anghraine | (no subject)

A few years ago, my grandmother (my bio father’s mother) told me that she’d made my aunt (her daughter) promise to take me to Greece, since I’m the only grandchild who cares and she (my grandmother) will never be able to do it herself.

I’ve just been thinking about it because our relationship is complex (she was awful to my mother, my bio father didn’t even raise me and she was a pretty shitty mother to him, etc), but she was thrilled to get a hold of me on my birthday and Dad says she’s been very sick. I'd written her a thank-you note for my birthday present that I then forgot to send because I didn't have a stamp when I wrote it, so of course I rushed to send it off today, but ... it's complicated. From some conversations I've had with my cousins, it seems like she's told me more about her family and her past than she has the other grandkids that she's spent vastly more time with, and I was able to help track down information about her father and the very tiny Greek village her family came from, and so on. Yet I don't think she really knows me.

This isn't going anywhere—I was thinking of how I'm not Greek in the way she is, and that's partly because our relationship is so messy, but it's enough to be twitchy about certain narratives and aggravated about how she's sometimes treated within the family and so forth. Strange though she is, I hope she's okay. :\

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Different ethnic group from very nearby, but I have some similar feelings about ethnicity, and tracing it through relatives I have or had extremely difficult relationships with, and how that has cut me off from having normal experiences of it even in an American setting.

My sympathies! It does make everything that much more complicated.

I totally get both being frustrated with someone and/or having a bare relationship with them from a distance but still wanting them to be treated with dignity, especially by their family. She sounds like a difficult person, but also as an immigrant woman in a strange country, I can only imagine how that shaped her relationships with her children and then everyone else.

Yeah, exactly—like, my mother's mother told me about how she used to joke about how the family had a yellow Greek baby now(me) and that this other grandmother had such a bad sense of humour that she never laughed at it, and I'm thinking ... the fuck?! Of course she didn't! And it was worse when (Greek-American) Grandma was growing up—apparently she got bullied over it as a kid and told they were dirty and so on, and her in-laws have always been shitty about it and continue to be so. So it's a Thing, for all of her personal failings. It's just such a weird thing to have her be treated the way she is, and to grow up w/ the impression that any heritage from her was vaguely embarrassing, and then have people be so into Greek everything when living human beings aren't involved. :\

ETA: She isn't herself an immigrant, but the child of immigrants, for full disclosure; she has a lot more ties to the ~community than I do and more experiences of xenophobic assholes, but she was born on the West Coast.

Edited 2021-05-06 18:20 (UTC)

I feel you. My parents and my grandmother (the one surviving Swiss family member I have any contact with) are feuding.

And for me, that's really like, twisting the knife in my diaspora loss feelings.

It's all just so horrible and complicated sometimes, isn't it...

Yeah :(