Mother of My Mother: The Intricate Bond Between Generations

Book by Edelman Hope

Introduction

My grandmother lived in a town called Mount Vernon, and for most of my early childhood I thought that meant George Washington had once been her neighbor. There was a legitimate old-world feel to her street: gabled roofs, imposing oak trees, trellises, gazebos. Her house was a Cape Cod-style with a century-old maple tree anchored near the curb. Inside, the walls were painted slate blue and the blinds always drawn, and the living room smelled of electric heat and boiled chicken and week-old fruit slowly going soft in a large wooden bowl. My mother bounced her right foot anxiously whenever she sat in the room and my father had to step outside periodically for fresh air, but even when my grandfather sat in his salmon upholstered lounge chair and trapped me between his crossed ankles, refusing to release me until I said the magic words, Open sesame, I never felt the desperate need to escape. I drew great comfort from a room where the walnuts on the end table were the same walnuts I'd seen there last year, a room where the type of holiday cards displayed on the mantel were the only evidence of the passage of time.

It did not take me long to understand that rooms were predictable but the people in them were not. My parents, relatively even-tempered in our home, were capable of anything in my grandparents' presence--irritation, laughter, indifference, anger. My grandparents, it seemed, could transform from doting elders to meddling intruders in the span of one carefully timed comment. Then my grandfather died unexpectedly the summer I was twelve, a passage I learned about weeks later when I returned from summer camp. In my memory he's a large, gentle man with a shoebrush moustache who stands at the perimeter of every room. Funny, really, since he always sat in a lounge chair in the center or in a seat at the table's head, a commanding presence in his own right, but in my mind my grandmother's personality pushes him aside. Where he was Laurel, she was Hardy. Where he was yin, she was yang.

I never had the kind of grandmother who wore aprons and spectacles and pulled warm cookies from the oven, the kind who exists more often in children's books than in real life. I didn't have the kind of grandmother I saw on television, either. She was neither as sage as Grandma Walton nor as goofy as Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies. You couldn't reduce her to a single dominant trait the way you could say Aunt Bee was cheerfully domestic or Maude acid-tongued. The grandmother I knew was colorful, opinionated, ubiquitous, stubborn, loving, patient, devoted, intelligent, intrusive, funny, tragic, uncontrollably obsessive, wildly superstitious, and capable of both astonishing acts of compassion and unpredictable fits of rage. She had little in common with the "New American Grandparent," of the 90s, the one who mall-walks and e-mails and moves down to Florida to remarry at seventy-five. My grandmother wore suits, but they weren't the kind you jogged in. She lived in the same house from 1952 until she died.
Because Mount Vernon was an easy thirty-minute drive from my parents' home in Spring Valley, New York, my grandmother was a staple of my childhood. I questioned her presence no more than I questioned the existence of my swing set, or of lunch. She was just, simply, there. Several days a week she crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge and showed up at our door, usually without warning, always carrying gifts. Plastic snowshakers, Lucite coin banks, those little upright metal calendars where you turned a tiny knob to change the date. She drove over during the day, while my father was at work. It was not unusual for me to come home from school and find her sitting in the kitchen with my mother, drinking coffee in her coat, or for my mother and me to return from an ice-skating lesson or shopping trip to find her parked in front of the house, listening to AM radio in her car. Only now do I realize that means all those years she never had a key.

I imagine that was because my mother knew the risks involved in giving her mother unrestricted access to our house. Whenever my grandmother baby-sat while my parents were away on vacation she immediately combed through the refrigerator and medicine cabinets, discarding all the foods she thought to be bad for us and stocking up on supplies she believed ensured good health. After my parents returned, my mother did a search of her own, pushing the containers of witch hazel to the back of our linen closet and pouring bottle after bottle of castor oil down the kitchen sink. My father watched from the background with his hands on his hips, swearing, "Goddammit, I'm never leaving that woman alone in this house again." Nobody took this seriously. We all knew that the next time my parents prepared to leave town, my grandmother would come driving up with her suitcase and a vaporizer. Despite her idiosyncracies, my parents knew there was no one they could trust with their children more.

But none of this describes her relationship with me. After she died in 1996, one of my cousins was surprised by the depth of my sadness, having known my grandmother to be difficult, stubborn, and driven by crisis. I knew her in those capacities too. But when I push past the images of her standing in the middle of our living room in her coat and hat, stamping her foot and shouting "Listen to me! Would you just listen to me?" or standing on our front step, banging on the door and demanding to be let back in, I find other memories, softer ones, of times we spent together, just us two. Of her in 1981 sitting patiently outside a department store dressing room for hours, wearing her wool coat and clutching her pocketbook in her lap, while I tried on pants and sweaters for the new school year the first autumn after my mother died. Or an even earlier memory, one of my first, of her teaching me to read when I was two, afternoon after patient afternoon of alphabet flashcards on the living room sofa, sounding out the letters until I recognized each one. Ah, Beh, Cuh, Duh. Back then, she carried a black patent leather handbag stuffed beyond hope of closure with empty lipstick containers, dried-up pens, six-month-old receipts, telephone numbers scribbled on paper scraps, stray coins, unopened junk mail, lengthy notes to herself, and loose ten-dollar bills. "Grandma, your pocketbook is pregnant!" I told her when I was six, and she laughed and agreed yes, it was. As if in testimony, the next time she visited she reached into her shopping bag and pulled out a black patent leather purse for me, a miniature version of her own. She was trying to teach me about reproduction, I think, but I learned more about love.

Our relationship was easy then, an aging woman guiding a child who had not yet learned how to discriminate or to judge. Arthur Kornhaber, M.D., a child psychiatrist and the author of several books on the relationships between grandparents and their grandchildren, says that part of the magic between the generations exists because children haven't yet conformed to societal ideals of youth and beauty, because they ignore signs of aging or disabilities and respond instead to a grandparent's inherent goodness. And it is true, there was a time when I loved my grandmother with a pure and simple love, before I could distinguish between acceptable behavior and objectionable behavior, before I one day understood what my parents had been complaining about for all those years. Until then, I was still my grandmother's ally, sitting knee-to-knee with her on our brick front steps after she'd once again been banished from our home. "Why do they do this to me?" she moaned. "Why?" I grasped my ankles and shrugged. Like her, I didn't know. "Maybe you shouldn't yell so loud," I suggested. Then, one day when I was eleven or twelve, she asked the same question--Why do they do this to me?--and I knew. It was the day I joined my parents on the other side of the door.

* * *

I knew, for as long as I can remember, that if I wanted to complain about my grandmother, my mother was the wrong parent to approach. In private, she might roll her eyes at her mother's obsessions or laugh at her superstitions, but she never extended an invitation for me to join in. I might have seen commiserating about my grandmother as an opportunity for my mother and me to bond, a chance for the two of us to drink coffee together at the kitchen table instead of the two of them, but my mother wouldn't tolerate my acting with such lack of respect. It was a position, I suspect, similar to the one I now take with her. I give myself license to say whatever I choose about her, but if someone else remembers her critically, or even in a slightly unfavorable light, I immediately leap to her defense.

The bonds between mother and daughter are primal, immutable, revered. Between grandmother and granddaughter they're never as direct. My grandmother, no matter how large a role she played in my childhood, was always the mother of my mother, one generation removed from me. The powerful attachment they shared was the central drama of my family, the story around which all the others revolved, often leaving me swinging my legs impatiently at the kitchen table while they reprised roles first staged long before my birth. No matter how essential a part of their lives I imagined myself to be, the intimacy between them didn't include me. I found some relief in this, knowing I was outside of that exitless loop, but I also felt excluded, aware that I was more observer than participant--and oftentimes even incidental--to events that unfolded before me. As Carole Ione writes about her mother and maternal grandmother in her memoir Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color, "They were caught up in their own story, and I felt like an intruder in their lives."
As contradictory as this may sound, my ability to feel close to my grandmother grew out of this distance between us. Because ...