When I was a little girl, the song I heard playing all the time in my home was Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Maybe it was a super popular song at the time, or maybe it was popular in my own home because it was so soothing to my mother in those fast months when her mother was dying. Those circles were already broken, though, and would remain broken for another generation—until these past few months when I have brought old patterns full circle.
I always thought that I fully understood the patterns of my matriarchal line and the generational wounds at least as far back as my grandmother, but it took my daughter having children of her own before I understood what in the circle had been broken.
When my daughter was pregnant with her first baby, I moved to be close to her. We watch out for each other that way. I moved, in fact, so close that I can “Frogger” across the street to her place in about five minutes. I can do it in ten if I want to take a safer route rather than be the punchline of Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. It means I can help her through maternity leave by watching the newborn all night. It means I can accompany her and the kids to the mall and help her wrangle the toddler or hold the baby while she tries on clothes. It means that if she needs something from the store, I can pick it up and walk it over to her rather than her bundling up the kids and trying to manage her children and other tasks in an exercise that will surely take 30 minutes just to get them in the car with all their strollers, carriers, and paraphernalia.
Those are all little things I can do for her because I live so close. People who are accustomed to having a grandmother close by probably undervalue this relationship and its perks. These are things I never had as a new mom, and they are things that my mother never had as a new mom.
For me, I lived too far away from my mother to have any help from her when my kids were little. She came to visit for several days at a time when both my daughters were born and maybe one other time after that, but my dad would pitch such a hissy fit if she went anywhere without him that she felt obliged to stay at home. She kowtowed to him because she knew how much worse things could be if she defied him.
I never strolled through the mall with my mom and my babies, and I didn’t even realize until being a grandmother myself what I had missed. I do remember going Christmas shopping for my extended family and husband’s family with a new baby in a stroller and a toddler on a leash to keep her from running away from me—as toddlers do—but I didn’t have access to grandmotherly help.
Still staring into my grandmother’s eyes, I let my hand slip out of hers. All I can do is stare at her. I understand now. I needed to see my mother the way her mother saw her — weak, frightened. I’d always seen my mother through the eyes of a child, specifically the eyes of her child. Strong, determined, hard-working. A woman who fought for what was hers. But there was this other side to her that I never really thought about before. — Rite of Reckoning
Nor did my mother when I was a child. My dad was always stirring up drama—something I’ve written about in The Rites of Passage Trilogy—and when my maternal grandfather bailed my parents out of a bad financial situation, my dad resented it and punished my grandparents by forbidding my mom from visiting and taking me with her. It wasn’t a handout, and Granddaddy never lorded it over my parents, but he did lend them money so my dad could pay off his own mother’s debts to prevent her from losing her home. That good deed was repaid by restricting access to their daughter and granddaughter until my grandmother’s terminal diagnosis, when I was permitted to spend time with her, provided she would babysit me while my parents were both working.
Those are the memories I have of my grandmother—the year I was in first grade. I knew exactly what was in the junk drawer and even got in trouble for finding a packet of lye and getting it all over my hands. I knew exactly where to find the Three Musketeers bars stashed in the freezer for me, though I didn’t like them, and she usually kept a smaller package of Butterfingers in the bottom of her fridge just for me. I knew exactly what TV shows and game shows we would watch together in the afternoon: my favorite was Let’s Make a Deal because I loved the costumes. I knew exactly where I was allowed to play in the house and in her expansive backyard. I knew not to go into her bedroom and to stay where she could see me. I knew not to plunder in her drawers, even though I did, and I knew about the box of silver dollars hidden under the china cabinet. I knew to stay behind the white stone fence in the yard whenever the open truck carrying soft drinks showed up in the front yard to exchange a small pallet of empties for a heavy pallet of full glass bottles of Coca-Cola or RC.
Every visit had its usual rituals and usually things I couldn’t get anywhere else but Grandma’s house. I had only about six months of that because of the barriers my dad put up. Those six months were filled with her progressive illness and her lack of strength to be much of a playmate with me.
I’ve come full circle now, from granddaughter to grandmother, and I’m trying to heal that circle. I try to make my house—which reminds me of my grandmother’s house—into the same kind of magical place that Grandma’s house was for me. There’s always Jell-O in the fridge for the toddler, and fresh apples in a bowl on the kitchen countertop. We have a particular series of cartoons we watch, always at my house. I have musical instruments everywhere—some that can be played and some that cannot be touched—and musical toys and bright, interesting trivia. I have kids’ books lined up on the coffee table. I have beaded curtains over doorways, and a hallway that goes in a circle and is perfect for running around and around and around.
I cultivate these things so that my daughter’s children can have the things that I loved most about my own childhood—the magic of Grandma’s house.
My grandmother brushes the back of her fingers against my cheek to wipe away a tear. Her eyes are sad, but still she smiles at me. “I’m always with you,” she says. “If you don’t believe me, look in the mirror.” — Rite of Reckoning
But most of all, my grandchildren live closer to me now than my grandmother did to me as a child. I never experienced the lack as a mother of having my mother close by for my kids because that was my norm, but I know now what I missed.
All those times I heard my mom quietly crying in the kitchen as she sang Will the Circle Be Unbroken as she missed her mother, she never realized that the circle broke with her—both as a young mother and later as a grandmother who missed those rituals as much as we missed them with her. I hope that by mending this circle, I can heal those generational wounds and that my grandchildren will carry forward the love, the rituals, and the magic, never knowing the absence that once lingered here.
For every woman who has ever felt invisible, wondered what comes next, or dared to believe the best is yet to come.
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