Family dynamics

It's kind of sad that all my grandma's were mean. I started thinking about them all while reading a collection of childhood memories sent to me by a paternal aunt. I never knew my dad's mom she died just before I was born, but she was a cruel and neglectful mother. To be accurate she was a chronic alcoholic with many other mental issues that saw her institutionalized many times. My grandfather turned around and married her sister who was pretty much the same except slightly more sane. They both had stopped drinking by the time I was in kindergarten so they were drastically different people to be around. Still I was terrified of my grandfather who made it very plain he didn't like us kids and grandma wasn't someone I ever would have considered even slightly warm. The only kindness I remember from her is a drawer in her kitchen that always had lollipops in it. If we were very good we could get one right before we left.
My dad won't talk about his childhood at all. Only in the last few years would he even stay in a the room if one of his sisters was talking about anything from when they were young. What I know of my uncle who died when I was a toddler is from my mothers stories of a smart, funny, very damaged young man who took his own life. My aunts book made it so clear that he'd never really been given a chance to have a happy life and that's so sad.

I used to wonder why the kids didn't just all run away as soon as they could. I was amazed my dad left, got educated, a wife, started a family then came back to live near his family. Reading my aunts book I finally got to see the glimpses of the good there was in their parents. It wasn't all hell, there was some love there in the rubble, but my dad doesn't want to remember that either.

My moms mother I knew very well. I used to call her Attilla the Hun in drag. She hated me with a passion and I hated here right back. My mother was the child of her first marriage which ended in divorce about 2 months before my mom was born. My mom was born premature and the doctors told my grandmother she wasn't likely to live and to just leave her in the hospital to die. Since my mom was the offspring of the man she now hated Grandma was good with that and left. Her mother was not and came the next day to take my mother home. Mom lived for two months in a rabbit skin lined box beside the kitchen wood stove. Being born was the first crime she committed then she up and lived!!! Mom spent the first 10 years of her life living with her grandparents.

The next great crime she committed was being introduced to her mothers future husband. He fell in love with mom at first sight and from that day on considered her his daughter. For the rest of Grandmas life she had to be nice and sweet to mom whenever Grandpa was around. Mom had some scars from the times he wasn't around.

Long story short. Eventually mom moved back to this area when I was about 10 and again grandpa fell in love. Out of all the grandkids I was the only one who willingly worked on the farm. I slaughtered, I shoveled, I bucked hay and picked berries for hours on end. Grandpa and I were buds from day one. It made grandma crazy. We had a war she and I. Her goal was to drive me away and mine was to keep the Grandpa I adored. She once hit me with a full pan of cooking bacon because I snitched a piece on the way through the kitchen. I was very lucky not to get badly burned. I think that was the first time my mother pinned her mother to the wall and told her in no uncertain terms if she touched one of us kids ever again she'd have her wrinkly old butt thrown in jail no matter what it did to grandpa. The war continued unabated, but the level of violence dropped considerably.
She won sometimes, I won sometimes. In the end when her health failed it was the child she left to die who came to help out of all her kids. Though it hurt my grandfather I didn't attend her funeral, I couldn't be so hypocritical as to pretend to mourn. I remember once she grabbed me by the arm and hissed, "You're going to go to HELL!" My response was, "Save me a place old woman, cuz you're gonna get there first."

Anyway that's my ramble about grandmas.