Bad Opening Lines

Back in November during the one weekend I had off for at least six weeks on either side of it, I got on a plane and flew 600 miles south of us. My brother kept telling me that my 95 year-old grandfather was fading fast and that if I wanted to see him, I should do it. I kept getting this message from various members of my family until finally Z and I decided to go. So down we went. Since we were already heading south, we decided we should visit my maternal grandmother who also lives nearbye-ish. It'd been awhile since I'd seen her, and she was always saying that we never visited. So we went. And we stayed for one night. We jumped up and did the dishes on queue. We cleaned up the $50 of steak her dog threw up. We stripped the sheets from our bed and started the wash machine before we left. We did or duty, and because we both had to work on Monday, we couldn't stay long. But we did it.

So today during Easter Mom said we should call Grandma. I went first. Grandma's opening line, "I'm so glad you're not dead. I was starting to think that you'd died." 
"Not dead, just a crazy work schedule."
"I really thought you were dead. I never hear from you."
"We just visited a few months ago."
"You wanna bet!"
At that point I changed the subject to how excited we all were about my sister's pregnancy, and as soon as I could, I gave my sister the phone.

When the phone made it back to my Mom I could hear her telling Grandma, "She said she sent you a card." This was in reference to a thank you card I owed my Grandmother because she sent me a check for my birthday. I had intended to send it, but I'd forgotten. No excuses. Bad etiquette on my part. And probably a bit why my Grandmother's opening line was one of passive aggression. (An outsider may not hear the passive aggression, but the entire brief conversation definitely was.)

In my family, we don't get the chance to do things out of love because we are too busy doing them out of guilt. And once you are in that set up, you can never get ahead of it. I can't ever visit my grandmother enough (again, who lives 600 miles plus away) to get to the point where I can just think, "I'd really like to see Grandma," because any time I might get close to that I get the message from my Grandmother (or from my Mom as a Grandma proxy) conveying the message, "I never see you."

The experience today proved that I can't actually win. And so I'm done with it. I'm finished trying to  make an angry woman happy. Because I can't. There is no way. And it is no longer my responsibility. My responsibility is to the lives of the family who didn't move 600 plus miles away. It's to the lives I can actually have a positive affect on. It's to the lives that aren't guilting me into phone calls or visits.

And some day I will get this same treatment from my own mother. And to her I do owe a debt. And I will make the trip, and I will make the calls. I will put up with the inevitable crap to try and make her life better. I already do. (Although she is nowhere near Grandma-status.) Although it's already an uneasy relationship, it's a relationship where I have a responsibility.

But to my grandmother, I have very little actual responsibility I owe her nothing more than thank you letters for the checks I tear up and throw out. And I owe it to myself and to my partner to no longer let that negativity affect our lives in the way it has. But most especially, I owe it to my family to not repeat this cycle of behavior in our generation or hand it off to the next. Sometimes we can't fix the past, but we should work damn hard to make the future better.