I was just a little kid, so no one told me anything.
What I figured out much later was that my Lithuanian grandmother thought my mother wasn`t good enough to marry her precious eldest son. My mother worked and didn`t cook, and her manners....well, let`s just say that my mother has always believed honesty is the best policy, and takes that to a morbid extreme.
Over the years, I`m sure many things were said between them. I`m sure many other things were left unsaid, but implied. I was just a little kid, so no one told me anything, and everything went right over my little head. I never understood why my family seemed so angry so much of the time.
Years later, I also heard that my Lithuanian grandmother thought she was too young to be a grandmother when I was born. She was just a few years older than I am now, and still had an 8-year old daughter at home. This partly explains why she rarely babysat me, even though they lived just a few towns away.
We lived in Hartford, then in Wethersfield, with my Polish grandmother. She was like a mother figure to me, in fact -- clearly the matriarch of our household, even though she was a shy, quiet person. My mother, who was only 23 when I was born, was more like a competitive older sister, who probably resented that her mother doted on me the way she had never doted on my mother.
When I about Little Son`s age, my Lithuanian grandmother found out that my Polish grandmother was singing Polish songs to me, so she brought over an ancient Lithuanian song book, coverless with yellow crumbling pages, and tried to teach me some Lithuanian songs.
"I want you to keep this book in a safe place," she said, giving it to me.
What is a four-year old`s idea of a "safe place?" I hid it under the couch, with all the rest of my precious objects -- my rocks and feathers and seashells.
My mother found all of it, and said, "What is this dirty old stuff?" and threw everything away, even the book. I tried to tell her what it was, but she didn`t listen to me. I was probably crying about my stuff and not all that coherent.
When my Lithuanian grandmother heard about her song book, she was angry, at both my mother and at me. This is the first time I remember being involved in a bad misunderstanding between two people I loved.
My Lithuanian grandmother would sometimes invite me to sleep over her house. I hated this -- I thought her house was creepy -- but I knew it was important to her, so I dutifully went. On my ninth birthday, she asked me to stay over, and I reluctantly said yes, and then went to my room and cried at the thought of wasting my birthday night sleeping at her creepy house.
My mother found me crying, and I told her why. She immediately got on the phone and told my grandmother I wasn`t coming.
I felt betrayed, and regretted confiding in my mother. I knew how important it was for my grandmother -- didn`t my mother understand that part at all?
Another phone call was made, and a compromise was reached: I spent the day of my birthday with my Lithuanian grandmother, but didn`t spend the night.
"I suppose you`re much closer to your other grandmother, because she lives with you," I remember my Lithuanian grandmother saying to me on that birthday, and I can still see her sad face as she said it. I don`t remember how I answered -- her statement was certainly true, and I was only nine: old enough to understand people`s feelings, but not yet old enough to know how to say things to make awkward situations better.
My mother said to me the day before yesterday, "You don`t need to go to the funeral. I already told everyone you weren`t going."
And the truth is, I don`t
want to go at all -- I want to stay home. She is right.
But I feel as if I should go. Like that long-ago birthday sleepover, it`s an event that matters, to a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. It matters to
me. I should go.
So I will. I leave tomorrow morning, and get back Tuesday.
