I wanted to share and discuss a link to a post by fellow feminist blogger Oh Hells Nah called: ”When Women Hate Women: An Abuelita Story.” It’s a very personal story that’s loaded with feminist and cultural flashpoints, and begins;
My maternal grandmother was very cruel to me when I was growing up. To this day, I’m not sure why, but I can only speculate that most of it was due to deep-seated misogyny. She didn’t mistreat any male grandchildren that I know of. In fact, she very obviously favored them. (Thanks, machismo.) There was something about me, however, that she really hated….
Over the years, I’ve tried to forgive her for my own well-being. Though I don’t love her and know I never will, I’ve tried to understand why she was so bitter and why she took it out on me.
Her analysis of the hows and whys of her grandmother’s toxicity ultimately concludes:
I can rationalize and intellectualize the situation all I want— look at it through a socioeconomic lens, see in a feminist context — but it still bothers me more than I’d like to admit.
The post really struck a chord with me, because like Oh Hells Nah, my grandmother liked making cutting observations about my weight, my hair, my clothes, and anything else that occurred to her. To be fair, no one was safe from her criticism, usually delivered with zero regard as to how hurtful it was. Starting early in my childhood, I always regarded Grandma with a certain wariness, unhappily accustomed to bracing myself for the expected caustic remark and then sighing with relief if it didn’t come. The negativity, the criticsm, the totally unnecessary meanness were a form of emotional terrorism, and Grandma knew how and when to deploy them for maximum effect. A few words from her could suck the joy right out of holidays and family gatherings.
Like Oh Hells Nah, the feminist in me realizes that to a certain extent some of Grandma’s behavior was probably an outgrowth of her life experience; she was a beautiful and highly intelligent woman with great aesthetic flair who, had she been born into my generation instead of into a working-class family in 1920s Brooklyn, might have had a brilliant and fulfilling career. Instead she married a handsome, charming man who could never quite succeed in business. They had four children and were frequently short of money, with three generations of her family–eight people in all—living in a small rented house. What happens to a dream deferred? Unhappiness, then alcoholism. Not surprisingly, being a drunk did not make her any kinder to those around her.
In the years since Grandma died, my chief emotion has been relief that she will never say anything hurtful to me (or anyone else) ever again. I refuse to feel guilty for that. I also find that I have no patience for the cowardly custom of not speaking ill of the dead. Being honest about what they did in life is not speaking ill of them—it’s being truthful. And unfortunately, a cruel person’s death doesn’t heal the damage they did during their lives.
Oh Hells Nah and I talked about this briefly when I read her post. She said it was cathartic to write and I told her she’d encouraged me to talk about my own family experience. We both wondered what kind of response we might get for publically exposing the unpleasant truth that our grandmothers were not the sweet, cookie-baking grannies of popular myth. She knew that she’d likely get some nasty backlash from some family members and she did. I figured that I might…and we’ll see. Neither of us blogs under our own name, but our families know who we are. We agreed that regardless, we have the right to tell our truth about our experiences. It’s morally wrong to gloss over or ignore cruelty, although my family was known to do it where Grandma was concerned and I know many other families who do the same.
Oh Hells Nah’s post also hits on a particular phenomenon that stirs up a lot of strong emotions—women being cruel to women, especially their own relatives. Most mean people are equal opportunity attackers, but women make easier targets and are more frequently mistreated, for the simple reason that they are nearly always less empowered and thus less able to fight back. If you’re a woman—espcially if you come from a strongly patriarchial culture—mistreating other women may be your only outlet for your anger, frustration, or just plain meanness. Women who are disempowered by poverty, sexism, or oppression will feel great rage but often can’t really bite the (male) hand that feeds them, and have no tools to attack the social institutions that hurt them. So other women make tempting targets, which only spreads around the rage and suffering.
Unfortunately, because women are also expected to be accepting and pleasant, expressing anger at being mistreated by women in our family is a double betrayal. We’re rebelling against our families’ codes of silence, we’re exposing the unpleasant truth that some women are not sweet and pleasant, and we’re violating the cultural mandate for women to tolerate mistreatment to the point of martyrdom.
So I ask you, readers…Do we respond differently to cruelty by women? Do we expect women to be less cruel? Are women who are cruel to their daughters and granddaughters somehow more reprehensible? Are they merely passing along the generalized unkindness of society toward women? Or are some people just mean people? And does it betray our families when we drag all this mess out into the daylight and give it a thorough airing? Let’s discuss in the comments…
As the daughter of a highly abusive (deceased) woman who most likely had high-functioning borderline personality disorder and possibly narcissistic personality disorder, this post really resonates with me. My grandmother is also high-functioning BPD/NPD and very abusive. I don’t find either my mother or grandmother any more reprehensible than my NPD/sociopathic/alcoholic father–I figure abuse is abuse, regardless of the abuser’s gender or relationship to you, and all three of them hate/d women in different ways–but lots of people, including most of my family, find ME reprehensible for being open about my mother or grandmother when asked. But I see it as more of a betrayal of myself to keep taking it or even to keep silent about it in most contexts. I don’t see any point in lying to protect my one-time abusers. It’s their shame, not mine. I think there are may be two different intersecting “betrayals” involved in outing abuse by female relatives:
–The cultural one, in which negativity about motherhood is taboo and any lack of mother-daughter closeness is the daughter’s fault (and it’s also “unfeminine” to be angry at the network of relatives you’re supposed to helping prop up by virtue of your femaleness, or especially to be direct about your anger);
–Also(at least in my case), the dysfunctional family system that can only thrive when everyone adheres to his or her rigid role (in my case, the Bad Child/scapegoat/shock absorber/Horrible Female). Refusal to accept one’s role, let alone publicly reject it or even publicly or privately criticize it, also constitutes “betrayal” in this kind of system.
My grandmother was/is an equal opportunity abuser (verbally). I think where the gender difference plays out in my family is the reaction to her. My dad very clearly sets boundaries with her and does not play her game while one of my aunts believes that if she plays the dutiful daughter role well enough it will somehow put an end to my grandmother’s difficulty. Sixty-plus years in to their relationship and I don’t think much has changed other than old age.
Where this becomes an issue for me is not so much in how my family talks about my grandmother but how she is cared for. I struggle with what responsibility I have to visit her because I frankly don’t feel like we have much of a relationship and with everything going on in life it’s not high enough on my list of priorities to be worth my effort. Others in my family clearly feel differently.
Re: expecting women to be less cruel
I always feel a little guilty when I air out the meanness I’ve experienced from my older sister or from my boyfriend’s sister. As a feminist, I’ll admit that I’ve perhaps naively bought into the whole “sisterhood” idea, in which women need to help each other overcome the burdens of the patriarchy, because we’re all in this together, right? I feel like I should have extra patience and understanding for them because some of their emotional issues stem from sexist cultural constructions. And when I don’t conjure up feminist sympathy, it makes me feel a little bit guilty in a way that I don’t think I’d feel if those two people existed as male family members.
I’ve been told that it’s unfeminist to talk about abusive mothers/grandmothers/female relatives because I’m therefore colluding in some kind of divide-and-conquer activity, and that they’re only that way because of the patriarchy. If that were true, then why aren’t *all* women in any given patriarchal system abusers? I think it’s unfeminist to insist that women aren’t as capable of being cruel as men.
Thanks so much for reposting. I experienced a shitstorm this weekend as a result of this, but I don’t regret it. After sifting through a series of contradictory emotions, I came to the conclusion that if my family doesn’t want to believe me or thinks I should have protected my grandmother’s image, I don’t really want to belong to that kind of family. Everyone has attacked me for my writing this without even taking my grandmother’s cruelty into consideration. It’s as if that’s completely irrelevant, which astounds me. Anyway, I’m so glad people were able to connect to it. It makes it all worth it to me. Thanks for sharing your stories.
I found these two posts and the comments here a great relief. I have a wonderful grandmother and an abusive one, and I have felt guilty about the extent to which the latter’s dementia has made life easier.
My grandmother was always very dissatisfied with her family, but repeatedly blamed the women; her sisters, her sisters-in-law, her daughter, her daughters-in-law and her granddaughters. If one of the men seemed to be in trouble or wasn’t paying her enough attention, then *someone* wasn’t being a good enough wife, daughter, sister etc.. She was very critical and suspicious of the men too (always very gendered accusations), but they were favoured – she always spoke of “her boys” when she spoke of her children, despite her daughter, my mother.
I think if anything, my feelings have helped stop my mother feeling utterly trampled on – although like Anka’s aunt, on some level my Mum is still trying to “put things right” between them. But for all my life, there has been the insistence that my Gran is “a little old lady”, a vulnerable feminine creature who just wants the best for her family.
I think many of the same arguments are used to defend male abusers, but I think this issue of vulnerability is important, combined with the idea that a mother is either a monster or a saint (and even the children of abusers don’t want to call their parents monsters).
Oh, this strikes home. My granny (dad’s mom) was an incredible bitch at times. I sort of understand why it is; her story is so very sad. But she took her anger out on her daughters-in-law a lot and they weren’t responsible for any of it. AND they were still the ones who looked after her while she struggled with dementia.
I stood up to her a couple of times in my life (when she put down my mom) and it was not easy.
My father’s mother (I have taken away the title of grandmother from her) has always been a mean, spiteful person. No one ever does anything right. She talks about peoples weight,appearance etc when they are right next to her. She has no regard/respect for other people. I have no idea why she is the way she is. My father had bleeding ulcers from stress when he was 6 years old.
My mother is abusive. I haven’t had contact with her since 1994. The biggest problem I had was that no one would help me/believe me/support me even when I asked for help from the police. I was told I needed to deal with it on my own because she was family. She stole my mail, closed my bank account, told the rental office at my apartments that I was moving out so I lost my apartment. No one would do anything. I can’t tell you how unsafe I felt for years. Now I am just angry. When I would tell people of the things my mother did for years, they would say, “But she’s your mother. You must still love her. You MUST forgive her.” There is this strange idea that mothers are sacrosanct. They are not. They can be just as bad, evil, whatever as anyone else.
With regard to your questions, parents have a greater responsibility toward their children to, at a bare minimum, care for them. A child is unable to protect itself from an abusive parent and is potentially subject to many years, during the formative years no less, of maltreatment. I don’t think it is any worse or better if it is a father or mother figure that is cruel.
As to betraying a family by airing the dirty laundry, they are betraying the people being hurt by not addressing the issue. Shame on them.
I went through this with my family when I talked about the abuse I suffered at my mother’s hands. My SIL and niece took me to task for it, saying that because my mother had treated them decently, I had no right to call her a bitch or air the dirty family laundry in public. Excuse me? You didn’t live through her abuse, you kissed her ass so she wouldn’t abuse you like she did me, and you have the nerve to tell me I’m wrong and I can’t talk about it or call an abusive bitch an abusive bitch? You say that I have to forgive her? Since when? She abused my brother too, but not nearly to the extent that she abused me, and he doesn’t talk about it. He stayed in contact with her, let his kids have a relationship with her, fine. I was the smart one – I left so she couldn’t continue to abuse me and when I left the state, she forgot I even existed (thank Maude for that!). When she knew she was dying, the whole family asked her if they should contact me, and she said “What for?” and told them they weren’t to let me know. They continued to kiss her ass until the day she died. They called to tell me she was dead and that she wouldn’t let them call any sooner to let me know that she was dying. Yeah, right, she was dying, what the hell could she have done to them if one of them had had the balls to defy her and call me anyway? They didn’t have to tell her they had called me. It’s not like I was going to travel 900 miles to go see her before she died, she wasn’t going to reconcile with me or tell me she loved me (she never told me that, never in my entire life did she ever say she loved me or did I ever get a hug from her).
So not only did I end up cutting my mother out of my life, I ended up cutting my brother, his wife, and their 2 kids out of my life as well because they wanted to perpetuate the abuse. Not something for which I would stand, not at all, not once I had escaped it, anyway.
The sad thing is that her mother was one of the nicest women I’ve ever known and was there for me when my mother wasn’t. Why my mother was the way she was is a mystery to me and most of her family.
Wow, this resonates. Not only was my maternal grandmother incredibly critical and mean and favored my brother, but there were a number of other women of that generation who seemed to line up to treat me like crap. Great aunts, my mom’s godmother, former teachers, you name it.
My best friend’s grandma told me to my face that I was too fat and too nervous. Yeah, being on edge waiting for you to decimate my character would make anyone nervous!
And as an editor in the features department at a large newspaper, I often dealt with mean older ladies. The restaurant editor had an interesting theory, which is named by Becky above: that these women had swallowed so much shit in their lifetimes that they were out to avenge themselves on anyone they perceived as weaker than themselves. I say becoming the monster that once abused you is no way to live.
I was lucky–my mom never once made me feel bad about myself. Unfortunately, I never knew either of my grandmothers so I wouldn’t know how they treated me. But what this did bring to mind is a close friend of mine. The females in her family–her sister, her mother, her grandmother–consistently deride and belittle her for not having a boyfriend, not wanting an ‘acceptable’ job (she wants to be a park director), not being skinny enough, etc. I don’t think women attacking other women is due to the times they’ve lived in, mostly because I see it happen to her every day from three different women in three different generations.
Similar to Phoenix Talon, I never met my grandmothers – they all died before I was born.
But given that “no group has a monopoly on being as a$$hole”, it does not seem strange that grandmothers come in all different personalities. So some may be more more loving and supportive, whereas others are cruel and cutting.
I found that the post has resonance in terms of other family relationships. I figure life is too short to put up with bad behaviour, so I have learnt to call out what I perceive bad behaviour (even if the behaviour is not directed at me).
It doesn’t make my life less difficult, and means that once a boundary has been set that I stick with it – but my life is more peaceful, and less drama-filled. And that’s the way I like it.
I’ve never bought that rubbish about owing your family love and/or loyalty. Why should an accident of birth give them a pass for behavior you’d never accept from anyone else? Shalom bayit (peace in the house)is a lovely ideal, but one person can’t make it happen if others are determined to destroy it. No one deserves to be someone else’s punching bag, literally or any other way. So all of you who have cut off relations with toxic family members, I congratulate you.
I hereby send out love and hugs to all who were cruelly deprived of them in their childhoods by those who should have been the first to offer them. You are loved!
I’ve never met my grandmothers/abuelas either. My own mother talks about her mother very frequently, about how much she loved her and how much my own mother loved her back, and in specific loving detail.
Many times I’ve thought that it’s a passive/aggressive tactic on her part, because our relationship is less than great. Whenever Ma feels unhappy about some exchange we have had, out come a story about her heroic sainted mother and how much she loved her.
I’ve never had the nerve to tell her “shut up I am sick of hearing about how much you loved your mother and why, and all your sacrifices for her and blablablbla” although I think about doing it frequently. I’ve got more than one reason to shut up, but one relates to something Anka mentioned upthread.
One day someone did explain to me the whys about not trashing your mother, for feminist reasons, because it might be colluding. I don’t mean to say these discussions aren’t healthy. Talking about this stuff helped me. I just mean to say that we always need to consider that broader angle too.
When I say, “Oh my father is so nice and my mother is so nasty” it is true, that is my lived experience. But it is also true that my father never bothered to take on the really nasty parts in child-raising. He ALWAYS let my mother be the one to say no, the one to punish, the one to explain their reasons. Later he smiled and petted and fretted over me.
He stood on her shoulders because he could, and he continues to benefit from many years of strictly defined gender roles. I’ve just figured this out lately, really.
On first glance it seems crazy when feminists say critiques of women are better directed at the patriarchy. Ultimately what they are getting at is that we are all the products of our socialization, and need to consider those motives too.
Also let me say that I caught my husband pulling the exact same shit the other day! We had talked about something we both knew our daughter was going to request. We decided it was a bad idea, and that we would say no.
A few days later she asked him (of course!). He said, I will talk to your mother. Fortunately I overheard the conversation.
Let me say it was a really big effort to keep from screaming when I broke into that conversation. But somehow I managed to say:
We guessed you would ask, and we talked about it and decided against. Now, you ask him, and since I’m not around he says, I will ask your mother. That gives the impression that he is open to the idea. Later when you get back a no, you can conclude that I dropped the hammer, and not him.
And he is not behaving fairly to me right now. He is throwing me under the bus. RIGHT. NOW.
So she said, ok, I see that happening. And he apologized.
Thanks for all the great response on this, y’all. I’m glad the post resonated with so many people.
Like Mackey, I’ve reached the point where I will call out bad behavior when I see it. I spent many years putting up with various forms of silencing—being dismissed, having my anger belittled, being told that I was just being oversensitive, etc. I realize now that the reason was that some people simply cannot tolerate any kind of conflict, and will throw the victim under the bus rather than stand up to the aggressor. So now I stand up for myself, and loudly—no one else will do it for me. And yes, policing the boundaries ain’t always easy, but it ultimately leads to less conflict and more peace of mind.
As for the whole issue of breaking our silence, I think CraftyDabbler is 1000% right: As to betraying a family by airing the dirty laundry, they are betraying the people being hurt by not addressing the issue. Shame on them.
And Oh Hells Nah, I’m sorry your family went the asshole route on this one. I will say that sometimes even when the initial response is overwhelmingly negative, your family may ultimately be taking more of this on board than they’re willing to admit. Rarely do people say “Wow, thanks so much for pointing out this shitty behavior/situation that forces me to re-examine what I thought to be true. I’m going to embrace this new unpleasant reality and thank you for opening my eyes.” But once they’ve had time to dwell on it, they often realize the truth of what you’re saying. At least, that’s been my experience. At any rate, I give you a big abrazote for putting your truth out there with such unflinching honesty.
This hits me right in the chest. My paternal grandmother is AWFUL to me and does it for fun. I refuse to feel bad about wishing that she was dying instead of my other grandparents.
This post resonates with me as well. My experience is very similar to The Goldfish, with one nice grandma and one (now deceased) not-so-nice one. I actually refused to see my deceased grandma for the last two years of her life (she was in a nursing home) because I no longer wanted to deal with her constant verbal abuse. She was never satisfied with my weight and while she was happy that I went to college, she was disappointed that I chose liberal arts majors/minors as opposed to STEM fields. My mom always resented her because she favored her brothers. The daughters were forced to move out at a young age (getting pregnant helped with that) while the brothers could live at home as long as they liked and one of my uncles never moved out. I agree with mischiefmanager about the ridiculousness of the notion that we have to love people because they’re family. It’s hard to love someone for who they are if you know that they don’t love you for who you are.
Watching my grandmother’s relationship with her daughters has led me to believe that sometimes women are cruel to other women because, while they know they’ll never be on par with men in a patriarchal system, beating down other women can win them some crumbs of favor from the boys, and maybe that’s better than nothing to them.
As another daughter of a woman with NPD, I just want to say “what Anka said.” I didn’t have issues with my grandmothers – I was very close to my paternal grandmother (she was more like a mother to me), and while my maternal grandmother was not terribly fond of me (thanks to my mother’s constant bad-mouthing), she was never cruel, just distant.
But my mother…that’s another story. I do believe part of it was passing the abuse down. She felt very put-upon in her (personally chosen) stay-at-home role by my father, and took that out on me from a young age; as a young daughter I’m sure I made an easy target. Then again, she did not do the same to my younger sister, so it was not purely passing on the patriarchy’s misdeeds – I was the chosen scapegoat, for whatever reason.
I have found my issues with my mother exceedingly difficult to talk about in my 38 years; I’ve only really started acknowledging it in the last 6 months. As others have said above, others within and beyond the family tend to believe that the daughter is at fault for mother/daughter divides. This is magnified in the case of abusive mothers, especially those with NPD, as they put on a good external face while abusing in private and gaslighting like crazy, and convincing you that it’s all your fault. Then when you finally get up the nerve to tell other people, they assume it must be your fault, reinforcing what your mother’s already told you. There is so much pressure on the daughter to forgive and forget – she’s your mother, after all, and it couldn’t really have been THAT bad, right?
The idea of the sisterhood only magnifies this problem. But as others have already said, abuse and mistreatment need to be called out, regardless of who does the abusing. Women are just as capable of abuse as men, and to argue otherwise seems unfeminist in itself.
Yup yup and yup. My grandmother is completely emotionally abusive, as is my mother. They are classic models of self absorption and blame-shifting. Has anyone here got the book ‘Children of the Self Absorbed’? I highly recommend it. It’s got thought exercises that really helped me work through the things my mother was doing to trigger emotional responses.
My grandmother is worse, but my mother obviously has had more power over me. I haven’t seen my mother’s side of the family for some years now, and I’m in only limited contact with my mother, but it’s been a hard battle to find out that it wasn’t my fault. That I wasn’t the broken one. That I wasn’t being a horrible, selfish, bad person by wanting not to be manipulated and abused.
It is REALLY hard to talk about. It makes people so uncomfortable. My dad’s side of the family is not perfect, but they all love each other and have working relationships. Any time I bring it up I can see them getting uncomfortable and wondering why I am such an ungrateful daughter, etc. They say things like ‘but she’s your mother and she loves you!’ Well, I wouldn’t know about that, she may well love me. But that doesn’t make it ok. And I haven’t loved her for a long time.
Which is not a nice thing in itself. To not love your mother. My dad died a few years ago and I basically consider myself an orphan. Luckily (?) I have friends and a boyfriend who recognise abuse when they see it, and who offer me support and understanding. I am more grateful for that than I can say.
The other one I get, if I talk about it in mixed groups, is ‘oh, I hope MY kids don’t talk about me like that!’ Well, I hope you don’t treat your kids like my mother treats me!
Coming late to this thread, but it was fascinating to read all the comments.
I was lucky enough to have a kick-ass mother who made the decision right off the bat to support her kids in the face of her parents’ manipulative shit. She got serious flack from her mother and sister when she backed me as a kid when I refused to take the verbal abuse my grandfather handed out (calling me ‘fatso,’ etc.). Watching her set boundaries with the extended family made me very aware that you get to set the terms of interaction even with family members.
Put me down as another with a paternal grandmother who was much “less than nice.”
Yes, she lived through more than 60 years of verbal abuse from my paternal grandfather. She also chose not to leave and was a true co-dependent who thrived on the drama her relationship created.
Yes, she verbally/emotionally abused the women in the family (esp her DIL and only granddaughter). I saw less of her interactions with her daughters, but I would be surprised their mental issues had nothing to do with the way they were raised.
Why did she do it? There are many possibilities, but I can’t say I cared enough to try and figure that out. What became crystal clear is that both I and my mother were somehow *less* than my father or brother in her eyes.
I am critical of that. I will not stand that sort of bullshit and chaos in my life. Hence my choice at 18 to never see them again, except at weddings and funerals. I have no regrets.
I don’t talk to much of my extended family anymore – they may think what they like but I have better things to do with my time than convince people, who share a tiny fraction more of my DNA than a stranger on the street, that treating me as less is wrong. Perhaps I should try more. Can’t say I give a damn though.
“I have no patience for the cowardly custom of not speaking ill of the dead. Being honest about what they did in life is not speaking ill of them—it’s being truthful.”
Spot on, Becky, and in the end, it helps the survivors, too. Case in point, at my mother’s funeral a few years ago, I felt like I was going to scream if I heard one more positive, glowing thing about her. I loved (and liked!) my mother deeply, but she was a notoriously difficult character and had an extremely sharp tongue to match. Hearing only glowing, rosy reports of her (or hearing her faults fa-aar too subtly alluded to) felt so wrong, and so untrue that it really made me feel crazy for a moment. Fortunately, one of her cousins came up to me and very kindly simply acknowledged her difficult-ness, so to speak, and it instantly made me feel 1000x better and de-crazified. My immediate relatives would be very mad if they knew that happened, i.e., think it completely inappropriate, but I am really grateful her cousin did it.
@rodriguez – The situation you describe with your husband and daughter would happen occasionally (rarely, fortunately) in my family as well. By the time I was in my late teens, I figured out what was going down, but I just wanted to say I’m glad you stuck up for yourself. It took me too long to understand what was happening in my family and it actually helped me take my Dad off his pedestal a bit, which was healthy for me in the end. Props to you!
@annaj – My Mom really made the effort not to pass down some of the favoritism/sexism from her Mom, too, and I’m grateful for it, as well.
I’ve thought about this thread all day, and I finally decided that what I wanted to say about the families who put up with this is that it’s hard to let go of just one piece of family, so they’re protecting themselves from loss.
I too had an awful grandmother, and since she was the mother of the father I’m not close to, and I lived with my mother a thousand miles away, it was easy to cut her out of my life long before I turned eighteen. The thing is, cutting myself off from her verbal abuse also cut me off from my cousins, since everyone gathered at her house and my custodial parent wasn’t part of that family anyway. I’ve only reconnected with the cousins closest to my age since the advent of Facebook, and I’ve never met any of the cousins who are more than eight years younger than me. Maybe their parents should have fought a little harder to stay in touch with me. Maybe all those other families who put up with difficult old people could find a way to gather without that person. But I missed out on my cousins because I refused to be verbally abused by my grandmother, and I bet lots of otherwise sane adults don’t act because they fear the same thing.
Av0gadro – I’m SO glad you mentioned that because that’s my internal struggle about slowly moving away from that side of my mom’s family. There are some nice cousins who I would like to stay in touch with, but I can’t decide if it’s worth the expense of being mistreated by the matriarchs.
I’m still thinking about this post, especially since I’ve been going through a lot of old photos I got from my parents when they moved. I found a shot of me and my grandmother. I’m four years old, and she’s saying something to me that’s obviously unpleasant. I have this confused, hurt look on my face. It’s upsetting, even so long after.
Thanks, Becky
And thank you to everyone who replied. Your comments have helped me get through this.
JetGirl, that is a very sad image. I’m sorry that happened.
JetGirl, I think the worst thing about the abusive matriarch is that it starts so young. My grandmother started telling me (and everyone else in front of me) that I was antisocial about four years before I even knew what it meant. My mother-in-law can say some hurtfully dismissive things to both me and her daughter, but we’re grownups. She never pulls that on my kids, and if she did, she’d get called on it.
Thanks, oh hells nah and Av0gadro. The most galling thing about it is that a lot of the abusive remarks were cloaked in “this is for your own good.” I’m all for kids learning good manners, and so on, but critiquing every move, getting hung up on petty shit and never ever pointing out the positive can really screw them up.
She would do this to my mom, too. Once my mom just came right out and asked her:
“Okay, but is there anything about me you like?”
And that shut my grandma right up. Sadly, my mom falls into those patterns herself. And she didn’t attempt to shield me from my grandma, though living 6,000 miles away from her most of the year helped. Now I live 6,000 miles away from my mom, and that really helps.
I’ve also been finding letters from this grandma, who’s been dead 12 years now, and they are a shocking contrast to the way she always treated me in person. I was “beloved,” her tone was sweet and encouraging, she sent me kisses and hugs.
Sigh.
I’ve always felt that I can’t talk much about my grandmother to other people. She is my only living grandparent, and I never even knew my dad’s mother. I have no happy memories of times with my grandmother. She either regarded me as an inconvenience or a prop, as she’s quick to brag to others about my accomplishments but she’s never said anything nice to me to my face. I know she thinks I’m a loser since I recently turned 26 and I’m still unmarried, and gasp, a little fat.
My grandmother has undiagnosed ADHD (the source of me, my brother, and my mother’s ADHD actually was HER mother), and undiagnosed histrionic personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. She steamrolls people in her intimate life but is very interested in keeping up appearances. Her being histrionic means she has always perceived us to be living in a Norman Rockwell illustration where she is the loving, nurturing grandmother and we are the sweet little grandchildren. The relationship is the complete opposite, and ever since I was in elementary school I’ve known that our relationship is not a common grandmother-granddaughter dynamic. She is abusive verbally, and she saves her sharp tongue mostly for my mother and for me. She was physically abusive to my mom when she was growing up, but distance has changed that.
I’ve had little contact with her since I was a little kid because she moved to Florida when I was about 8, but she wasn’t missed. Going to her house was always an ordeal because I would be expected to behave in a certain way, scolded if I didn’t, and there were a lot of prohibited activities and places and nothing to do there for little kids. She didn’t even keep toys or books around, and the gifts she’d give us were things that she would want for herself. She has no concept of empathy, and that is a huge problem in our relationship.
I have a very small family so there aren’t a whole lot of people to talk about, but Grandma is the #1 person we don’t want to be around.
She has kept in contact with my brother, but not with me, and I know that she doesn’t think as much of me because I’m not a boy. She’s nicer to him, and he doesn’t understand why I don’t ever want to talk to her, why I am so uninterested in what she has to say. She can’t give him advice really but does heap all kinds of praise on him that she’d never give me.
I think that past trauma (she’s British and was a teenager during WWII in London) has warped her but she has never actively done anything to change herself. As we’ve grown older, I have noticed her intransigence increasing and learned that I will never be able to please her. She has horned in on two out of three of my graduations, even introducing herself to my friends as “my favorite grandparent.”
It’s hard to describe how I feel about her. I don’t hate her, but I know don’t love her. I don’t even like my grandmother. I internally roll my eyes when she is mentioned, and my biggest fear is turning into her. She is a misogynistic bully. She is hypercritical of all women, but especially me and my mother. I don’t know what made her this way, but at the same time I’m not interested. As someone who’s been bullied all her life, I don’t put up with it from anyone, least of all my family members. Yes, some people are jerks, but only with family are we able to know some of the reasons why they’re jerks. If they themselves don’t know those reasons, they can’t stop being jerks. I don’t think anyone should be obligated to interact with someone abusive, and now that I’m an adult I can finally make these decisions for myself.
Oy, that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I appreciate being able to talk about this because I feel that it’s one of my dirtier secrets having a horrible grandmother. I just didn’t know that it was more universal than I thought because you know, nice girls don’t talk about that stuff.