My parents were divorced by the time I was six months old, so I had never had a father. This holiday was just another reminder of how different I was from the other kids, then my mother died when I was six, and it was just me and my grandmother. Just two women living alone, or two females if you prefer since I was a little girl when the arrangement first began, but the point was that there was no male presence in my home. My grandmother had lived with us since I was brought home from the hospital as a newborn, so living with her was a continuation, we just both missed my mother, her daughter, terribly. But my mother had gone out to work and my grandmother had stayed home, kept house, and taken care of me. In many ways it was a traditional household except that we were all women, but the roles for everyone were very standard in most ways.
If my grandmother and mother could have been a lesbian couple it would have been a happy family, maybe, but my mother wanted to remarry. My grandmother saw this as a threat. Hadn’t my mother’s only husband been cruel to her, broken her heart? My grandfather beat my grandmother for decades, nearly killed her a few times. She left when my mother, the youngest, was old enough to not be trapped with him in some court custody nightmare. Until that time, she fought back, this tiny woman, 4′ 11″, fought back against my much larger grandfather. She never gave up, never gave in, even though she stayed for the kids. She taught me what strength could be, and stubbornness, too.
My grandmother would dress me up in my best Sunday clothes and set me by the door when my mother had a first date. She’d tell me that I was going and it was a treat, and not ask my mother. My grandmother said, she wanted to make sure the man would be nice to me, but really it was to sabotage the date. Having a small girl on most of the first dates she managed pretty much guaranteed that there would be few second dates. I remember some of these awkward and socially painful moments. I knew I wasn’t wanted and shouldn’t be there, even at six. But my grandmother protected my mother and me from the men, and herself from losing us. She would later regret her actions, and come to take partial blame for my mother going into work that day and dying in the car accident. If my mother had only married and been a stay at home mom, it wouldn’t have happened. My grandmother blamed my father for years, if he’d been a good man and taken care of his family my mother wouldn’t have had to work outside the home. Like I said, my grandmother was a very traditional woman in some ways.
My grandmother loved her own father dearly and her own brothers, especially her nearest in age, my great-uncle Troy. But she told me once that if she hadn’t had sons of her own and loved them, she probably would have hated all men after what she endured from my grandfather. She hated men enough, and certainly told me they were evil, and would hurt me, and wanted only one thing. Her attitude towards sex does not bear talking about here, lets just say it was bleak, and that’s putting it mildly.
She raised me to be the boy, the man of the house, and to take the place of my mother who we had lost. By the time I was in my teens, I was lifting the heavy stuff, not her. When I was in college, still living at home and commuting in, an uncle was visiting us. We’d bought a fifty pound bag of rock salt to go into the water softener. I opened the bag, picked it up, so I could pour it in, and he jumped up from his chair as if to take the bag from me. I just looked at him as I poured it, easily, into the water. He looked perplexed.
“Do you think a man springs from the woodwork every time there’s something heavy to lift?” I asked him.
He hadn’t thought about it, none of the family had, I don’t think.
“Who do you think does all this?” I asked him.
He didn’t know. It had never occurred to him what it might mean that there was no man of the house.
If there was a scary noise in the middle of the night, I got up and searched the house for danger. My grandmother stayed back in the bed, while I secured everything. In many ways I was the man of the house.
If I’d been raised differently would I have been less drawn to so many masculine hobbies, and interests? Who knows? But I’ve spent most of my adult life being the only girl, or the minority in a room. Martial arts of various flavors, a biology degree, though I have an English degree, too, and that’s heavily weighted to woman, or was when I was in college. Somehow, I doubt that’s changed. It would be Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, that would be the writer that made me want to write horror, and heroic fantasy. Before my mother’s death I wanted a pink canopy bed, to be a ballerina, and have a white pony, or a white cat. By the time I was fourteen I was writing horror stories where most characters died horribly. I hated pink, and if I got a cat, I wanted a black one. I’d always loved horror movies and scary ideas, that wouldn’t have changed, I don’t think, but the rest . . . Is it nature or nurture?
We didn’t have much money so I didn’t worry about clothes. It was more important what I could do, than what I looked like, besides my grandmother didn’t encourage me in my looks. I believe she thought since my mother had been the pretty one and it had done her no good, just attracted a bad man, that she determined I wouldn’t think I was the pretty one. She did a great job of convincing me, as she put it, “No man will ever have you, so you better be able to work, and take care of yourself.”
I took this admonition from my childhood to heart and worked to get my ass out of there, because no one was going to save me. My grandmother, the only parent I had, told me that no one would save me. Look what had happened to her after she fell in love with my grandfather. Look what had happened to my mother. Men weren’t the answer, standing on your own two feet and not needing anyone was the only way to be safe.
She didn’t intend that I become quite as independent as I did. She complained that I was, independent as an old widow woman, because I didn’t just not depend on men. I fought to be independent of her, and that she had not planned. We fought most of my early adulthood as I tried to break free and she tried to keep me. Worst fights we ever had were when I fell in love the first time and wanted to marry my first husband. It was a horrible time, because a man, an evil man, because all men were evil, had come to take me away.
My now ex-husband was a good man then, and he still is in many ways. He’s a good, traditional guy, not a guy-guy, but conservative. One of the things that would later fuel our divorce was that the conservative girl he married became a liberal, but that would be after a decade of being pretty happily married.
Actually, my grandmother only approved of two men that I dated. One cheated on me, and the other tried to abuse me – I say try, because one incident of it and I was done with him. She had a nearly unerring radar for bad men, just like my grandfather had been. She was drawn to abusive men that would not be faithful, perhaps its a good thing she gave them up after my grandfather.
My first husband was kind, calm, hard working, serious about college and his future, and our future. To marry him I had to defy my entire family and be told that if I did marry him, I was dead to my family. By the day of the wedding my grandmother had relented enough to come, because she realized I was going to go through with it. I thought, and I still think today, that marrying my first husband, even if it had cost me my birth family, was a good deal.
Oddly, nearly twenty years later when I told her that my ex and I were divorcing she was devastated. She had made of our relationship a Romeo and Juliet drama, because I had defied them all and seemed happy, and we had a child, and . . . My grandmother seemed to feel personally betrayed that it had not worked, because she had built it into something more dramatic and more “love of my life” than I had. But I didn’t know that until I told her it was over.
She expected me to come home and bring my young daughter with me. My mother had been out of the house less than two years when she divorced and brought me home to my grandmother. I had been out of the house for fifteen years. I had done what my grandmother raised me to do, had a job that could support me and my daughter after the breakup. I was independent and fine on my own without a man, or my grandmother. She took it hard that I didn’t come home crying and needing her. Her reaction totally took me off guard. The two of us never really understood each other.
When I got engaged to Jonathon, my husband, my grandmother was very upset. Again, it was a man, and she didn’t like, or trust, them. She would eventually make peace with this marriage, too, but she never understood me marrying a second time. I had my daughter, and I was divorced, why did I need another man?
The men I married have been all the men I have known in a home situation. I had no basis for what a husband should be, or what a father should be. I had to create that reality for myself through therapy and years of effort. My daughter, Trinity, is lucky enough to have two fathers. Normally, my ex would split this weekend with us, but work has interfered this year. He was disappointed, but they will have other weekends. So, this Father’s Day, Trinity and I are helping Jonathon celebrate that he’s her dad. I’ve loved watching them grow into the great father/daughter relationship that they have, and I’m happy that my first husband is involved in her life. I had no father and it makes me very happy that Trinity has two.