Day 369: 5 Minute Freewrite: Wednesday - Prompt: idiot

Grandma, Grandpa, and my dad

"You idiot"

is a phrase I heard from my dad, from infancy. He was an equal-opportunity employer of the "idiot" label. It's how he addressed my mom a great many times as they worked together on a farm, which Mom, a town-girl, petite and fine-boned, was never built for. Her mother-in-law was a beast, taller than her husband (my cute little grandpa!), with size 11 shoes, broad shoulders (again, broader than Grandpa's), and strong bones. That woman could beat a carpet like nobody else's business, back in the day when wall-to-wall carpet wasn't a thing yet, and rugs were taken out and whipped with a wire implement with a wooden handle.

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Grandpa evidently wasn't so nice to Grandma,

from what she told us. "He was mean," she once said in that stoic way. 'Nuff said. Grandma never offered details about her private affairs or her emotions. When Grandpa died, I never saw her shed a tear. When my sister Julie was murdered, Grandma may have wept, but it would have been behind closed doors. What a pillar of strength she was! Coldness? Heart of stone? We all knew it was just the way she was raised, and we privileged mid-20thC-children of the TV era were fortunate to have had Dr. Spock and Women's Lib exhort parents to break out of that old mold.

Competence,

too. I'm pretty sure Grandpa never had an occasion to call that woman an idiot. She was farm-born, the first of ten children, and she came to hate children because her mother had the eldest daughter take over diapers and feeding and dishes, night wakings, and all the work that a child was born to do, in a German farm family. Children were workers. Love apparently had little to do with it.

Infant mortality was ridiculously high in those days, and from what I've seen of all everyone raised in Grandma's and Dad's era, children weren't "fussed over." In fact Grandma would comment on the way my generation did just that: "My, how you fuss over that child," if I held him and consoled him.

"Never give a child his way; you'll spoil him," was Grandma's motto. Obviously she never read my most-beloved book of my childhood, "The Secret Garden," in which Francis Hodgson Burnett speaks through Dickens's mother.

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Grandpa on his first tractor, painted by my husband Tim;
my dad (far right), our daughter, and the first great-grandson

My stoic grandma never called me an idiot,

never made fun of me (Dad did, and he allowed my sisters to ridicule me at the dinner table), and never criticized me.

That may not sound like a big accolade, but really, it is something. "I never laid a had on you girls" was my father's boast, and we were duly grateful. His high school classmate and best friend had 12 children and all of them knew the sting of a leather belt. Yes, things could be so much worse for us! We had a roof over our heads; we never wanted for food; we were not worked like slaves, nor beaten; we were not exploited or neglected. Life is good.

Grandma was the most capable and assertive woman I'd ever known. She didn't let her husband push her around. He wanted to smoke a pipe, he had to smoke it outside. My mom had no such backbone, no such stiffness to her. She meekly submitted to Dad's will in all things, like smoking his pipe in the car, with five daughters and a wife choking on the fumes. He smoked in the house. He didn't take off his muddy shoes. He often commented on how his bossy mother was cold and indifferent to him. We all grew up indoctrinated with the idea that meek, pretty little Mommy was the role model to emulate, and big, strong, assertive Grandma was the kind of wife no man could love. Not even her husband. No love lost between those two, as the saying goes.

Grandma died at age 97,

as alert and spry as ever, and too proud to use a cane, oblivious to the irony that she'd look far more capable walking with a cane than lurching from wall to sofa to doorway, to keep her balance.

She continued baking bread until the last days of her life.

I was amazed at how much I cried for Grandma,

the cold, "unloving" woman who earned no affection or accolades from her only son. From her only daughter, she heard complaining, ranting, and raving, but not words of affection (not that I ever heard or could imagine).

Their only daughter, my spinster aunt, moved out of their house after they'd retired from the farm to town so Dad could take over with the wife and kids. She bought her own house. Freedom! Right? Wrong. Grandma and Grandpa proceeded to sell their house and move in with their daughter, because it only made sense, economically.

When Aunt Malita died, we found labels - "Mine! Hands Off!" - affixed to new items, unused, stored in boxes on dark, hidden closet shelves. I could not bring myself to inherit, and touch, and use, that set of pristine steak knives or the bedsheets in the original packaging with Malita's urgent plea: "Hands off!" - because Grandma believed "yours is mine," as Dad bitterly attests to this day. He raised rabbits before the ripe old age of ten to sell as meat during the Depression, and Grandma pocketed all the money he earned. This will stay with him all the way to the grave, overshadowing any act of kindness or generosity his mother might have shown him.

Unlike her assertive mother, my spinster aunt did nothing to keep Ma and Pa from moving in with her, except lash out at them verbally and tell Grandpa to go jump in a lake.

Aunt Malita never called me an idiot.

And as I look back, my heart swells with love and gratitude to this grandma, this grandpa, this aunt.

They didn't shower us with kind words, affection, praise, or material gifts. For Christmas, Grandma would gift-wrap a box of Kleenex. And believe it or not, that was a luxury item in our world. To use something once and throw it away! It was unthinkable!

These grandparents, this "only aunt," and we, the only grandchildren: one might imagine hours of laughter and visits to county fairs and movie theaters and fun things, but "fun" was never part of the equation. Work, work, work. Man up. Buck up, be strong.

To this day, Dad regards all five of his daughters as idiots, and his wife too, no matter how much any of us might accomplish. One sister has a PhD. Three of us graduated summa cum laude from college.

But nobody in the world is as smart as he is, and if we fail to understand his orders, if we choose not to follow his blueprint for our loves, what possible explanation could be there except that we're idiots?

Grandma, I miss you!

Grandpa, and Aunt Malita, I have only good memories of you, and gratitude for the virtues you modeled.

The vices?

I don't even think of their traits as vices. Just... it is what it is. Growing up German.

Aunt Malita (left) in some parallel universe, er, collage I made with my dad and my oldest sister Julie

Thank you, @mariannewest, @improv, and all the @freewrite team, for hosting Daily Freewrites.

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