My Nana

It occurred to me upon rereading some of these posts that my nana (and her influence over my life) possibly seems kind of negative to someone reading this blog (and not living my life).  I don't feel like nana ever did anything intentionally to hurt me.  If anything, she loved me unconditionally.  I don't think the majority of people have actually experienced truly unconditional love.  I feel lucky in that regard.

I don't believe there was anything she wouldn't have done for me if I had asked her to and she could have made it happen.  I think if I had showed up to her house with a dead body in my trunk, we would have both struggled, but she would have helped me bury it.  There were times when I was not a model granddaughter; but if you asked her, you would never know it.  She above all, always showed me and told me that she was proud of me.

But the fact remains that every person is a product of the shit they themselves have survived.  You have to own your shit, work through it, and move forward.  My nana was a part of a generation that really didn't believe in therapy.  Owning your shit to them meant suppressing your emotions, not talking about things, hiding/lying about embarrassing parts of your past or family history, etc.  

How many people do you know of (in your own family or otherwise) who have some shady parts of their family history that have been glossed over by years, distance, or outright lies?  From criminal activities, to unwed mothers forced to adopt out their babies (or abort them), affairs, men raising children they don't even know aren't theirs, the list goes on and on for the people in that generation.  Maybe if my nana had been able to heal some of her own wounds, pieces of our relationship would have been different or healthier than it was.

I feel that nana never healed from all of the miscarriages she had trying to have a baby girl.  She probably had a pretty high level of PTSD and unresolved grief from all of those experiences that led her to be overprotective of me.  She manipulated situations in my life if anything to keep me closer to her.

She was never shown a lot of affection as a child (one of twelve) and grew up very poor.  She told me stories of kids on the school bus making fun of her for having cardboard in the bottom of her shoes.  She was probably made to feel worthless by them and others in her community.  She was never made to feel special as one of many children.  In fact, being second to oldest, the responsibilities of caring for the younger kids fell on her shoulders as a child.  They didn't even remember what day she was born (she spent a lifetime thinking her birthday was the day before it actually was).

This is the only photo we have of her as a child

She also told me stories about a male family member (I don't recall if it was an uncle, grandpa, whatever) that used to wait in the barn for her (or her sisters or cousins) and try to catch them to molest them.  She said she was too fast and always got away.  But what an overwhelming feeling of not being safe at your own home.  I asked her if she ever told her parents.  "They never believed us," was all she responded.

When she left home as a teenager, her father told her not to come back.  She said it was a full ten years before she ever visited them again.  By that time she was married to my grandfather, and my dad and uncle had already come along.  How rejected she must have felt as she made her way out into the world as a teenager without family support to back her up if something went wrong.

This appears to be taken prior to leaving home

My nana was married once before my grandfather.  This would be one of those family secrets that gets swept under the rug.  She came home from work one day to find her first husband in bed with her cousin.  Another round of rejection and abandonment to add to the list.

But my nana's generation would say that the appropriate response to all of that was to suck it up and get over it.  There was no therapist to work with her to convince her of her value as a person.  There was no one to help her through the rejection, the PTSD, the grief, any of it.

My nana showered me with so much love, probably because she never felt loved as a child. She was always buying me things, probably because she never experienced that as a child and felt neglected.  She was always feeding me when I came to her house, probably because she went hungry when she was poor.  She never created healthy boundaries, probably because she never felt she deserved the love she received in return.  She was overprotective of the life she built with my grandfather, probably because she didn't have that security before.  She was always telling me how proud she was of me for being so smart, probably because she never graduated high school.

Nana was a flawed human being, just like everyone else I have ever known.  She made what she thought were the best choices with the information she had at the time.  She never had the opportunity to own her shit (or work through it).  She used coping mechanisms that a lot of other people use.

Taking a step back from your life and your relationships and really taking a hard look at your past is not an easy process.  It would be easiest for me to just continue to use food as my coping mechanism and carry on whether I gained all the weight back or not.  It would be easiest to continue to berate myself for perceived failures and just insist on trying harder over and over until I kill over from doing so.

It's always easiest to stay the same.  Change is hard.  But I am trying to own my own shit.  And, I am trying to place the shit back where it belongs when it isn't my own.  Do not misconstrue this for blame.  I do not blame anyone for my shit.  If anything, I overly blame myself for shit that isn't even mine.  

But there comes a time when you have to realize that you cannot spend your life looking for someone else to blame for your own shit.  You just have to accept it as a part of you, change what you don't like, and move forward into a different and healthier phase of life.

If anything, the only thing I fear at this point in this process is that it may be hard for other people in my circle to accept new expectations and boundaries that I need to create for myself.  I hope that there will be a level of understanding that I am trying to end a family cycle that has gone on for long enough, and we are all at point of needing to take responsibility and own our own shit.