When I was thirteen, I was a pain in the ass. I think I even knew it at the time. I had all of the usual hormonal ups and downs that torment adolescents, plus I was cursed with the idea that teenagers were supposed to be angst-ridden. My normal temperament doesn't really run to public rages and door -slamming, but it did that year. And of course, because I''m so original, I took it all out on my mom.
I remeber complaining about her--her awful rules and how she didn't understand me and how I was made to do ridiculous things like get out of bed and clean my room--to my dad. They'd been divorced for years at the time, and I guess I thought he'd be a willing audience. (He did use to refer to her exclusively as That Battle-Ax, but I digress.) I don't know what I thought he might do; defend me against such indignities, invite me to move in to the 1 bedroom apartment he shared with his new (at the time) girlfriend? --but instead he advised me to talk to my grandma about it. Poor dad; I think having his little daughters morph into sneering, spotty teenagers was a little bewildering for him.
So, grandma. My mom's mom is one of my favorite people on the planet. I lived in walking distance of her house growing up, and I spent every minute that I could there. We baked and sewed and ate banana splits and played badminton. Grandma is known and loved everywhere. She's short and kind of impish, and you can hardly look at her without wanting to pick her up and hug her.
She's also a crier. She cries when she's happy, or sad, or having a bad day. In my little world as a child, crying was something you did only to express the upper limits of emotion; only if it REALLY hurt or REALLY sucked. Grandma frequently cried when faced with a Hallmark commercial. I knew what her triggers were, and steered her away from them as best I could. "I'm not crying," she would insist, smiling brightly as tears rolled down her cheeks. Even now she warns me when she thinks she might start.
So there I am, contorted with hormonal angst, thirteen, in my Grandma's kitchen eating Soft Batch Sugar Cookies. She asks me how I am, and I launch into the whiniest, most self-pitying and stereotypical rant you can imagine. I'm sure I could re-create it here, but I like us both too much to do that. Suffice it to say that it was a little over-dramatic. When I get wound up, I can really whine.
At the end of my rant, as I sat gazing mournfully into the cookie bag, my grandma burst into tears. "I had no idea you were so unhappy, " she wept, dabbing her eyes with a napkin. I was...horrified. I felt like a crochet hook had been jabbed through my stomach. I was sick with shame. I had made grandma cry. Me! Every minute I spent with my grandma, I was on guard against anything that might unduly upset or excite her, and here I'd gone and made her cry.
"Oh no!" I said. "Don't pay any attention to me. I'm just complaining and being dumb. Dad said I should talk to you. But I'm fine! I'm not unhappy!" I was backtracking furiously.
She sniffled. "Oh, I'm so glad," she said. "Uh-oh, here comes Grandpa, I better not let him see me like this."
GRANDPA! Holy shit. If there was anything worse than making grandma cry, it would be having Grandpa catch you in the act of making Grandma cry--and doing so by complaining about your mother. She dashed for the bathroom to disguise the evidence. Grandpa never suspected, or I might not have lived to tell this story.
Over the years, I've related this anecdote to my mom and my aunts. I try for humor, but they never laugh. "You made mom cry?" they ask disgustedly. As if that's so hard. "Boy, are you lucky she stopped before Dad came in."
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It was a year ago this week that we went to Florida to see my Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa died less than six weeks later, unexpectedly. The hardest thing about his death and funeral was seeing my mom and aunts and uncles cry, and my cousins; all those big boys, weeping in their pick-up trucks. I've never been to a funeral before where there was so much sobbing. But my grandma hardly shed a public tear. I'm trying to end this with a pithy statement to tie all of that together, but I can't think of one. I hope she didn't waste all of her tears on her whiny grandkids. But I hope even more that she's not crying by herself, so no one sees.
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