Dear marthams:

Your grandmother’s weapon is her anger. When she is displeased, she angrily attacks her now adult child, or grandchild, attacks by words (ex: “Yes she did and she had to buy a house but I don’t care about yours“), or silence (“sweeping the floor, still no talking”), and then she waits for the one she is angry with to crawl back to her, to apologize, to repent, repeatedly until she decides that her target suffered enough and starts talking to her/him until the next time she is displeased.

“I really regret calling her when my mom wanted me to, because ‘I should'”- your mother is still trying to please her mother, she is still on that impossible mission of being on her mother’s  always-good-list, a list that doesn’t exist. Better you don’t encourage your mother’s impossible mission.

“I often got bored sitting there because I used to sit there and listen, she didn’t actually have a conversation with me, a dialog. I wasted many hours sitting there and being bored”- it is difficult to imagine that a grandmother or a mother has no interest in her child’s or grandchild’s thoughts and feelings and what is happening in their lives, and even more difficult to imagine a grandmother being upset when she hears about something good happening in her grandchild’s life (ex., you buying a home), but it is reality.

See your grandmother as who she is, a selfish woman who has hurt her own children repeatedly and continues to do so. She is a bad person who hurts others and then wants them to apologize to her, repeatedly, for wrongs not committed.

anita