I’m revisiting significant memories from my past. My therapist wants me to think about the messages I’ve been subconsciously given about myself through the things I’ve experienced. I’m hoping to gain some understanding of how I ever reached the point where I became invisible. This is part of my backstory.
When I was young (I’m not sure how young, pre-school aged, I guess), I was apparently in a bakery with my mother. The bakery was on the main road in the suburb where my paternal grandmother lived.
According to my mother, she and I were standing in line to be served at the bakery when my grandmother walked in, pushed in front of us so she would be served ahead of us, then left without acknowledging my mother or me. She apparently saw us as she was driving past with her partner, made him stop the car, and deliberately came into the shop to ignore and inconvenience her daughter-in-law before leaving without a word.
I can picture the bakery – where it was positioned on the street and the long glass display counter filled with all the traditional 70s bakery treats. I have a hazy sense of random people and a wire display rack with loaves of bread within the store filling the space and providing a backdrop for our little family drama.
My memories of the store are an amalgam of multiple visits and probably multiple similar stores, not an accurate backdrop for that specific memory. To be honest, I have absolutely no memory of that event at all. I know that my ‘recollection’ is based entirely on my mother sharing the story multiple times over years. There has never been a spark of personal recognition when she’s told it to me, other than the familiarity of hearing her voice shape the words.
The story always ended with my mother reminding me that my grandmother’s behaviour was unnecessarily cruel and selfish. My grandmother and parents were apparently at odds about some issue at the time, but to ignore your own grandchild because you are unhappy with their parents was, in my mother’s view, unforgivable.
In the past when I’ve randomly thought about this anecdote, the mental and emotional pathways have been reasonably linear. It’s a memory from my childhood where my grandmother was mean to my mother in my presence. There are no associated emotions. It’s consistent with what I know about my grandmother, but I don’t remember feeling hurt or rejected at the time (because I don’t remember it at all), so it’s not really a factor in how I feel about my grandmother except in a purely academic sense of being another (small) facet of the picture of her that I have in my mind.
The reality is that this story isn’t really about my grandmother, it’s about my mother. I have no memory of this event, but I have strong memories of my mother sharing it with me – repeating it to me over and over. I have clear memories of my mother using this story as an example of how difficult my grandmother was and how inappropriately conditional her love was, that she reserved her affection for those who made choices she approved of and that she was superficial and inconsistent in the way she demonstrated her love.
And that fact – that this memory says more about my connection with my mother than with my grandmother – means that this is no longer a linear family anecdote, mentally or emotionally.
I’ve wondered at times about the details of this particular story, although when it comes down to it the details don’t really matter. It doesn’t even matter if it actually happened because I don’t remember it and so nothing I’ve ever heard about it has been about explaining my perception of things. It’s always been about creating a memory, not explaining it or providing reassurance. (ETA: extended family has confirmed that it did happen and it was something my grandmother bragged about doing after the event.)
Taking that into account, why would my mother share this story with me so frequently that it’s become a pseudo-memory that feels like it belongs to me when it really belongs to her? What was there for her to gain in demonstrating to me that my grandmother didn’t care about my feelings? Why would she choose to remind me that I’d been rejected by someone I should have been able to trust unconditionally? If my grandmother’s behaviour was so hurtful and inappropriate, why did my mother put so much effort into making me relive a hurtful moment?
Perhaps she felt she was helping to protect me from my grandmother’s inconsistency – forewarned is forearmed, so the saying goes, and what better warning than a real-life example of her selfishness? That doesn’t explain why she continued to share the story with me into my adulthood, however, and well beyond my grandmother’s death. What protection would I need from her at that point? And I was always encouraged to spend time with my grandmother and to show affection towards her. I was encouraged to stay with her in school holidays and visit her regularly on my own as I grew older, so why encourage me to do that while giving me reasons to keep my distance?
I have several pseudo-memories like this one and as far as I’m aware, my mother hasn’t bombarded either of my sisters with hurtful memories from her life or their childhood. Why was I the one selected to hear my mother’s memories of hurts inflicted by others and reminders of how many times I’ve personally hurt and disappointed her?
And more relevant to my life now, why did my mother put so much effort into passing judgement on my grandmother’s lack of love and concern for her grandchild when she’s distanced herself from my children because she’s so disappointed in the way I managed my separation and divorce? Barely any contact with the children for the first 18 months of the separation and nothing for the past 12 months – no cards or texts for Christmas or their birthdays. She’s even moved to a different town without letting them know or making any effort to contact them, even though they’re all in their teens and she has their phone numbers. By her own standards, her rejection has been heartless and inexcusable and my children will remember not because I embed a pseudo-memory for them, but because they are all old enough to understand that their grandmother rejected them for no reason at a time when they most needed her support and unconditional love.
In many ways it’s an innocuous anecdote and as memories from my childhood go, this one is far less traumatic than many others. For me, the significance is how it contributes to my growing awareness that my mother’s baseline for choosing right and wrong behaviour is how it makes her feel. It’s a skewed way of looking at the world and it’s given me a lot to think about as I look back over my relationship with her.