The Good, the Bad, and the Crazy

My father’s mother was……..difficult.

As I got older my father would tell me stories that gave me more insight into his idiosyncrasies’.

It was all his mother’s fault.

That was a family joke, but I think it might have been closer to the truth than I ever realized.

I don’t remember ever seeing her smile. EVER.

Not in pictures or in real life.

She was passive/aggressive.

Example: My Grandfather loved to listen to baseball games on the radio. Just to interrupt his pleasure she would take the plug to the iron and shove it in and out of the electrical socket over and over to create static so he couldn’t hear the game!

She was anal.

Example: She ironed my Grandfather’s SOCKS! That’s right I said SOCKS!

She was vindictive.

She remembered every wrong ever done to her (real or imagined!)

Example: She didn’t talk to her own sister for forty years. At the end of their lives they lived in the same apartment building and would occasionally ride the elevator together. Even then she didn’t speak to her.

(What, you may ask, was the horrific deed that was so awful it would keep two sisters from speaking for so long? My great Aunt scorched my Grandmother’s slip while ironing it when they were girls!) 

(Are you kidding me?)

She was a worrier. Even about things that WOULDN'T happen.

Example: She worried about my cousin getting Polio. Even after she was vaccinated.

She would say, “She could have gotten Polio!”

My mother would say, “But she didn’t.”

Grandma would say, “But she COULD have!”

And you wonder why I’m slightly off kilter? 

Look at the gene pool I was distilled from!