My Grandmother

[MTY]

My biological grandmother died during childbirth. The woman I am writing about married my grandfather while my mother was still an infant. She was of higher social standing than my grandfather, and her family disowned her. My grandfather died not long after the marriage, and she raised my mother and her siblings by herself. My grandmother died in 1961 at age 81.

She always told me that no one should be dependent on anyone else. She taught me to cook, sew, clean house, do laundry etc.. One day we made dinner together. Mashed potatoes were on the menu. When we sat down to eat, she had this great meal, and I had raw potato skins. When I started to protest that I had helped make the meal, and that I was hungry too, she said, "Now you understand communism." After the lesson, I was fed too.

Today I spoke with a friend who lost his wife to cancer. They had been married 50 years. His role was to earn a paycheck. He handed it over to her, and she took care of finances and the house. He was completely dependent on her, and now he is lost.

I am thankful for my Grandmother every day.

 

[deermanok]

I came from a big family. As the 7th of 8 kids, a number of my older siblings were already grown up and had left home.
My dad passed away when I was about 11. My mother had to work to keep 4 kids fed, clothed and a roof over our heads, which was a big struggle for her.
I learned early on to be independent. Helping with meals and chores. I also had a paper route which brought in a few extra dollars.
Life wasn't easy for us but we all made it.

 

[Matthew323]

I grew up blue collar in Baltimore City as one of three kids, with a mother who mostly worked outside of the house from about when I was 10 years old.

My father was a childhood Type-1 diabetic whose diabetes was the least understood, and most unpredictable form of the disease. Every year as I was growing up, it seemed that his body would decide to malfunction, he would pass out on the job, be rushed to the hospital, require hospitalization for 1-7 days, & subsequently end up losing his job as a refrigeration mechanic.

This was in the 1950's, and 1960's when there were no Federal laws protecting a person from discrimination vis-a-vis a medical condition that they had zero control over.

My father's entire life as a child, and as an adult, he had been blamed for not following his prescribed diet, and thus being at fault for these hospitalizations.

Every time that he lost his job as a result of the diabetes, we were forced to move out of the current row house that we were living in at the time, and seek other shelter. This was as a result of living not more than $1,000.00 above the poverty level for my father's entire working life. In other words, hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck.

We were medically poor. Without the diabetes, my parents would have lived an entirely different life, than the one my brother, sister, and I experienced.

As a result of growing up vastly poorer than the other blue collar families that lived immediately around us, I had chores to do in order to help my parents cope with the everyday things that it takes to keep a home going.

As a boy, I learned to, whether or not I liked it, to........

1.) Cook on top of the stove.
2.) Bake sourdough bread from scratch.
3.) Make pie dough, and a lattice top pie from scratch.
4.) The proper way to make soup, using celery, carrots, and yellow onion as basic savory flavoring ingredients, long before I ever heard the word mirepoix as a chef.
5.) As a result of the diabetes, what a healthy plate was supposed to look like, because that's how my father's diabetes doctor forced him to eat; so that's how the rest of us ate.
6.) How to vacuum the rugs & hardwood floors.
7.) How to run a dust mop before vacuuming.
8.) How to scrub the kitchen floor on my knees.
9.) How to scrub the mostly tiled bathroom from ceiling to the floor, including the floor on my knees.
10.) How to properly paint walls, ceilings, and the trim, both with a brush & a roller.
11.) How to sew a button on, when my mother & grandmother got tired of doing it for me.
12.) How to thread a needle. Still do it like a man!!!
13.) How to repair most of my garments, sewing by hand.
14.) How to sew with a Singer sewing machine, when I purchased the pattern for, and the linen fabric to make a Rifleman's coat. And, neither my grandmother or my mother wanted anything to do with the project.
15.) How to mow the grass with a push hand mower, the only kind my father would have, as he said that a gasoline mower was ridiculous considering the amount of grass for a row house's front & rear lawns.
16.) How to trim the flower beds, and sidewalk on my hands and knees with a hand trimmer.
17.) How to keep the sidewalk properly edged with a push-pull hand edger.
18.) How to deliver newspapers responsibly starting at age 10, a year before the law said a kid in Baltimore could start doing so.
19.) How to make my bed everyday before breakfast.
20.) How to keep the room I shared with my brother clean, under penalty of punishment.
21.) How to properly sort, and do laundry as a young teenager. What clothes needed special attention, where the use of liquid bleach was appropriate, what cycle to use for what type of fabric.
22.) How to use all manner of hand tools competently, before being allowed to use an electric power tool equivalent, if there was one.
23.) How to take most things apart, repair them, and put them back together so that they would work again.
24.) How to lead solder with flux using a soldering gun.
25.) How to lead solder with flux using a propane torch.
26.) How to silver solder using an oxy-acetylene torch.
27.) How to braze with brass using an oxy,-acetylene torch.
28.) How to rough weld using an oxy,-acetylene torch
29.) How to build most things out of wood using basic carpentry tools and skills.
30.) How to make most basic plumbing repairs around the house.
31.). How to work with electricity, up to 440 volts.
32.) How to drive a 3-speed column shift automobile using the clutch, accelerator, and brake, starting at age 14.
33.) How to use a clutch on the steepest of inclines. Burnt the original clutch right up in the Falcon when my father put me on a 30% grade, and refused to stop until I had mastered it. That clutch was smoking all the way home, and my mother stopped my father from trying to make me pay for a new clutch, as she told him that it was his own fault that he didn't stop when he realized the clutch was getting hot.
34.) How to change the oil, change a tire, rotate the tires, change the spark plugs, top off the radiator, tune a carburetor on that old '68 Ford Falcon 2-door.
35.) How to install lap seat belts & air conditioning in that Ford Falcon. And, to convert it to hand controls when my father lost his right leg below the knee due to the diabetes.
36.) How to drive a car responsibly at age 14, without a Learner's Permit, which was still allowed back in the '60's, even when my father was sound asleep in the passenger seat.
37.) How to parallel park so that I was always closer to the curb than the legal 6". Regardless of which way the car was facing, left or right. Regardless of which side of the street I was trying to park on. Regardless of how much traffic was whizzing by on a busy street. Regardless of how steep the hill was that I was trying to park on.
38.) As a result of my father's many Jack-of-all-Trades talents, there wasn't much in the way of the basic building trades skills that I was not taught as his primary helper, after school, on the weekends, and any other time that the house/car needed repairs.

As I look back I can see that I was blessed by being taught all of the skills that my parents taught me. Those skills left me well situated for life, and gave me a certain confidence that a lot of my peers growing up didn't learn.

 

[MrTom]

I didn't know my dad until I was 43. Even then he wouldn't crawl out of the bottle to have any kind of relationship and I'm sorry to say that when I he died I felt little of anything. My mother worked her ass off to raise myself and two siblings, both with mental challenges. My grandmother was the one who raised me really anmd I was holding her hand when she took her last breath at 112 years of age.

 

[Matthew323]

As an adjunct to my above post. I had a love/hate relationship with my father, mostly hate as he was a very abusive parent/spouse. The disappointments in his life left him a very unhappy man that led him to take out all of his frustrations that occured away from home on his wife and children.

Consequently, we never knew before he arrived home everyday from work what type of mood he would be in. As a result, we tip-toed around him 6 days a week until we knew what kind of behavior to expect from him on any given evening. Coupled with his willingness to lash out physically a half dozen times a year, this made him a not very pleasant human being that most people walked on eggshells around.

The love part came in because I have now/had growing up, a very inquisitive mind, loved being challenged, and also loved tools/working with tools. So, even though I always feared him, and as a teenager began to detest him, I still wanted to be around him to learn.

As I mentioned in another post here recently, he had a near photographic memory for just about everything, had an intuitive knack for how just about everything mechanical that he ever encountered worked, plus was one of those very rare mechanics that could fix almost anything that became broken. That made him one of the most capable mechanics that I have ever met in my life. Any skill he did not already have, he simply taught himself.

Unfortunately, he was the worst type of teacher, especially with his children. He expected all three of us to have the same abilities that he had, and had zero patience with anyone that could not keep up with his agile, mechanical mind.

This was, I believe, as an adult trying to analyze a parent long after they have died, the primary reason that his employers chose to fire him in the '50's & '60's every time his diabetes kicked in, and he ended up being hospitalized. He was a stellar refrigeration mechanic, saddled with an uncompromising & abrasive personality. As an employer, it was just too easy to blame my father for his illness, and the loss of him temporarily as an employee.

Especially, since the entire medical world, as well as the secular world, took it as an article of faith that anyone who was a diabetic was completely in control of the disease. Therefore, if my father was supposed to be in control of his diabetes 100% of the time, then it stood to reason that he was at fault for losing time at work as a result of eating a sugary snack when he shouldn't have. And, following that kind of reasoning, if he was at fault for going into diabetic shock, then he deserved to be fired.

Up until I was 13, we moved at least a dozen times because of the diabetes. This, I can now look back on somewhat dispassionately. At the time, it made for a very unsettled home life.

It was, I believe, the primary reason that he was such a miserable man to be around. He spent virtually all of his 47 years on this planet being blamed, and held accountable, for something he had no control over.

When he died, he gave his body to science to be studied at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where his primary care diabetes physician practiced medicine, and taught. Dr. Silver told us as a family about 18 months after he died, that my father's internal organs, every one, looked like the organs of a man who was as twice as old as he was when he died.

That's when I started the forgiveness period of my life as far as my feelings towards him was concerned.

As a child it's very hard to not blame an angry, harsh, uncompromising, & abusive parent for their obvious behavior. Only in my 40's did true perspective arrive.