Grace and Dignity

There is a phrase called "hate read" and I totally do it. There are blogs written by people with whom I vehemently disagree. I read their blogs anyway, even though the more I read, the less I respect them. Or each blog post that I read makes me want to send them a long email detailing my stance on whatever topic they wrote about. You might ask why I read if I hate. There are two answers. One is that I have a lot of downtime at work where I need to appear busy. The other is that I don't only want to read about things I relate to and people I agree with. I want to see different ways to think about things. I want to understand why people think about certain topics the way they do.

There is a blog I read written by a woman who could not be more different than me if we tried. Opposite ends of the country. She works from home, is a former drug abuser and alcoholic (personally she comes across to me as a dry drunk, but who knows if that's accurate?), grifter, etc. Anyway, her mother recently lived with her for the better part of a year, through some medical difficulties. This week, the mother moved out.

Throughout this experience, the blogger wrote about her difficulties with her mother. Including feeling like she couldn't have sex with her husband because of her mother being in the house. Which I didn't really understand since she made it clear the bedrooms are on a separate floor upstairs and the mother was living in the basement. And since the mother went places during the day while both this woman and her husband ... well he doesn't work, but they're both home during the day. They could have fucked worked it out.

The most recent blog post is about the relief felt now that the mother is out of the house. Like many (all?) of the blog posts mentioning the mother, it's painful to read how much she hated having her mother there, and equally painful to read how relieved and happy she is to have her mother finally gone. It's cruel to the mother. It's sort of cruel to all the people whose mothers have died and would put up with any inconveniences to have a bit more time with their beloved relatives.

I didn't realize this until recently, but here is what happened in my house between December 1994 and August of 1995.

1. My grandmother died unexpectedly. 
2. I spectacularly failed out of college and had to move home.
3. Golden Boy moved home after being away for four years.
4. My grandfather, devastated by my grandmother's death, moved in with our family.
5. I fell ill, with difficult symptoms that included passing out, unexplained rashes and screaming in pain, then needing to be taken for medical tests numerous times via backboard and ambulance. 
6. My father was working at a job almost two hours away from home (each way).

That's what my mother was juggling in 1995. I was stuck in my bedroom, and each night around 11pm my mother would bring me a bowl of cereal so I could take the really strong pain killer that let me sleep for a solid four hours on good nights. She would sit in the rocking chair near the foot of my bed and tell me all the things my grandfather, her father, did that annoyed her. He wanted the thermostat turned up higher, he wanted dinner to be before my father got home, he wanted to put garlic in his oatmeal for breakfast and microwave it which stunk up the house (I didn't smell it, but I never left my bedroom).

For Father's Day my parents solved the garlic problem by gifting my grandpa with garlic pills. My grandpa, despite being quite good to me, always viewed and treated my father like an evil son-in-law. I have never once heard my father say anything cruel about my grandfather. As frustrated as both my parents got with my grandfather, even while dealing with one sick kid and one boomerang kid, they never would have done what this woman does had blogs existed then.