Twas Brillig

Flashback Friday, Gentle Readers!

(Thanks, by the way, to everyone who has left comments on my last post. On Monday or Tuesday I’ll write a follow-up to it. In the meantime, I’d love for everyone to throw in their 2 cents. And guys! I haven’t yet had a GUY leave a comment and I’d really love to hear your point of view there too!)

Today’s Flashback Friday is one that I’m not even sure I’m ready to talk about. But here goes.

When Hubby and I were engaged, we were poor. Very poor. We needed a place to live. It was arranged that we could live with my Gramma D. For free. In her basement. We would be required to earn our keep, so to speak, by doing odd-jobs for her. She was nearly 100 years old at the time and had been wheelchair bound for forty years by that point, so there were lots of things she’d love for us to help her with. She was a millionairess, but it never occurred to her to HIRE someone to help her with things. She just usually guilt-tripped family or neighbors or the church into helping her with stuff. So it would be handy to have us there as her on-call slaves.

Hubby and me with Gramma D

Here’s the thing with my Grandma. She was not only extremely demanding, overly critical, impossible to please, manipulative, racist, and self-righteous, but she’d also made it clear from the beginning of my life that she did. not. like me. So why I thought that this would work out, I have no idea. But we were poor. Oh my gosh, we were so poor, and we had to live SOMEWHERE! Hubby was still in school full-time and I was working my butt off at a job where I was making just over minimum wage, paying for his schooling and our living expenses.

Gramma D at our wedding

I tried to get along with her. I tried every possible approach. My parents said that no one had ever broken through her shell as much as I had. Some days we got along and I made her laugh. I had a knack for making her laugh–it was my saving grace. Still, she loved to tell people how awful I was and even occasionally how abusive I was and how I took advantage of her, and so on.

Fortunately, she liked Hubby. She probably wondered why he had stooped so low as to marry someone as wretched and disgusting as me, and she likely judged him quite harshly for that, but otherwise she loved him. And since he hadn’t grown up with her, he didn’t carry all the baggage about her that I did. So that helped us all to co-exist.

We lived there for three years–I gave birth to my first two babies right there in her house. The hardest time was probably when Princess Fluffy was about 7 months old and I was already pregnant with Bubba. That’s just way too many hormones and emotions rolled into one human being, and living with a woman who thought I was a terrible mother and didn’t know anything about caring for my baby was very difficult.

One day she decided that I had made the floor dirty (in a room that I never went in, that had rotting linoleum floors that weren’t “dirty” they were just worn out and needed to be replaced!) and so she demanded that I get down on my hands and knees and scrub. I was pregnant. I had a crawling baby who kept trying to drink up the cleanser on the floor, etc. She sat in her chair and watched me, criticizing every stroke I made with the scrubbing brush. “Gramma, this floor is not going to get clean. It’s scratched. Scrubbing it will not make it look any better, no matter how hard I scrub.” She wouldn’t believe it. I just sucked at cleaning. She couldn’t believe I sucked so bad at cleaning. She would have to call all of her friends and let them know.

So, that’s Flashback Friday, friends! We will probably revisit Gramma D stories again in the future. There’s lots of blog-fodder here….