A Mile in His Shoes
I saw my maternal grandfather last week for the second time in my life. Considering I’m thirty-eight years old, I realize this is somewhat unusual. My mother’s childhood could be written as a Shakespearean tragedy: parents divorced when she was two, her father remarried and moved to Florida when she was five; her mother dead in a car accident when she was 10; her father and grandparents fought a bitter custody battle, which her grandparents won; and her father left her. Completely. He did not contact her for the rest of her childhood.
When my mom was twenty-one and I, her first child, was born, she wrote her father a letter to let him know that he had a grandchild. Thus began a tentative and careful correspondence between the two of them for the next 20-odd years. I knew I had a grandfather, but my mother told me when I was quite young that he was not in our lives and that he wouldn’t be. He had remarried, had three children, two of whom I knew were disabled, but that was all I knew. I was too self-involved (as all children are) to think about what this meant for my mother, that she had been completely abandoned by her father for the majority of her childhood, and despite the renewed contact, he still had no interest in us. I didn’t actually care—my father’s mother loved us unconditionally, and I felt no need for another grandparent.
To everyone’s surprise, my grandfather decided to visit us when I was in college. He looked the retired Florida type: polo shirt, pastel pants, soft white shoes and sunglasses. He lounged on my mother’s lawn chair and spoke of finances and his two residences and his children. I was getting married soon, and I had no time or interest in a man who chose to ignore my existence for twenty years, and who now seemed just as disinterested in us while sitting in our back yard. So my sister and I dismissed him completely. It’s hard to be offended by a total stranger. Again, I was too self-involved to think about how this all might be affecting my mother. I so much sympathy for her in hindsight: her oldest daughter getting married, her own marriage less than ideal, and then her father decided to visit her for the first time in over thirty years.
We didn’t see him again for eight years. I missed his last trip, six years ago. My sister reported that his second visit was much like his first: a smug, self-important old man decided to come calling and talk about himself, and again, we paid him little attention. I do know that by then, my mother had beat back many of her demons and had mostly put them behind her. She was in a new, much more satisfying relationship, her life was as she wanted it, and she no longer craved her father’s attention. Her desire for her father’s approval and love had dogged her, and damaged her, most of her adult life. Moving past that grief helped her to make the transition to true adulthood, and I was so thrilled for her when she told me that she completely believed in her own worth, despite her father’s abandonment.
When my first son was about a year old, my mother called me and said her father wanted to open a college account for Logan. I shrugged and ignored this news. How could I trust this man to give his great-grandson money, when he had ignored his own daughter, then his granddaughters? But he sent me yearly statements of the account, with letters congratulating me on our son’s birth and news of people I had never met. It felt a bit like I was dropped into a Twilight Zone episode. After wrestling with my own conflicting impulses, I decided to answer the letters. Each Christmas for the past four years we have exchanged Christmas cards and a single, brief, neutral letter, where I generally thanked him for Logan’s Christmas gifts and the contribution to the college fund. He signed them “Grandpop Trenton”, something that felt patently ludicrous.
My mom called me several weeks ago and said that her father was due to visit her for a long weekend, and she asked if I would make the 90-mile trip to bring our three children out to meet their great-grandfather. For her sake alone, I decided to go.
And so, this past weekend, for the first time I truly met my grandfather. He is 81 now, and he is such a completely different man that I sometimes wondered if my memory has played tricks on me. He was completely solicitous, asking many and varied questions about my life, my children, my decision to stay home and raise them. He was kind and gentle and loving with my children, and with my sister, my mother, and me. I discovered that I enjoyed conversing with him, and he answered my own questions about his life with candor and simplicity. His second wife is bipolar, his first son blind and retarded, his second child also retarded, and his third son an alcoholic with two failed marriages and a son he rarely sees. My grandfather keeps himself in excellent shape, watching his diet carefully and running a mile and a half every day. He admitted he feels he must keep himself in perfect health, so that he can continue to take care of his wife and three adult children.
He told me all this as a simple statement of fact, without self-pity or excuses. He did express regret that he has been absent from our lives, but without the expectation of forgiveness. But forgiveness comes when you spend any time walking in someone else’s shoes, for while I don’t excuse his absence, I can understand it. Life has been very difficult for him; my own life has been so ridiculously easy in comparison. Would I have done any better in his place? Would I have wanted to bring my single normal daughter from another marriage into a house of mental illness and incredible need and stress, even for a visit? Could I have born visiting my daughter’s normal household, with her normal children, and then gone back to my terrible trials at home? I don’t know, and I’m grateful I don’t have to make such choices. I regret the lack of elders in my daily life, for I crave their wisdom and life experiences and advice. I am not above refusing this man’s hard-won wisdom. And I am certainly not above forgiving him.
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September 3rd, 2007 at 2:25 am
Beautiful writing Stacy. Thanks for showing us the gift of connection, no matter what the age.
September 7th, 2007 at 2:35 am
This is beautiful Stacy. I really enjoyed reading it
September 8th, 2007 at 12:34 am
Thank you for the kind comments. I wrote this entry not knowing if my mother would approve its publication, but I didn’t care–I needed the catharsis writing it brought. My mother did approve, despite its personal nature, and she told me after she read the entry that she had not, in fact, fully forgiven her father after all these years. I don’t think reading this has made her forgive him, but she knows now that she needs to, as much for her own sake as anyone’s. I feel so proud that I might be able to help my mother with her relationship with her father, after all this time. More than that, I’m proud of my mother! I’ve been reminded, yet again, how critical it is for a daughter to have a healthy relationship with her father, and how truly crippled she is without it. It’s so wonderful to see my mother stand, walk, and finally run on her own after all these years, despite the empty hole left in her life by her father’s absence.