And I loved my grandmother. She was indulgent, she took care of my every need, and she never yelled at me, called me names or imposed restrictions on me the way my mother did. I think she was trying to make up for what she'd done to my mother. I would tell her things I couldn't tell my parents, usually about my parents, and their arguments, and the way they treated me. And she would always keep what I told her in confidence. She never, to my knowledge, betrayed me by telling my mother any of it. That made her my soul confidante, my only friend, and the only relative I felt any real attachment to. Yet, by the time she died in 2008, I had separated myself from her, too, because I'd realised that the relationship I'd had with her when I was a teenager was... sick.
I stayed at my grandparents' house almost every single Friday night between the ages of two and sixteen. It was my second home. It's been sold, now, but I dream about the place all the time. I always knew I was safer there than at my parents' house. I always looked forward to going.
When I was really little, brimming with imagination and a love of stories and fictional characters, my grandmother would pretend with me while my grandfather was at work. We'd play out fairy tales together, and it was great fun for me. I didn't have anyone my age to play with, and I loved to act from an early age, so it was a needed outlet. It was cute. As I got older, though, it changed. I remember, once, when we were playing "Sleeping Beauty" -- I must have been about nine or so-- she was the Prince, and she kissed me on the lips to wake me up. It was innocent enough, nothing improper, but somehow, it started to feel different. I had a very early puberty (age 8), so this was probably the beginning of the thing I never talk about.
I must make the disclaimer that neither of my grandparents ever touched me in an inappropriate way. What I'm talking about here is fantasy. Regardless, it was wrong.
As I got older, and more interested in romance, our "scenarios," as my grandmother called them, took a different turn. At any given time, I would have a crush on some male fictional character or celebrity (well, usually male, anyway), and my grandmother would pretend to be that character. Usually over the phone, but sometimes in person before I went to bed, we would play out my meeting with said character, I creating an idealised version of myself and she playing the character mostly as I directed her to, since she wasn't familiar with some of them. There is no question that I drove these "scenarios," and that, in my mind, I was having sex with the characters my grandmother was playing. We never went beyond the suggestion. There would be romance and a meeting of minds, followed by passionate kissing (again, with absolutely no physical contact between her and I), and then we would jump to "the next morning," or something to that effect.
Because of the isolation, because of the fact that these stories were my only outlet, they became an addiction. I would talk to my grandmother on the phone for many hours every day. I doubt my parents suspected the content of the conversations, or else they would have stopped it ... wouldn't they? I remember creating fictionalised and embellished versions of troubles in my life, playing them out, drowning my angst in the arms of my pretend-lover. And when my grandmother couldn't talk, for some reason, I would become very angry, slamming the phone down over and over again as hard as I could and crying myself to sleep. (I'd say this behaviour went on from about the age of 11 until I was 14 or 15.)
I was hypersexual from a young age, a characteristic of bipolar disorder. I thought about sex pretty much non-stop from the time I was 10 years old until my mid-20s. I don't know if my grandmother fully realised this. I don't know if she really understood what she was doing by indulging me in these fantasies. I just know that it went on until I was almost seventeen years old, and I started to have actual relationships with men. In my early teens, when a relationship ended badly, I would retreat into the familiar fantasy world again. I knew that [insert character here] would always be with me, even if real boys broke my heart. I didn't think even think to label this relationship with my grandmother as horribly strange and extremely unhealthy. I didn't come to that realisation until much later. And when I finally did, it made me sick to my stomach.
I have always felt that it was my fault. I was using my grandmother to play out these fantasies. I was the one in the driver's seat, I was the one who was demanding we continue. That's the primary reason why I haven't talked about this before. It just dawned on me, fairly recently, that this is exactly the thought process of any child who is sexually abused by a relative. Whether there was any physical contact or not, my relationship with my grandmother was unhealthy. Incestuous. Wrong in every way. It would have been healthier for me to write my own stories (which I did, and was punished severely for when they were found) or read romance novels (which I was forbidden to do). These "scenarios" forever coloured my perspective on relationships and made my expectations unreasonable. They warped my view of what was "normal," as if it wasn't already warped enough.
And now that I've got this all written down in black-and-white, I don't know what to do with it. There it is. It amounts to years and years of abuse by the only family member I ever trusted or felt I would miss if she were to die. She's gone, now, and I think it's taken me this long to even begin to process it.
So now what?
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