CW: Death, references to abuse
Apparently I've got F E E L I N G S that need expressing in longer form.
Back home for my Grandfather's 90th, but when I come home, I have to see the remembrance book from Nan's funeral.
I get angry with it for a number of reasons, but one is that the woman in the book is not my Nan.
People have a right to whatever memories they want, but for me, this little book with dozens of pictures of her smiling, surrounded by family, is just beyond reductive.
Reduces her to a stock photo of a beloved grandmother.
My Nan, the one not in the book and not even the one necessarily known by everyone in the family, was creative, nasty, kind, impatient, curious, insecure, funny, manipulative, loving, self-centred.
Her shelves were full of self-help and spiritual books she never took advice from, and I suspect never could.
She had what she called an "Irish" (explosive) temper that she inherited from her mother and her mother's mother.
She had deep-seeded attachment issues because her mother was a flighty party girl who did not put up with shit from her husbands and her father disappeared for a number of years when she was little and no one would tell her why. (Prison for multiple burglaries it turns out. Which I only discovered about 18 months ago and she had known nothing about.)
She wished she was a feminist and tried to instil that in the girls in the family, but still treated her son differently to her daughters and would ask about my brother but not ask questions of me.
She was a kinda racist lady who married a Chinese Malaysian and would loudly tell people sneering at her "half-caste" daughters on the bus that they were Vietnamese orphans to make them feel bad for looking at her kids that way.
The worst of her was reserved for her first 2 children, my mother included. Even though she was (mostly) only ever loving towards me, I have scars that originate from her.
She had a deeply embedded sense of justice. She went and volunteered for long periods at a home for women struggling with substance abuse and their kids.
I'd been on multiple night raids of hers where we'd drive around in the dark and take plant cuttings from people's gardens.
When I was a teenager, she'd say, "If you got it, flaunt it." I know she wished she meant it.
She was an artist who always had the chaos of multiple projects going on. Knitting, furniture restoration, quilting, mending, crafts, painting.
She stared daggers at me once because I asked about her pottery.
She would read me horrible stories from Roald Dahl and was genuinely delighted by my creepier, morbid inclinations at a young age.
She once did some "Native American" drum healing on my little brother, but figured it'd be easier to spin him around and around in an office chair than to walk around him.
It was entirely her fault that she lost a foot before she died.
There's so much more I could say about her, but this complex woman is a lot closer to being my Nan.
The smiling lady is all of her edges smoothed out at the expense of her definition. A half-complete idea of a person.
She was wonderful and awful. Like most people she was richly textured.
I miss all of her deeply.