A little regret before sleeping

I’m indulging a little in….well, I suppose regret has a part to play in it. Whatever it is, I am thinking of my relationship with Nanny. I watched a video interview of a daughter about her mother, and it got me to thinking. Granted, Nanny was my grandmother, but in my own life, that was not that far removed from being my mother. Nanny thought she was the only person who REALLY loved me, and she tried to convince me of that; almost successfully.

The point is, I WISH I had been more able to understand whatever damage it was that caused her to act the way she could when she was jealous. Under normal, every day circumstances, there was always the chance of an argument over something, but the big stuff was almost always about who loved me and who didn’t. NOW, I can see that she was a terribly injured woman, clinging to the grandson who was named after her son, whom she loved more than anything and lost in 1989. Now I see that she felt she had to fill a void with me, and I didn’t go along with it the way she wanted me to.

Now I know why she tried to fill that void with me. I understand…three years after her death…that if she had not filled that void with somebody else she could love so much, she would have gone insane, because the pain of losing Daddy was just too much for her to bear. She lost her only child, then her husband, and she was all alone in the world, except her grandchildren. Since the other two had a lower tolerance for her bull than I, I, the “glutton for punishment”, as they thought of me, became the one to fill the void. In spite of how it turned out during the bad times, I really do not regret having been there to fill that void. I am glad she had that, because she would have died from a broken heart, and that would have been a horrible way to die. Misery unlimited, sadness that NEVER got any relief at all, and a total lack of hope, for if your child is dead, what else matters anymore?

And I wish there could have been some compromise, rather than my fighting her tooth and nail, because I really DID and DO love my grandmother. I never doubted her love, no matter what, and I hope she never seriously doubted mine, though she would have had valid reason to do so.