#my grandma has 18 grandchildren and majority of us and our families went to grandma every 25th and it was honestly the best thing growing u | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

okay-victoria · 3 years

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Random Personal Rant

For anyone somehow here not from the original thread, this started off me getting asked what finishing school is and me getting shit off my chest that is only mildly relevant about how I could both be of the social class that gets sent to finishing school and grows up on welfare.

With an understanding that in many parts of the world it wouldn't qualify as so, as far as the US goes, my dad is from what counts as a very old money family from Baltimore & Philadelphia. Both his siblings went to college and one now owns a major hedge fund, and his sister is married to a C-level executive at a huge conglomerate. His parents went to college. His grandparents went to college. All eight of his great grandparents went to college. My dad...did not go to college. He was not about that life, and while I don't mean it as an insult, when I say his primary occupation until I was ~5 was a drummer in a mediocre band I mean that he opened for a lot of great acts, and if you lived in the Boston to Atlanta area in the 80s you may have heard him play, but he was never a huge national name. But he wasn't an amateur band playing for free at some random local gig either.

My mom grew up on a chicken farm in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania but also completely rejected her heritage and became a model, sort of like my father, of mediocre status. Not Giselle Bundchen, but had national contracts and if you have a Graco ad/box from 1990-1993 you might see both me and her on it. They met because my mom's friends placed bets, one each, on who could sleep with a member of their favorite local band first and my mom picked my dad and...my mom was actually supposed to go be a model in Tokyo and found out she was pregnant with me and couldn't go 😂

So, after my parents had two kids back to back with a third on the way and determined they needed lifestyles more in line with having three children, they became much poorer than they originally were because my mom stopped working and my dad, with a barely-passed-high-school education but needing a true "day job" worked day labor in construction. My dad's father was too proud to give us money/help if my dad didn't beg for it; despite having eventually four young children my dad never did so we ended up on all the state assistance programs one could imagine. My grandma jokes that dinners at my parents house were BYOC - bring your own chair, because we didn't own any.

My mother and paternal grandmother had no such pride issues and I live in eternal gratitude that my welfare childhood was not as crappy as it should have been because my grandmother would have my mom accompany her on grocery runs and buy us food without my father or grandfather knowing, and every Christmas and birthday my grandparents/godparents could give us the one big ticket gift all the kids wanted that year. But, on the other side, I once got stung by a bee inside my mouth because my brother threw a hairbrush through a cracked window at me and broke it and we couldn't afford to fix it for about two years and a hornet got in one day and rested himself in my coke can (my parents were the very American type that fed me coca-cola in baby bottles at age 8 when I was jealous of my younger siblings lol).

It is hard not to believe in "toxic masculinity" when two men warring over dumbass pride issues would rather their children/grandchildren go without food than suck it up and decide 'help' isn't the worst word in the English language, and you know you've only been saved by two women who came from totally different backgrounds and entirely disapproved of each other but reached out the hand to shake when it came down to toddlers getting the short end of the don't-bend-the-knee stick. It wasn't that either of the men were bad people, I loved them both and got along great with both, but on a societal level I feel they were socialized in a very fucked up way if that was the end result, as both claimed "male pride" in these instances [my dad took multiple thousands of dollars I'd saved from working during college from me during the 2008-2010 financial crisis and didn't tell me and that was the reason I was given for why I hadn't been informed/asked, because it would be too emotionally difficult for an adult man to ask a young woman. My graduation present was them repaying me 1/3 of the money they'd taken from me without asking because I'd like, trusted them when it had been in a joint account that was a holdover from when I was <18 and couldn't have my own bank account].

While in some ways my parents on the surface achieved the American dream of going from nothing to a bunch of money, the real factor in play was that my dad's father was the bank. My parents had no credit and couldn't get real loans. My dad worked construction and during the two major periods that flipping houses was very lucrative, he never had to get an actual loan or pay actual interest, he just had to ask his father to pay out cash and then repay him at a flat 2% interest rate that didn't even accrue over time, just...whenever you are ready, repay the value of the loan + 2%. Because my father was doing something productive, in these instances, my grandfather was happy to pay, because it wasn't giving away money, it was loaning it. I had a very weird situation of mostly being poor but like also getting taken to the "big donors" events at the Kennedy Center and my grandparents regularly buying me a dress as a child worth more than my mom's wedding dress and also needing to pretend I fit in with these people.

And look. When I say "these people"...honestly, by and large, most wealthy people, whether inherited or not, are not the assholes you want to imagine. Most of them are extremely nice. Most of them are generous when it comes to the less fortunate who are in their personal sphere of being. Most of them are just really out of touch. The 100% kindest of all of them that I know once relayed to me that she thought people would be happier if once a year they did what she did...go to the airport with a purse packed full of absolute necessities, buy a one way ticket to the most appealing destination on the flight board, buy your clothes and book your accommodations after you'd arrived, and come back after you felt you'd 'centered' yourself. She didn't understand why there were so many unhappy people who weren't taking this very obvious route to being happier. I didn't quite know how to explain that saying "most" people couldn't afford to do that either financially or from a job/career angle didn't even cover it, as "most" sounds like 70% instead of 99.7%.

I was both my parents eldest son and eldest daughter in the worst combination possible. I was the eldest son because I was the most stereotypically male of all my siblings, in everything from desire to physically fight the battles I was given to dislike of shopping/fashion to lack of emotional connection to my relationships, so I can now fix your average household plumbing/drywall/electrical issue better than most "city" guys I interact with and remain less clingy to them in the process. I was also very much the oldest daughter from a responsibility perspective, I managed our household and from age 10 - 24 managed the finances of our family business, my mom almost died giving birth to my youngest brother after a ruptured uterus that should never have happened in the first place if we had adequate insurance to get her a non-emergency C-section (I was just past 9 years old at the time) and I was informally withdrawn from school for two years to take care of the family when she couldn't because there is no paid parental leave in the US and we got double-fucked by the medical industry because she got a bad "mesh" put in and then had to have a further surgery to repair that which we also had to pay for and didn't have the money to win a lawsuit over.

I don't know quite how to put this, but in the deepest fuck you of the universe, my rich-immigrant-ggggg grandfather's money led to him owning banks, insurance companies, etc, and the family cashed out in a big way when their ownership was bought by and merged with what is now Cigna, one of the biggest US healthcare insurers, and my nuclear family specifically got screwed by the American health insurance industry, but anyway, we were the people selected for that karmic comeuppance so if you want to feel schadenfreude at my expense, I'll allow it without begrudging the sentiment, my family might have fucked up your family’s life too, not just their own.

I got up twice a night to feed my brother because my dad had to sleep unmolested in my room to get to work and my mom was too weak to carry my brother or even hold him against her while she nursed so I had to hold him up to her. Adjusting to living in a city and hearing lots of random noises all the time was not easy when I'd had mom sound instincts from age 9.

I learned to drive the fall my youngest bro was born because my mom couldn't and I had to get my middle brother to preschool and go the grocery store on my own. While I hold absolutely no ill will towards my father or grandfather for this and given that about 1/3 of my paternal family either has an autism diagnosis or should, I fully feel the struggles they both went through to be communicated with, my father wouldn't ask for help, and my grandmother that lived 20 minutes away couldn't give enough help because my grandfather refused to do a single dish on his own as that was outside their "marriage contract" type agreement and she couldn't ever stay with us overnight when there wasn't a clearly-communicated need, so they let the burden fall on a 9 - 11 year old child and that really shaped a lot of my life in both good and bad ways. My youngest brother is 22, and we have only just climbed out of the medical debt his birth left us with between my dad's life insurance and my oldest brother and I paying for the extra cost of out-of-state college tuition.

The irony of all of this is that because my father died before his father, when my grandmother dies, my siblings and I will all inherit enough money (as a non-blood relative my mom, despite keeping her vows to part at death and not having remarried in eight years, is cut out entirely) to make this a non-issue, but my grandfather couldn't conscience spotting his unluckiest child some money in the end of days to pay for my youngest two brothers' education and take that worry off my father as he was dying. The day before he died I had to hold him down in bed to keep him from trying to climb in his truck to go to work because he was so anxious about trying to provide for us in spite of his father having fuck you money, because his father didn't think it was fair to the other siblings (who, at the time, still owned a major hedge fund and were married to a C-level executive of a huge conglomerate). A day and a half later I went back to my job because at the time I was then the sole provider for the family and didn't want to risk asking for the standard week's bereavement leave when I knew I was capable of showing up at work the next day and was fresh out of college so hadn't built up a reputation yet.

My father worked the day each of us was born, so I suppose it is only fair and he smiled at the choice. In spite of what it may seem, I gave a baller and very heartfelt speech at his funeral to all his rich friends that over and above everything, he'd taught us how to be happy with our own lives no matter what, and multiple of them emailed my mom in the aftermath to say they'd reassessed their relationship with their children in light of it, although...tbh I kind of doubt that lasted and they probably changed nothing 😅. The last good talk I had with him, two weeks before he died [his liver was going and it sent toxins to his brain that de-personed him after that and he no longer recognized me as his daughter, but as his sister], I reassured him that though we would all be sad he'd gone, we'd live on just fine without him because that's how he'd raised us, and according to my mom that was what gave him the final bit of peace he needed. Although honestly, I don't think I will ever see the strength in another human again that it took my grandmother to sit next to him and stroke his hand and tell him to close his eyes and imagine he was happy on a beach and die, for God's sake, because he was unaware and in pain and just prolonging it for our sake by then.

That type of obsession my grandfather had with assessing his children and grandchildren on the basis of economic productivity and a very black and white idea of "fair" is one you don't easily forget, I promise you. My hedge fund uncle is currently positioning himself to screw us out of our inheritance because of janky writing in the will and I'm doing my fuck all best to gain the wherewithal to go toe-to-toe with this cold motherfucker in court as the oldest and representative member of my happily much nicer and softer younger brothers who I want to remain that way not because I even care that much about the money, I know what bills affect your credit first and what you can put off paying and all of us have good enough career prospects to do our own thing, but just because I want to give the middle finger to a man that was a multi-millionaire and drew lines on his milk and orange juice bottles when I came over so he knew if I drank what my parents couldn't afford when I was approximately six. Anyway, ask me why I support major reforms in wealth taxation. I don't care who it goes to, just not that guy, you feel?

Having expendable income was very exciting for a bit after I started working but once I got to the hateable point of assessing my annual bonus and internally complaining that I'd spent the money I should have spent on a Sauternes cellar to drop five digits on bedset materials (to be fair they are drop dead gorgeous, very comfy and the factory pays a living wage for people to handmake the sheets/duvets/pillows to people in San Francisco, which is not cheap, so maybe I did more good than harm with that), I two seconds later nodded to myself and went "the government needs to confiscate more money from me". The narrative is always that the "undeserving" will use it for dumb things they don't need like iPhones or refrigerators...?...but like...I could also have gone to Bed Bath and Beyond and bought a very nice sheet/comforter set for at most a tenth of what I paid so am I really spending it responsibly either....?....who is going to get more joy out of this misspent money....?....not me, that is for sure, I probably would have had more fun going to BBB and laying on all the demo beds and buying something there.

My lifelong dream, which may become possible if/when I do have something of an inheritance, is to provide food security for one of the many towns in the US were most residents don't have it. It's the thing I remember the most distinctly over the years. I never could quite believe it when I got to the point that I could just...pay to eat at a restaurant. One of the most disappointed my mother has ever been in me is when I was twenty five and confessed I actually had no idea how much a gallon of milk cost in a city grocery store besides that it was probably between $1 and $5, because I didn't have to know. For now I make a weekly drop off of my excess produce to a mom group I met under somewhat weird circumstances but I was walking through the cut-through that went through the low-income housing back to my apartment at like 2 AM on a Saturday and these moms were out there partying and smoking weed with their kids all strapped in strollers around or the older ones watched by a rotating member of the group and I felt very safe and like these moms had a very good vibe of both living their own lives [seriously for mental health parents but in most cases specifically mothers need to be able to keep up relationships with people their age] but keeping their children safe and accounted for while doing so and trying their fuckin' best against all the odds to figure out how to make that happen when life had dealt them a shit hand.

...anyway, looping way back to the original question of what finishing school is, when I was almost done with middle school my dad had built a legit construction business that then very quickly took off because we lived in a commutable zip code to the now-rich-in-their-own-right people he went to high school with who trusted him to redo their homes. We eventually moved to that zip code but I stayed and commuted back to my old high school. But, i was a pretty wild kid which my father appreciated for a long while because I would follow him around on jobs and enjoy doing physical labor, but once I was mid-puberty and also he had to maybe show me to his high school friends that did not fly.

I snapped - not broke, snapped - my left thumb and my parents had to trap me like a wild animal to get me to go the hospital. Then I got a deep cut that partially injured a tendon in my leg and at eleven I tried to beat the shit out of my dad to prevent him from picking me up to strap me in the car and go to the hopsital. Next I got a deep splinter due to my eternal-barefoot tendencies and it wouldn't come out so got infected and I refused to go to the doctor [another weird back story but I was minorly sexually assaulted [[to be clear, not raped or anything big traumatic]] when I was eight and had to stay in hospital for a week and my parents couldn't be with me all the time so I have a permanent heebie-jeebie about going to the hospital, not true anxiety, I will go if I know I need to and I don't breathe heavy or anything, and I'm actually not permanently weirded out by sex or anything, just doctors in hospitals specifically I kind of unconsciously try to justify not needing to the extent I can rationalize it] and my dad was tired of my antics so he was like "fine if you don't go I will slice your foot in half with a Swiss Army knife to get it out" and I called his bluff and laid down on the floor, stuck my foot on his lap, and he didn't really know what to do when a barely fourteen year old girl called his bluff so my brothers watched in fascinated but horrified awe as I got my foot sliced open spectacularly so that the infection/splinter could come out and I didn't even make a sound out of spite despite it being quite painful to my recollection almost twenty years later.

They saw me cry from pain exactly one time when while trying to break up a fight between all three of them (it was over ice cream) I got pushed and my ankle got dislocated and what actually made me cry was snapping it back in place and they realized it was not a joke. These dumb assholes that I love have ragged on me for "skipping" chores the day after I was in the hospital because the day before that I had to spend 18 hours running Thanksgiving as a good sub-hostess like I didn't have a serious infection that needed treating and couldn't rest because none of them were up to any task beyond peeling potatoes.

After the Swiss Army knife incident, my dad's discussion of sending me to finishing school became real, which I knew when my mom made me take a walk with her and talked about it. Finishing school is like...etiquette school....? In ye olden day when finishing high school was not the norm for anyone, wealthy men finished high school and wealthy women often went to "finishing" school to have a combined education on being a proper lady but also being able to hold a decent conversation with your presumably-educated husband, so it wasn't entirely etiquette non-academic. It was more just like "what a rich man wants in a wife" school, which was sort of household management and knowing enough about cleaning/cooking to correct the staff if they fucked up, how to be a polite hostess, and how to not entirely bore him when you were alone together and had done your five minutes of sex or whatever so actually had to have a conversation. In modern times it has obviously expanded to be less bleak.

I said miss me with that, I can be a girl on my own, so I went full throttle into the girliest sport they offer in high school and ever since have gained the inestimable advantage of knowing how to also use femininity to my advantage, which I am very grateful to my parents for making me learn. It would be great if we lived in a world where that didn't count, but it did/still does, and they really set me up to operate in all the worlds.

It is weird for me to tell the story to Internet strangers because it's one of those things that makes your parents sound terrible and abusive in the general tone of the Internet nowadays, and while I support gender nonconforming children I don't remember my childhood or parents that way. But, I feel like the bits and pieces of my life I've given don't always make a ton of sense together without the context, so here it is, and in the end, I think a number of parts of it are areas where you can probably understand where it makes me have the opinions I do when I write.

Anyhoo, this makes my life sound far worse than it is, I actually have a great life and I am not unhappy with it at all and feel I was on the whole blessed with many more turns of luck than unluck, so, please, do not take this as a depressed artist rant, it is more like a rant of a very energetic person who rants about a lot of things all the time and didn’t need to come out but just did because the question was asked and the time was right with my life being in a bit of flux to think about how I got where I am and where I want to go and why.

Always remember no matter what problems it seems like I have, if I didn’t solve them on my 2 year round the world traveling hiatus I took from working, it’s my own fault, I definitely had the time and money to solve them and just chose not to.

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dragonoracle · 4 years

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Let’s talk about why my Mom did not bond with me and why my Maternal Grandma did.

I think the best thing to do is start at the beginning. I was born one month after my parents first child had died. This sister is my older sister but she was not really a part of our lives. (She will be called from now on DS = Dead Sister in this blog if she is ever brought up.) I think in our entire house there was only one picture of DS and maybe one at my paternal grandmother. I know my mother did have a baby book for DS but she kept it put away out of sight. So was the picture. The picture was shoved to the top of a book shelf in the living room. This death did make it hard if not impossible for my parents to bond with me. Well I should say for my Mom to bond with me. My Dad has made it clear several times that he ever wanted kids and only had me and my siblings because he liked having sex with my Mom. (The next post will go into my details on this point.) But my Mom never let that death go. And this death seemed to have warped my Mom’s mind where my early years are concerned. Whenever I have brought this up to her she always points out that she made me two baby books and will blame my MGM (Maternal Grandmother) for interfering with any bonding we could have done. I want to break down these two excuses one at a time as they both irritate me and upset me. The Baby Books my mother made for me are creepy to tell you all. Not in that way you get when seeing your baby pictures. They seem to document every day of my life until around the time I was two years old. My DS died when she was two years old. As if she was expecting me to die at the same age. My baby book even has a section of my umbilical cord in a little sealed baggy (yes it’s as gross as it sounds). Neither of my sisters’ or brother’s baby books have their cords in it. Also my sisters who are twins only have one shared book and my brother has half a book. It’s almost like once I didn��t die she stopped caring for me. She focused on my sisters and then my brother. She bonded with them but stayed distant with me. Her complaints that my MGM interfered with any bonding we could have had are all lies. My MGM had explained to me (when I was around 18 I think) that my Mom never bounded with me. She took care of me (feeding, changing, and bathing…etc). But once my needs where met that she would set me down or hand me off to another family member. My MGM stepped up and took a major interest in my life as a baby and that carried threw as a kind. She bonded with me and provided me the love and attention that all babies need to grow and thrive. My MGM loved my siblings but our bound was stronger than her bound with them. Partly due to them not needing a mother figure in their lives, partly due to the interference of my Mom, and partly due to how my MGM actually parented when we were in her care.

The distant and lack of bonding with me made my life and relationship with my siblings hard and very abusive. They would bully and beat me up a lot. They would steal my stuff and keep it for themselves. Give my bike to their friends to use so I could not fallow them. Take my diaries and share them with my Mom to get me in trouble for the feelings I had written there. They would break or destroy their stuff and then try and blame me for the breaking of the stuff. Or just try to break my stuff. My parents did not care nor punish my siblings for doing these things. Or even punish me for defending myself or standing up for myself. Saying the line “You’re the oldest and as such need to set an example for them” or some variation of that. This worked to build their bond between my parents and my siblings.

My MGM on the other hand would punish my siblings for doing them same thin. This would also keep my siblings from wanting to from a relationship with our MGM (cause they where spoiled brats not wanting to get punished). One example of her standing up for me was when we were kids me and my two sisters had been given these lovely cloth merry go round horses. They were kept at my MG house as most of our toys where due to how bad and disgusting our living conditions (to be explained in a latter post.) They each had tails made of color yarn and ribbons. My siblings one day when we were dropped off at my MGM’s house to be watched went back to the room that my Sisters’ merry go round horses were stored. I had joined my MGM in watching TV as we liked to do. Then my siblings came running out and lied that I had cut off the tail of S1’s horse tail. My MGM called them out as she had been in that room and seen the Horse and its tail had been intact before we had arrived and as I had just sat down with my grandmother on my arrival and not moved since. My Mom always blamed my MGM for why I never bonded with my siblings. She also would say that my MG could only bond with the first born grandchildren of each of her children. She always explains it as because my MGM mother died shortly after I think my MGM’s sister was born. My MGM’s father remarried and her stepmother was kind and caring till her stepmother and her father had their own child. Then my MGM and he sister where pushed aside. I have always felt this was just bull shit and excuses. My Mom would take glee in always telling me that had DS lived my MGM would have focused and bonded with DS and I would not have been the favored child. This has gone on ever since my MGM died. My Mom would never have told me that while my MGM was alive cause she figured that I would tell my MGM about what she said. My Mom has since poisoned my siblings with these thoughts and they went with it. It’s made it hard to talk with my sisters about this as they always mimic my Mom’s words back to me.

Saddest part is that my MGM didn’t feel this way at all. She loved all her grandchildren. But did not agree with how my parents (latter just my Mom) where raising us(the continued abuse and bullying I was receiving from my siblings, the lack of punishment and stopping of the behaviors by my parents, and the allowing of my siblings to do dangerous and illegal activities). After my parents divorced and my Mom moved us to a new state my MGM would send $20 a week to be split between the four of us. Then as first my B and S1 started to smoke she had the money to be split between me and S2. Then when S2 started to smoke I was to get the whole amount of the $20. My Mom was upset and angered by this and often said that my siblings were upset by this (and maybe they where I have no idea) but my MGM had hoped and explained this to us and my mother that she would not pay for my siblings to smoke. This didn’t stop my mother from trying by “borrowing” the $20 from me to help with groceries till I found out that she was using the $20 to help pay for my siblings cigarettes I stopped giving my Mom the $20’s and told her that I would tell my MGM what was she was doing. This stopped my Mom asking me for the $20’s. (Note my mother has never once paid me back for any money borrowed.)

My Mom was not above using the fact I was close to my MGM. She used me almost all the time to ask my MGM for money. Mainly because she felt and knew my MGM would be hard pressed to turn me down. It got so bad that when I would call my MGM I had to make it known to my MGM that no I was not calling for my Mom to ask for money.

She was deeply saddened by the distance that my siblings put between her and them. They stopped calling her on holidays and never wished her a happy birthday. As such she decided to stop sending them gifts. She would still send my siblings cards for holidays and for their birthdays. She just stopped giving them money. She did make it clear to them and my Mom that they just needed to reach out. But it was too late to repair much of the relationship. I do have some memories of my mother half halfheartedly bonding with me in my latter years that where clearly after thoughts and more meant to prove my growing feelings wrong. Or where just either forced on her to deal with my learning disability or cause it made her look bad. These bonding attempts where also always pushed aside quickly either to focus on my siblings or because I was not that receptive to them. These only hurt any relationship we could have had. Now I’m not saying if what my MGM did with her relationship with my siblings was right or wrong but I do understand why she did it. I’m not saying that she did everything right with our relationship. But I will say that without it my already very turmeric childhood would have been truly nightmarish. And I would not be the person I am today. For that I will always be grateful to my MGM and all she did for me. As for my Mom I don’t blame her for not boding with me. It’s impossible and would be monstrous of me to want that. After all her first child had died a month before her second was born. But what I do blame my Mom for is for lying about the fact that we did bond and trying to use the baby books she made for me as proof when they just more seem like they are epitaphs for me for when I was suppose to have died, blaming my MGM for us not bonding, for the issues between me and my sibling, and finally for the continued attacks on the one person who ever cared and stood up for me and protected me. Those are what I blame my mother for. Sorry for the rambling manner of this post. I think I’ve pretty much covered the bonding issue between me and my Mom I think this Friday I’ll post about my bonding issue and relationship with my Dad and his parents (how I did not bond with my PGM(Paternal Grandmother) and how I did bond with my PGF (Paternal Grandfather).

TL;DR My Mom and I did not bond cause I was born a month after my DS died. And my Mom has two excused for the bonding issue that contradict each other of first we did bond using creepy baby books as proofs and second to blame my MGM for interfering with our bonding. My Mom rather than accept the truth tried to gaslight me. Tear apart my relationship with my now dead MGM and poisoning my siblings to any relationship they could have had and had with our MGM. My mother tried half hardheartedly to bond with me in my latter years but always made it very clear my sisters and brother where her preferred children. I don’t blame my Mom for not bonding with me but more for her lies and her trying to destroy the only happy safe place I ever had during my childhood.

Update I recently talked with my S2 about our childhood. She actually confirmed some of what I said here. My Mom had all through our childhood drilled into the heads of my Siblings head that’s my MG loved me more then them. She would make them jealous of me by telling them my MG would buy stuff for me not them. She also said that my Mom and Dad would all but encourage my parents to beat me up or take my stuff to avoid fights. Now I’m not so foolish to fully believe what she said in this call. But it was interesting to see she backed up my beliefs without me saying what those beliefs where.

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