IRA
too far gone
i saw my grandma in a dream recently. I rarely think about any of my grandparents, and it's always been the case. My father was adopted at like 23 or 27 or something. he doesn't talk about it much at all. I didn't learn he was adopted until i was like 14 or something. I didn't know that his original surname was until sometime after that. I don't know his biological parents at all. I had never heard his birth parents names until this year, and i don't remember them. They were apparently really shitty. so much so that he left home by joining the navy as soon as he could, and then made effort to be adopted into a different family after getting married. one could call his biological parents my grand parents, but obviously I didn't know they existed at all, and they were never the people i had considered to be my father side grandparents. That isn't to say I have a great relationship with my father side grandparents either. The people who i know to be father side grandparents had a divorce at some point in the past 25 years I think, We lived on the other side of the country from them, and never made any efforts to visit until i was 16. I have met his father a number of times countable on one hand. His father remarried someone from an island nation who is younger than my father. She is nice, but i've met her countably in 3 bits times. even so it's more than the woman my father's father divorced. If there is a "father side grandma" to my mind it's that woman who is younger than my father, who is 3 lines of indirection removed from genetic relation. So when I say I had a dream with my grandma it's none of the three women I've thus described. My mother's mother. the matriarchal line. I know her better than the others. I have opinions about her at least. we lived near enough to them for a period of time between 10 and 14 or so (time is a mystery and I'm always making mistakes with it, forgive limewire/kazzaa time related misrememberings. I'm not bothering to try and nail down the actual year any more precisely than my own memory gives) Before the move near to my mother's family the navy apparently gave my father a choice. He could be transferred to a base in japan, or a base near my mother's family. I hated my cousins already at this point. I had no interest in continuing my relationships with them (they had all previously been living nearby as they were all navy families then moved to the same place where my mother's parents were). siblings felt the same way. We all had a family council about this move. my siblings all voted japan. My mother also said japan. it would be a good experience to see more of the world. she said. My father chose to move near to my mother's family. I still resent this choice. I don't like my grandma. Among my siblings my hate for her is probably 3rd weakest, meaning two of my siblings hate her much more than me. These two, not coincidentally, have spent more time around her. one lived near her as an adult and had to deal with her after having children. the other had an experience where he had to live at her house for a summer vacation. She is a mean woman generally. I can somewhat sympathize with this. there was a traditional story we learned about her marriage to my maternal grandfather. my grandpa's brother and friends essentially kidnapped my grandma who didn't like my grandpa at all and then forced her into a wedding with my grandpa. I have no idea if this story is true or not. but that's the family fiction if nothing else, and doesn't paint a great picture for the foundation of this family. there apparently was more than some infidelity. my maternal grandfather had a child with some japanese woman while he was out on deployment for the navy at some point. we don't know anything about this child who is my aunt i guess, neither her name, nor where she lives. my mother's mother also had a child with another man, one of my mother's siblings, which we learned due to genetic testing just after my grandfather's death. there was some worry about if he knew about this fact before his death, as it was news to the majority of the family. apparently his sister and him had talked about it sometime in the 90's so he did know about it. my grandfather and I didn't really have any real iterations. He was there. He watched golf on tv. he fished sometimes. smoked Marlboro reds. that's close to all I know. But that's not true of my grandma. she always made her presence known. she negatively commented on everything. the way someone walked, or stood. the type of food someone ate. where and what was being played. if clothes were wrinkled, or hair imperfectly combed. the way someone talked. etc. The best thing to do when forced to be near her was to be out of sight. to stay out of sight. judgy bitch. if she couldn't find something to be pissed at, if she couldn't find some drama to stir up, she would instigate one by setting people up to piss her off. she once blew up at one of my siblings because they said they didn't want any fruit after lunch. pissed she "asked" why he didn't want the fruit. they said "because i'm not hungry". spittle from her frothing mouth "you don't eat fruit because you are hungry, you eat it because it's good for you" we can laugh about this now. well, we can. but not my sibling, who still can't eat fruit without needing to eat pasted the specter of that moment on the fruit. She wasn't mean to everyone tho. there were specific people she was exactly as nice to as she was mean to everyone else. She specifically picked the worst people to give this "special treatment" to. i'm talking people who would grow up to be drug cartel murderers, rapists. etc. like literally the worst people. My theory is she did this not because she actually liked them but because she hated everyone else. so anyway. I dreamed about this woman. I rarely think about her at all, and I don't recall ever really having any dreams about her. If I heard that I dreamed about her from myself, I would imagine some kind of hellish nightmare where she is doing her usual torture behaviour, without any way to escape it. This dream had me remember she made fresh tortilla's every day, and painted it in a light to emphasize this as the only tenderness she was capable of expressing in life. We talked. she offered my siblings gifts. the gifts were guns, a pistol to one, rifle to another, and for me some kind of submachinegun on the order of a p90. It was odd but the glow was total heartfelt warmth. this was a sincere gift with good intention from the heart apparently. I say apparently only now in reflection. the me in the dream accepted it, but was confused at how i would even take it with me. "oh I will make sure it gets to you" and she wrapped it in a gift box. I asked her why she never acted honestly in life. why she kept everyone away with her abrasive attacks. She didn't answer vocally instead a love I'd never felt before cut through me, and I wept. Lamented that I wasn't able to know her better, That I was left with only these shitty memories of a horrible person. It was one of those soul rending cries that comes from the guts tears streaming freely and takes a long time to recover from. the forcefulness of it in the dream woke me, and I only felt it's echo, tears on my pillow, but nothing more.
tags:
black context ignorance ostracization pink safe