Shame on you, Grandma

Grandmother Marie, the mother of my mother, was a terrible mother. She was married to my mother’s father, a very intelligent and well known philosophy professor, whom my mother adores. He died as my mother was 6 years old. After his death, Grandmother Marie put my mother in several institutions, led by nuns, since Grandfather was strictly catholic and it had been his wish, as he was still alive, that his daughter would be educated in such institutions. Grandmother Marie then married another man, better: she married his money, and I am sure of what I am saying because at the time they got married he was already suffering from Alzheimer… so that I don’t think a woman marries a man who can barely recognize her out of love at first sight. Anyway, Grandmother Marie was not really a faithful wife, so that she found her modus vivendi in the whole situation. But she had a daughter, and this was disturbing. So, she put this annoying daughter in boarding schools and wouldn’t take her home even for Christmas or Easter. She wouldn’t even care to let my mother have enough clothes to wear. My mother was a little girl, totally alone. 

Then, my mother grew up, in some way, with a big affection deficit. With no father – she had a faded memory of her father – and an absent and, let’s say, cruel mother who had always neglected her. My mother was beautiful. I saw pictures of her. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Grandmother Marie noticed this beauty too, and convinced my mother to embark upon a career as a model. So did my mother, and for years she could give vent to a slight frivolity she had maybe inherited from Grandmother Marie. This went on until the day she met my father. My father had lost his first wife, who had committed suicide, and Richard, his adoptive son, was at that time with my father’s parents (Richard’s grandparents). My father has always had a soft spot for beautiful women. He is not the kind of man who looks at a woman’s personality or character. He couldn’t care less about the inside of a person; the shell is everything that matters. So, he fell in love with my mother almost immediately. Grandmother Marie encouraged the whole process, because my father was a rich, successful medical doctor and therefore a good catch for her daughter. And so, they ended up marrying. 

Things between Grandmother Marie and my mother never went well. They often had arguments and my mother wouldn’t let me alone with Grandmother Marie gladly. That old woman would also make strange conversation with me, like saying that she wanted to die at 80, and she would have committed suicide at that age – notice, she lived up to be a hundred: she died at 102. Then, one day, Grandmother Marie rang at home. My mother answered the phone, and her mother told her "Your father is in Lugano.". My mother was astonished. Her father had been buried in Neggio, a small town where they lived before my mother got married, and nobody had asked for my mother’s consent to move the body of that poor man to Lugano. My mother never forgot nor forgave Grandmother Marie for it. I remember that the two women spoke directly once again, and I was present; then, my mother told me to say good bye to my grandmother, because this was the last time I would see her. 

My mother has been always treated by Grandmother Marie as if she were of no importance, as someone who was more a trouble than a loved daughter. She never got affection or consideration. She grew up with the constant fear of losing the ones she loves. This triggered what she is now, a possessive person. It is not all her fault, though. She isolated my father, and this happened years before I was born. He had many friends, for example a group of friends with whom he used to play tennis; my mother stated that they were not good people, and forbade him to see them again. The problem were not those people, the problem was that she couldn’t accept my father liking someone else than her. Even if it was a different kind of "love", friendship and the love for a wife are not comparable, she was afraid that those friends might get a special place in my father’s heart and exclude her in some way. After my birth, I became the focus of her attention. She used to invite some schoolmates at home for me to play with other children – since I was an only child – but she would always complain that they were ill-mannered and that I had to keep away from them. She used also to criticize their mothers, saying that they weren’t doing a good job in raising their offspring. My mother, in reality, feared that someone could grow important to me. All my life has been a struggle to grow up, and my mother’s attempt to keep me down. It is also very significant that I got ill at the moment in which I should have reached a University graduation, which is a very important step towards emancipation. All this was not in my mother’s plans. Even if it was planned that I would have come back in the province and lived with my parents, my reaching such targets was not contemplated. 

Even now, I don’t think that my mother really wants me to get healthy. As long as I am the crazy little schizo, she has an excuse to keep me tight in her arms and not to let me go anywhere. She feels as if I needed her, and, actually, I really need her. I need her affection in the first place, and she knows it. But it is not her fault, she just fears to lose me – and the same happens with my father. She was rejected and forgotten as a child, and now she just wants to be sure that her dear ones will never leave her. So, to put it in a nutshell, I am paying a generational debt. I am paying for what Grandmother Marie did to my mother. I don’t like to talk rude about dead people, but if I could, I would like to say to her… "Shame on you, grandma".