Yesterday, I wrote about my dad’s mother, Grandma Vera. Today I am about to write about my mom’s mother. I don’t even know her name, partly because I never actually knew her.
The content of this post is depressing, but it’s the truth. I will move on to happier topics ASAP, I promise!
My Grandmother Bernadine (I just found her name through a strategic Google search) was not a happy person. Her family had emigrated to the US from France, via Canada. Her most noteworthy recollection from her own childhood was of her own mother attempting to sell her to strangers. I suspect that’s not exactly what happened, but I’ll get into that another time. She married my grandfather, who had been abandoned by his own parents and raised by his grandparents.
My grandfather was an alcoholic. So was Bernadine. Bernadine spent a lot of time drunk, passed out on the couch. She also spent a lot of time standing in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and repeatedly banging her fist against her thigh. Other times she was prone to various types of drama, although I’m sure I never heard about most of it. What I did hear is that she once drowned a cat in the toilet in a drunken rage. I am sorry to even include that, but it’s the sad truth. Bernadine and her husband fought…a lot. A gun was fired in the house on at least one occasion. Some of the fights managed to spill out into the front yard.
At one point Bernadine managed to get into the car that was parked in the driveway and locked the doors. My grandfather climbed on top of the car and banged on it with his fists. This is the kind of chaos, humiliation, and fear my mother grew up with.
After many years of marriage, raising four children, and witnessing the arrival of a number of grandchildren, Bernadine killed herself. I have no idea what finally sent her over the edge. I’ve always been too afraid to ask many questions about her. Apparently she died the year I was born. What I do know is that I grew up with her ghost, so to speak. I was born to a woman whose own mother had just killed (or was just about to kill) herself. She, in subtle and indirect ways, has been a huge part of my life.
October 9, 2008 at 5:37 pm
[...] I don’t know if I would be alive today. I don’t think I would have made it. I certainly wouldn’t be in one piece. Based on my two short-lived stays in my hometown since originally departing, I know my addiction issues would have been much worse. And the available mental health care was terrible. The therapist I saw before I finally “escaped” my family and hometown insisted I had been sexually abused as a child (which I had not been). And the psychiatrist I saw gave me anti-seizure medications instead of the anti-depressants I desparately needed. He also shared inappropriate sex-related information with me and prescribed a medication that decreased the efficacy of the birth control pills I was taking without telling me that this was the case. If I hadn’t escaped that “madhouse,” I would have ended up like my grandmother Bernadine. [...]