Mummie Dearest
My granny is my dad’s adoptive mother. She lives on the property where I grew up until I was thirteen. Her persistent paranoia combined with isolation, has turned my childhood sanctuary into Hell.
I stayed the night over with my granny this weekend for the first time in my adult life. It felt like being on one of those old Travel Channel shows where people would stay the night in a haunted house. Only- this house is haunted by fears and regrets of my Granny’s life that she cannot release (also there are mice in the ceiling and UFOs in the night sky). While I have no doubt she has undiagnosed mental health conditions, I know exactly where they are rooted. To get to that root cause, we really do have to start from the day she was born.
My dad used to have a joke that my papa brought on the Great Depression (born in 1929) and my granny started World War II. Granny was born two days before the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Not only that, her mother died either during or shortly after childbirth. She was raised by an aunt and an uncle who farmed for a living. While she doesn’t tell me many stories about childhood, its clear she was steeping in guilt since day one.
I’m not really sure how my granny met my papa, but what I do know (and what they knew) is they had an Rh incompatibility, meaning they weren’t likely going to be able to have children together. One day, while granny and papa were staying at a beach condo in Florida, my granny overheard a conversation which (as I’m told) happened over tea. Long story short: my biological paternal grandmother was being convinced by the woman that had raised her to put the child she was pregnant with up for adoption.
As a quick sidebar: my biological grandmother had five children already. This sixth child was- not only being born out of wedlock- but also, it was not clear who the father was. My grandmother was torn between being able to go back home to her children and husband, or keeping a child whom she didn’t plan to have. She chose the prior and allowed my granny to walk out of the hospital with a baby she didn’t birth.
Just. like. that. My biological grandmother signed the birth certificate with my granny’s name and no one in the hospital asked a single question (so the story goes). Whatever the real story is, we may never know. What we can be sure of is that there is no documentation of this happening. As far as the govament is concerned, my dad was born to my granny because that’s what the paper says. A quick blood test would’ve proven that bogus, but it was the 1960s.
It was 1967 to be exact. Granny and Papa left the next day and moved to a different city. Later we found out that my biological grandmother instantly regretted her decision. She went to go find out what she could do to get her baby back, but the couple had fled. Since that day in October, my granny was on the run. If she wasn’t paranoid prior to this event, she made up for it everyday after, ten-fold. Every time she turned a corner, she feared someone would come take her child and lock her up for kidnapping.
After obtaining my dad, my granny and papa did end up having a child together, but she was mentally challenged. Since people didn’t always used to throw out diagnoses like trading cards, I genuinely have no idea what her actual condition was called. In the yesteryears, they had a lot of difficulties treating ailments of any kind that they did not understand. Even though I’m sure my granny did her best, there are unsavory stories about how she disciplined her children.
She did everything from pulling hair, to grabbing, to biting. Everything you might imagine an untrained person in a fight would do. My dad recalls having to defend my aunt from my granny, even though she terrorized him just the same (maybe even worse). To add insult to injury (in the most literal way), my papa was an alcoholic. While he wasn’t too violent from most of the stories I’ve heard, he did know how to push Granny’s buttons to make her even more of a terror. It didn’t stop with her children though, I remember one time when Granny pulled me off a bunkbed. There was a whole family meeting in the kitchen and my mom looked like a vulture circling her, while pacing in anger.
There are so many other things I could say about how miserable my granny is. The news she watches only exacerbates her paranoia that the world is out to get her, and after confirming the UFOs she was seeing are real: I’ve determined she has manifested Hell. But honestly, I can’t blame her. I know what living a life of anxiety feels like. The oppressive guilt she allows to fester in her mind is reflected in her external circumstances. For example, none of her outlets work in the kitchen, except the one by the front door which is also near enough to the smoke detector that it inevitably sets off the alarm when she makes toast.
As I was staring at the hole in the ceiling of my childhood bedroom, laying on a fold up spring mattress, listening to mice pitter-patter overhead, I felt the fear. Thoughts racing out of control, insisting that if they were not acknowledged, they would be actualized in the physical realm. “Do mice eat people while they are alive? Am I skinny enough to be mistaken as not healthy by the mice? Those drones flying outside could probably beam me up and kidnap me in the blink of an eye.”
Suddenly, in my panic, I realized I was processing a lot of generational trauma and not just my own by sitting in the discomfort. While that very fact made me a little more uncomfortable, I remembered how I have been processing love and abuse trauma: through gratefulness practices and loving-kindness. That, and facing the emotional challenge head-on. I pulled my tulsi necklace around to the start of the strand and gently pinched the first bead between my thumb and index finger. Still breathing heavy from acknowledgement of my impending doom, I began listing things for which I felt moved to express my gratefulness. Thank you God for my coffee. Thank you God for my car. Thank you God for my parents.
The list goes on for 108 beads, and by the end of it, I wasn’t afraid anymore. Okay… I was a little afraid of waking up next to a mouse but I was also overwhelmed with gratitude for all the love I have. I had changed the program I was tuning into through my mind, with a ten minute practice of meditation. The next morning, I felt a little happier and even took a walk down to the creek with Granny, like we did when I was a kid. And that’s how it’s supposed to work. Meditation is your remote control to your mind- allow those higher frequencies to dissolve the lower.
