Grandma’s mother was sadistic. Grandma has made peace with her and forgiven her. I don’t know how. When she was a child she was stabbed repeatedly in her privates with the diaper pin, a hurt she remembers clearly, and still feels. The mother did it to Horse, too. Cigarette burns forever scarred in the same location on both siblings. Grandma says she didn’t start walking until the age of three due to all her injuries. She talks about remembering stiffening up when people picked her up, she was in so much pain.
Music always blaring in their home, a habit Grandma inherited, her mother would walk around the house in her bra. Another habit inherited by her daughter, as Grandma frequently walks around shirtless, her mastectomy scars and radiaton burns visible across her chest. She has hot flashes, so maybe this wasn’t always the case.
Grandma’s mother would sometimes lock Horse and her in the bedroom all day long. On occasion, like a cousin’s birthday party, they would risk the inevitable beating to sneak out the window. They didn’t care. To them it was worth it.
Both parents were alcoholics, “Pa” a weekend binge drinker, the mother an everyday drinker. The winters would be the worst as Pa would head north to Alaska to hunt. Without Pa’s oversight, the abuses got more sadistic. While their mother and all the other children would gather in the living room on mattresses on the floor where it was warm in the house, Horse and Grandma slept in the cold, distant bedroom, on the plywood bedframe, with no mattress and no blankets.
Grandma would be thrown out of the house during blizzards or harsh storms, naked, until the neighbour saw and threatened to beat the mother up if she ever did it again. She would just find more sneaky ways to enact her abuses. Making Grandma stand all night long in her room, even if she was dead tired, unable to relax for days. Other times, she was made to sleep on a bare wood floor with no blankets or pillows, occasionally stealing her mother’s full length fur coat. She would snuggle into that until her mother caught her and would take it away, or worse. Once she nearly chopped off your fingers with a cleaver, because Grandma was sucking on her finger for security.
Horse and Grandma would have to steal dog food at times to eat. Their mother starving them so severely that Grandma was skin and bone when she was dropped off at the most notorious psychiatric hospital in Canada for two months when she was 3 or 4 years old. A place where electroshock was given out like candy. The mother refusing to pick her back up, and Pa apparently unable to get the location from the mother until he kicked the shit out of her and she finally caved. Grandma remembers Pa picking her up at 10 pm, driving all the way there without stopping and refusing to leave without his daughter.
Grandma’s mother didn’t go to residential school, and by all accounts, had a decent childhood. Her cruelty was known in childhood, when her and her siblings reportedly locked up their cousins and other sadistic actions. She would get mad on a dime. Grandma was forced to live with her until the age of 9, minus a few months on the street and in a psychiatric hospital.
Children’s Aid had heard about the abuses, but never had solid proof, the mother a master of manipulation. At the age of 7, Grandma was given a worker at school named RK, who checked in on her and sometimes talked to the mother on the porch. She wasn’t always cooperative. The family used to tease Grandma that RK was her boyfriend. A 7 year old, being sexualized by her family.
Grandma’s mom was drinking one time and she tripped and fell on a log or something and broke her ankle, badly. It never recovered properly. During a later surgery on her knee, the surgeons somehow broke her ankle again, causing her to never walk again.
Grandma forgave her anyway. I don’t know how.
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I keep coming back to the question of forgiveness. Is forgiveness something you give someone else, or something you do so you can finally stop carrying what they did to you?
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