Ancestral Pain
Numbing so you don't have to 'feel': Maternal
Content Warning: Mention of alcohol and nicotine addiction
I’m not sure I know or understand the extent of the shame and suffering my relatives secretly lived with. It has all sputtered out in fits and starts and through the mouths of relatives and not from the horses themselves.
What I do know is no one felt the shame and pain of those secrets, like no one was really was able to fully acknowledge and endure the ‘feelings’, let alone release them.
My mom’s parents were first cousins who got married in the Catholic Church in a small Eastern Ontario town. Imagine living in a small town, Irish Catholic and marrying your first cousin? Maybe that was unusual, or shameful, but after chatting about it with others, perhaps it was not so unusual for the times. My mom didn’t tell me until I was 18 and that was only because there was a family tree in my baby book and so many of the names were the same. I was furious and frankly really grossed out. My grandma never spoke of it but she always seemed angry and bitter. I suspect marrying her first cousin was not the only source of that anger and bitterness.
My maternal grandparents had my aunt MaryLou and then Grandpa went off to war and Grandma worked in a shoe factory. I’ve heard stories that my grandma had male visitors at the house and that she would go visit them too, leaving my aunt in the car. When Grandpa came home from the war, someone else was living in the house with Grandma and he was asked to leave. Grandpa had been gone almost a decade. Not long after Grandpa’s return, my mom was born and my uncle Peter followed 2 years later.
Grandpa had a stroke in his late 40s or early 50s and he and Grandma quit drinking. Mom called them dry drunks because despite not drinking, they hadn’t resolved what caused them to numb in the first place, so they were defensive and reactive.
Grandpa had another stroke in his sleep, but this one killed him. I was 5 so my mom would have been 26. I remember her crying on the phone when she got the call.
After that, Grandma only had one man that I ever knew in her life, Ted. He was apparently her former neighbour (he, his wife and kids lived across the street) and he left his wife and kids to move in with (take care of and enable) Grandma.
The only time I remember seeing Grandma sober was in her coffin. It’s also the only time she wasn’t scowling. I remember visiting them as a kid and hearing her talking to Grandpa in a drunken stupor, all alone in the kitchen, clutching the purple velvet Crown Royal bag. It was usually the rye that brought on a night like that.
My brother and I would sneak her long cigarette butts out of the ashtrays and smoke them when no one was around.
Both Grandma and Ted had yellowy-orange fingers from the nicotine. Ted smoked Sweet Caps with no filter, or the Green Death (Export A in the green pack). Grandma smoked Matinees. Ted would go out and buy their cigarettes and beer and even as a kid in the car with Ted, I knew he was a scary driver.
When we’d come to visit, my mom and dad, Aunt Mary Lou and her husband, Uncle Jimmy, my Uncle Peter and Grandma and Ted would sit around the kitchen table and drink, discussing world issues. Often it would get heated and someone would walk out on the porch, or leave. Being the oldest in my family, and having cousins who were much older and not there, I’d get to sit on the kitchen ledge by the cookie jar and listen. I never spoke, I was basically ignored unless Ted had to get cigarette packs from the cupboard. He’d ask me to get them.
If Grandma left the house, she’d wear her Hudson’s Bay coat, and she’d put ‘paint’ (her word for makeup) on before going downtown to the Tavern or the Legion. I think Grandma met Ted at the Tavern. Grandma and Ted had a rotary phone and the number of Grandma’s hairdresser was taped on it. I later found out Grandma wore wigs (because I saw a wig box in the room my brother and I would share while visiting). I also found out after she died that she had had a double mastectomy. My mom said back in the day, if they even suspected cancer, they’d remove your breast. I found out when Ted sent me some of Grandma’s costume jewellery in a mastectomy/breast replacement (cutlet) box.
I remember hearing Grandma and some of her siblings, as well as Grandpa, lived with their Grandma, on a farm for a time, when they were kids. Not sure how long and why they didn’t live with their parents, or if the parents lived there too.
There were so many secrets and unspoken stories, I’m not sure I will ever find out.
What I do know is that the shame, the hidden pain, the trauma will continue to travel along our family line, unless my generation decides to feel it, heal it and release it.
And I have been going through that process. My body carried it all.
I’ve had some shitty jobs in my life, like REALLY shitty, but this is likely the hardest thing I’ve ever committed to.
The pain must stop with me. I’m grateful for the love, protection and privilege to feel it.