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I’ve decided to be happy. Happiness is often about choice. Choosing to be in a good head space, or letting the bad head space take you over. If we don’t work our issues, our issues work us. One of the issues most likely to put a collar around our neck and drag us around the block, is childhood issues. My grandmother was an amazing person. She survived domestic abuse, poverty and an amount of work that would have broken most people. She raised five children, plus one grandchild, me, and helped raise two other grandchildren, part time. But one of the lessons she took from a very hard life was depression. She was depressed most of my life. I didn’t know it when I was very little, but she lived with a fear of the future. She was convinced that the terrible bad thing would happen and it would happen to her and her loved ones. She was utterly convinced of this. She lived in terror of being alone, and of loosing my mother to an early death. When my mother, did indeed, die before thirty, it just confirmed my grandmother’s view of the world. This view stole a lot of joy from her life. She could never enjoy anything for long without worrying that it would be taken away. I absorbed this idea of the world into my very pores as a child. She was my whole world, why wouldn’t I believe her? Besides, my mother died when I was six, and that taught me that the adults around me couldn’t even protect themselves, let alone me. It forever changed how I would be a child, and later an adult.

I never felt safe after my mother died. Never felt sure of my place in the world and what would happen to me. My grandmother, bless her heart, didn’t help. She told me, nearly daily, that she would not live to see me graduate high school. She reminded me that she was old and would die soon. She was all I had, and she told me she would die and leave me to find other family to live with. It was a frightening message to a child. I think she did it, to prepare me, because she believed it. She honestly did. She said, "I’ll never live to see you graduate high school." She did, of course.

Then, "I’ll never live to see you marry." She did. "I’ll never live to see you graduate college." and, "Now that you’re married, you’ll never finish college." She never really understood me in some ways. My first husband and I finished college, we only had one year left. Then, "I’ll never live to see "Susie’s grandchild." My mother was Susie. Notice, not my child, but Susie’s grandchild. My grandmother never recovered from my mother’s death. It was a loss that haunted her, always. Admittedly, my first husband and I waited ten years of marriage before we got pregnant, but Granny did see, and hold, and talk to, Susie’s grandchild. All her life was about what she would not get to do, see, or enjoy. She was always so busy looking at what bad things were coming that she often lost enjoyment in the good things that were actually happening around her. I was determined not to do that in my own life. I’ve had therapy to help unlearn that lesson of loss and fear, but there’s a funny thing about childhood lessons, when under stress you sometimes revert to them. Even if they are bad, or scary, they are familiar, and under enough stress familiar feels oddly better than new positive things. I knew that lesson, but I forgot. I’ve let the stress of the last few weeks throw me back into that mindset of loss and sorrow and fear.

So, today, I got up and I felt good. I got more sleep last night, and so did Jon. But after I’d gotten dressed and quietly left the bedroom to start the day, I started to feel down. I read the New York Times on line. I answered some e-mail. I couldn’t shake the feeling of dread. Nothing bad was happening, but I felt like it was, and that was the moment that I realized that I’ve been channeling my grandmother. I’ve been worried about what might happen, or what is not happening that I want to happen. It is a mentality almost completely about loss. Fear that you will loose the good things in your life, fear that the things you want will never come to you, fear that if you do, you will be sorry you have them. I was raised that that was the truth of the universe, oh, and that God was a sort of heavenly hitman, and if you were too happy he’d punish you, and ruin it. That I think was from her early raising in a very fire and brimstone church. Though, she raised me not Christian, she never shook off the idea that heaven was out to get you. Her religion of choice? Angry-at-God. Someone at my mother’s funeral told her, it was God’s will, and Granny never forgave God for it. Well, years after I left home she found a truce with the big Guy, and some peace. But when I was little, oh, no. One of the biggest fights we ever had was me wanting to join the Church. She felt God had gotten one of her children in death, he couldn’t have the other one in life. I have to admire the sheer balls of it. She had a grudge against God for about twenty years, as if she could win this fight. That was my Grandmother, a woman who thought she could take on God and win.

You don’t change a lifetime of habits instantly, but now that I understand what is happening my head, I can begin the work. I can begin to take small steps to distract myself from the yawning abyss that was always at the edge of my childhood. It’s not really there, and God, and Goddess, really do want the best for us. I believe that, honestly, I do, but my grandmother’s voice in my head is still loud today. She didn’t believe in the good things of life, when was alive, I hope, I pray, that she’s somewhere safe and understands finally that the Universe is about love, not loss, and that she can finally let go of all that fear. I’ll do my bit, by letting go of mine.