Grandma Bea

It’s 7:30. I woke myself up to a wet pillow, emotions spilling out of my eyes and moistening my face. It wasn’t a dream. It was built up emotions that poured out even in sleep...like a wound collecting fluid that seeped out all over my sheets while I lay unaware. 

I feel defeated in so many aspects of my life. I compromised in an effort to help others and now I’m depleted.

The resonating thought amidst the chaos in my head: I wish my Grandma was alive. 

She taught me the word “rapport” when I was five years old. She said it was the most important word I’d learn. She stirred her big pot of boiled prunes and baked meat and made me look for her sewing pins in the high shag carpet while she painted or played her piano... and I’d sit on her furry toilet seats with eccentric little decorative balls and colors while she’d bathe and tell me about “rapport.” She even spelled it and explained the silent “T” and why it absolutely needed “Two little P’s”....and she told me the rapport I had with others would reflect on the rapport with myself. These symbiotic relationships would help shape who I was. It was a lot to explain to a five-six year old but I still remember those conversations and I remember understanding her completely. Even more so now.

All my wealthy family members rejected her. They thought she was crazy. Her reckless singing and dancing in her tiny apartment. Her kitchen full of food she’d managed to store in the ceiling lights and dishwashers and behind the plastic grapes and tucked in every crevice of her purse....

The day before I turn 40, I’m reflective on her words and lessons. She never made me feel five. She was my great grandma. She was the only one who treated me with decency and unconditional love. She didn’t care about bloodlines and bank accounts. She saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself and perhaps something I have forgotten. I was in her coven and she was exceptional; and because I was of her, so was I. Without arrogance. Just completely confident in her otherworldly powers. The same ones I try to evoke from my own daughter without making her subscribe to the fad of Whole-foods-adaptive sage rituals or supposed Eilish- flavored witchcraft. 

Maybe this year, I will learn to have a rapport with myself and discontinue the rapports with others that make me forget my own personal worth. 

Maybe this year, I’ll make sounds of my own and connect to music as she intended for me. I’ve held onto the concept of “its too late for me” for so long. But since she was a great grandmother, so she was always very old in my eyes and somehow it made her wiser and more powerful. I think it’s time to embrace the warrior wounds of time and use them for its power.

#GrandmaBea