My Parents' Parents (Part One)

by Anna

During my recovery I have gone through stages of trying to find out what my parents' childhoods were like so that I could understand why they treated me the way that they did. This came from a part of my self that needed to know that my parents abused me, not because I was a horrible child, but because they had been abused as children by their own parents.

What I found when I journeyed into the vast hell that lay beneath my parents' vengeance towards me, did give me some understanding. However, compassion would not come until years later, after I had punched enough pillows and thrown enough tantrums to release my own rage and the rage that my parents had passed on to me from their own childhoods. I am still working on my recovery from my childhood and past and I refuse to stop until I have healed completely from it. I've come a long way, but I know that I have more to go. Each time I get through something, I feel more and more free and able to live my life better.

My great-grandmother was the oldest relative that I can remember. She was five feet tall, slim, and spoke with a slight Irish accent. I never knew her first name. She was just Nanny to me. Nanny had married a man who already had ten children. After they married, Nanny and her husband had three girls together. This ended in Nanny having thirteen children to raise. My grandmother Agnes was the youngest of the thirteen.

After Nanny's husband died, she got a job as a seamstress at St. Elizabeth’s Mental Hospital. I remember Nanny telling me that she used to have to measure the mental patients in order to make their clothing. One time Nanny looked at me sadly and said, "Some day they will come up with a way to help these people. They suffer so much."

Nanny lived with my grandmother Agnes. They lived in the house right next to ours. My mother told me later that I had been Nanny's favorite. Nanny used to take me into the back yard so that I could feed birds with her. The birds knew her and they used to come so close to her that she could reach out and touch them. As a small child I was always so fascinated with this.

I didn't get very much positive attention from my mother, so I clung to Nanny while she was alive. She had all of these stories of her childhood and I remember being so captivated by them. It was such a different world that Nanny lived in when she was young. She had been born at the end of the Civil War. She told me about one time that her parents took her to a hanging when she was seven years old. She said that the hanging was a social event for the townspeople and that people came from miles around to see it. They brought their children and their picnic lunches. Groups and families camped out all night so that they could see the hanging in the morning. A tear formed in her eyes as she told me this. She said that she could still remember the young man crying and pleading for his life. She didn't say what he was being hung for. Nanny's own father was eventually put in jail and remained in jail for many years. No one in the family would say what he was in jail for, but Nanny always claimed that he was innocent.

In my grandmother's basement there was a long gray braid of hair hanging from a hook. As a child I was so curious about this braid, that I pushed a chair up to the wall so that I could reach the braid and touch it. As soon as I touched it, a deep sadness seemed to travel from the braid into my hand, down my arm and into my whole body. I had never felt anything so utterly sad and agonizing. I never tried to touch the braid again. I was told later that the braid of hair belonged to Nanny's mother and that it was the only thing that Nanny had left of her.

Nanny had arthritis so bad that I used to have to feed her. Her hands were so deformed and mangled with the arthritis that she could not hold a spoon or fork. I can only imagine how painful her life must have been. Nanny prayed a lot. I could see her outside my window, walking around in the back yard praying. Some people said that she talked to spirits and at times I did hear her talking to someone she called "sister."

I was at my Grandmother's house when Nanny died. I remember sitting on the floor looking up at Nanny. She was saying the rosary. Suddenly she sat up stiff in her chair, turned completely white, and then slumped forward. I can still see the horrified look in her eyes. I sat there not saying anything, just staring at her. My grandmother ran over to her and then looked at me and screamed at me to leave. I ran home, got in bed and pulled the covers up over my head. I stayed like that for hours. Later, my mother told me that Nanny had gone to sleep. I don't know how many years I spent waiting for Nanny to wake up, until I finally realized that she had died and would not be coming back. I would often go to her back yard and feed the birds thinking that Nanny would surely want to wake up and feed the birds with me, but she never did.

Though Nanny had been good to me and had brought me into her world of old Irish stories, leprechauns, and a post Civil War childhood, she had not been very close to her own daughter. I believe that this left my grandmother cold and unhappy. I have no memories of ever being hugged or really loved by my grandmother. She never smiled and she was always somehow distant. I remember her fussing over some of my brothers, but not wanting to have much to do with her granddaughters. My sisters and I learned at a very early age not to get too close to our grandmother. This was passed on to my own mother. It was very obvious that my mother favored her boys over her girls.

In 2008 my husband and I went to my parents' house for Christmas and my sister Angie and I talked about how my mother could get close to her sons but not to her daughters. Angie told me, "I always thought that I must be such a horrible person if my own mother doesn't love me." My heart went out to her. Angie has gone through years of depression and agoraphobia. Now she can leave her home, but it is still very painful for her to talk to people and to get close to anyone. Angie is seven years younger than me and she was still a child when I left home. I love her so much. She is so much like I was years ago before I first started into recovery. She doesn't own a computer and refuses to get one, so she wouldn't be able to write her stories on this site, but I can write to her and she can write back about how damaged she is from her childhood. I understand everything she's going through. She's like an echo of my past. If I could just take the pain away from her, I would, but I know that it is something that she will have to go through. I will try to be as much support as I can be while she faces her childhood.

My grandmother and my mother had a horrible, strained relationship. My grandmother had disowned my mother when I was still young, and did not want to have anything to do with her, which was an odd thing since she lived right next door to us. My mother was not allowed in my grandmother's yard, she was not allowed to talk to my grandmother, and my grandmother would not even look at her. My mother had two sisters, Teresa and Donna. My grandmother would talk to Teresa and Donna and they could come over to her house, but my mother was completely shunned.