Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-08-04 - 12:15 p.m.

Sad Generations

I just had one of those frustrating phone conversations with my mother - "Why don't your kids, my grandkids, like me? They don't like me, do they?"

If it's possible to have a prescient sense of total exhaustion - that is, a sudden onset of the total feeling of defeat one will feel at the END of a conversation one is only just embarking on - I felt it. Wind out of my sails, and so on. You know how it is.

Of course, the truth is no, they don't like her. They don't see her often, and she pays absolutely NO attention to them when they do. She won't wear her hearing aids, so she can't hear a word they say. She has been known to snap at them suddenly, like an elderly dozing pit bull whose tail has been stepped on. "Gramma yelled at me," they complain later. "Why isn't she nice?" I don't know, girls. I don't know.

She has never once remembered a birthday, Christmas, or other occasion for my kids. They get cards at Easter and Valentine's Day and birthdays - from their OTHER grandparents. When they visit their other grandparents, there are pizza dinners, and dogs to play with, and kid's videos to watch. The OTHER Gramma sits down with them on the couch and asks how school is going; she remembers that Oldest Daughter plays the flute and that Younger Daughter loves art supplies and kitties. They have pictures of my girls, and all their other grandkids, up on the walls. There are kid-fun outings and games of catch in the yard. There are always jelly beans or chocolate bars or junk cereal in the cabinet.

My kids don't visit my mother; they go with me when I have to go. There is nothing there to do except an old cart of toys that I purchased and put up there when they were toddlers. She seldom pays them any attention, doesn't hear them speak, gets very nervous when they go out in the back yard - "What are they doing out there? Can you SEE them? WHAT are they DOING? " until my nerves are frayed.

Tonight she says, "You never gave me a chance to be a grandmother. You'll see how it feels when it's YOUR turn."

Ahhh, the guilt. Did I do this? Is it my fault, because I did not call her two weeks in advance every year to remind her of the girls' birthdays, did not buy Christmas presents and sign her name to them, didn't make the girls call her every Sunday? It is a measure of the sickness of our relationship that I contemplate this. I have my hands full being a mother - I can't instruct my own mother on how to be a grandmother. She is the kind of grandmother she chose to be. I did not shut her out, but I did not do the work to create the relationships for her, either.

My girls are good girls. They behave at my mother's, and they speak when spoken to, and they try to remember to do it loudly. But they're kids. They aren't much interested in a grown up who hasn't shown an interest in THEM. They don't feel a sense of duty or kinship. She didn't raise them. She never made herself a part of their memories. She's just an elderly lady with a boring house and a mean temper.

It all feels so beside-the-point now. I don't know what she really wants from my children, and I don't guess they do either. She doesn't ever ask how they are, she frets over how they feel about HER. She lives in a universe composed of herself, her needs, her problems. So do my children - it's a child's world she's found again. I don't think the relationships can be established now, and I'm not willing to delve into the emotional agony of telling her why, in my opinion, they don't exist. I end up exhausted and resentful, and it makes it harder for me to deliver her groceries and clean the filth off her kitchen floor. Perhaps she has a point. My relationship with her is best managed at a practical level, and maybe my kids only mirror that. But it all feels so too-late, so moot, now.

Still, I note it. Someday I may get to choose the kind of grandmother I get to be, and I want to be the card-sending kind, the book-reading kind, the kind that remembers birthdays and puts photos on the wall and keeps a box of toys long after my own kids are gone. Please let me remember how.

My mother says, "Those children don't even KNOW me." And this is true. But she doesn't know them, either. The whole thing is really very sad.

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