「故事·听力」I Saved My Mom From My Abusive Grandma
I Saved My Mom From My Abusive Grandma
Hi, my name is Jen. And this is the story about me saving my mother from an abusive relationship… with her own mother. I think my story might be helpful since sometimes we just can't see how a relationship hurts us so much.
My mom’s name is Nancy, and with me being born she became a teenage mom in college. She was only 18 when she moved into her college dorm where she met my biological father. At 19, mom got pregnant, and her boyfriend moved back in with his parents who lived in a neighboring state. He made ONE phone call several days afterward to tell my mom that he didn't want to be a part of it. So mom was left all alone three weeks into her pregnancy. She had paid for one month's rent for herself but couldn't afford a second month, so she had nothing to do but move back in with her mom. And that decision was not as easy as it seems.
The thing is: my grandma Lucy is a very complicated person. She raised my mom alone too, but before that, during the 70s she earned some money, then invested it right, got lucky with it, and by the end of the 80s she was a very rich woman with a huge house and a nine-
I have to say that growing up I did not think that anything was wrong. Grandma had always been super nice to me, which is a kind of a paradox really. She bought me expensive toys and clothes, let me get away with stuff she’d have killed my mom for, and almost never raised her voice with me. And what happened between her and my mom… I never really thought things could be any other way.
My perception started to change when I made friends with Jessica, a girl I met at my karate lessons. Every week she’d invite me to her house, which was like, three times smaller than grandma’s, but what made it way more comfortable was her family. There were four of them living together: her parents, herself, and her grandmother. And what shocked me most was the way her mom and her grandma treated each other. It was a very loving and emotional relationship… like they were best friends. And I had something to compare it with.
I started to notice a lot of things. So when I stepped back and looked and my mom and my grandmother, the picture was horrifying. Grandma was manipulative, abusive, and egotistical. When my mom tried to find a job for herself to become more independent, grandma would get all hysterical, telling my mom that she was being ungrateful and wanted to leave her to die alone. When mom tried to go out more (including on dates), grandma would start a fight again, blaming her that she was not being a good mother and that she wanted to leave her daughter for another man, who’d just leave her in a couple of weeks anyway.
My mom was trapped both financially and psychologically. So I started to think about what I could do to get us out of this. Of course the first option was just talking to my mom. And I tried, I really tried several times, but then she would get all aggressive saying that it was none of my business. This was obviously a defense mechanism.
Then I started to think about how I could get help from the outside. My biological father was never an option, but there was another man whose name was mentioned in our family all the time. It was my grandpa Jack. Every other week grandma would talk about what an evil and terrible person he was, and I thought – if that’s what my grandma says about him, then he must be the nicest man on the planet! OK, I’m kidding there, but I really felt that meeting him might be helpful.
We all knew where he lived, since grandma would somehow get updates on his life regularly, so there was no problem finding him. The problem was finding the right words since I had never met him before.
But my mom’s happiness was at stake, so I had to do this. One afternoon I went to his house and introduced myself. He was astonished, but in a very positive way. He invited me in to have dinner with his family.
He had a lot of stuff to get off his chest. It turned out that when my mom was seven, Jack realized the marriage was not working out (or I guess he just could not take it anymore) and suggested to my grandma that they get a divorce peacefully and raise their child together. She became hysterical. And after that one conversation, she put all of her effort into getting a divorce and prohibiting my grandpa from communicating with his daughter in court. And she succeeded.
He could not keep in touch with my mom until she was like eighteen, and he’d been suffering for all those years. When the ban ended and mom went to college, grandpa wrote her letters, and she even wrote several back. They were had planned to meet really soon, but mom got pregnan...