Another layer of ickiness

Each time I go to therapy, new things come up for me. Each time a layer of ickiness peels off. I let go of it. Today it was, surprisingly to me, about my grandmother. There was something that didn't connect me with my female therapist. Last week I told her I wanted to stop, I said I have lost connection. As soon as I said it, I understood that I am projecting the image of my grandmother onto my therapist. It was time to shed another layer of ickiness.

I despised my grandmother. She had to raise me, since my mom left and only showed up occasionally. My grandmother didn't want to raise me, and I didn't want her either - I wanted my mom, but my mom was never there. My grandmother was the object of my hate, which later turned into a general dislike of all women, especially the ones who were older than me. All women in my family abandoned me, ignored me, and didn't protect me from the abuse. My grandmother on my mom's side was even worse than that. She knew I was sexually abused by my father, she is the one who gave me over to him when he came to pick me up, she is the one who saw him once him forcing me into oral sex, but chose to ignore it and walk away. I remember her image in the door way - she came with her hands wet, she was wiping them off her apron. She was terrified of my father, or course, as all women in my family were, but that doesn't justify her neglect. I hated her with all my little might. I hated everything about her, I was ashamed of her, I wanted her out of my life. 

She laughed loudly, with her mouth open, huge teeth sticking out, like an ugly ogre. I shrunk at the sound of that laugh, wishing she was not my grandmother. She laughed at things I told her - I don't remember what exactly, but I tried telling her what my father did to me and what her husband (my step-grandfather) did to me as well. She hit me on the head for that, called me a stupid girl, and laughed at me and my silly ideas. She exclaimed - what an actress! Just look at her. The stories she makes up. I cried. My grandmother fed me, she made me eat, I refused - for that, she hit me on my forehead with the spoon, hard. It hurt. I prided myself in not even blinking or showing any emotion. You can hit me all you want, I will stay strong. I hated how she smelled - of sour onions and old sweat. She walked around the apartment in her underwear, with her stockings strapped to the bottom of her gigantic panties. She grabbed the top of the door and hung next to it, for her spine to stretch, for the exercise. I hated the sight of her body against the door, I imagined her pinned to it with a gigantic finger, the way she squished cockroaches on the walls. We had cockroaches all over our apartment - she would just press them into the wallpaper, with her bare fingers. Yuck! It left a smeared brown spot. 

She gave me antibiotics at the first sign of any cough - she opened the capsules, mixed up the drug with sugar, added water, and made me swallow the concoction. Until this day, if I smell the drug, I gag and throw up. She lugged me around for dance classes, to school, from school, to the playground, to the doctor - always grouching, never happy, always nudging me along, to be faster, to be quieter, to stop being stupid, to shut my mouth. She felt sticky to touch, alway sweating, never clean. She would close her fingers into a fist and hit my head hard, for any misbehavior. 

Yet she is the one who made me study, she is the one who told me that knowledge is everything, that if I wanted to climb out of this hole, I had to be smart, to learn, to excel. I did. I had all A's in school. She was proud of me for that. I was happy that she was proud. I never knew that I would hate women for a good chunk of my life because of her, but I am healing now. I am finding ways to relate to other women, I practice, each day it gets better and better. And I forgive her - for everything. I love her - for those small moments of love that she did give me - for baking special cookies for me, for going to all my dance competitions and being an invisible audience, but being there. For taking me to the photographer, dressed up, to take pictures - the few pictures that I have from my childhood. For taking me to the sea in the summer. For being there when my mom wasn't. My poor grandmother. She was kicked and hit by her own mother, from when she was being very small, as my mom told me. She never knew love, she married one abusive husband, divorced, only to marry another one, abusive and alcoholic. She never made it to the other side of the tunnel, and succumbed to being bitter at the whole world, at life, at people. I have traveled to Moscow last November and I found her, barely alive, in the locked apartment where I grew up, eating stale bread and drinking endless tea, her only food, forced to live with her first husband, the one she divorced, by her own daughter, my aunt, who has no ability to love either and who saw a commercial opportunity at getting the old folks together again to take her father's apartment.

I made it out of the hole, grandma, and I forgive you. I love you.