Growing Up… Growing Old

These guys could be found all over the house… a not-so-subtle reminder.

I am — or, perhaps more correctly, I look like — structurally — a clone of my mother. If she, my mother, had been Cuban, we’d have looked something like distant twins, but while my body took after her, my skin and hair were an obvious gift from my father’s DNA. Nevertheless, as a result of our undeniable structural similarities, I lived with a preview of what my own aging process might well look like… body-wise. Mentally is a whole ‘nother matter. Mom was a Ripley’s Believe It or Not level of brainy; she was actually IN the book. That, I did not inherit. DNA is real trickster.

I’d gotten a look at my mother’s teen-age diary when I was in my late teens and had become intrigued. It was from that diary that I’d learned that her father hadn’t made her life easy. Her attitude towards my ‘development’ had had its roots in her childhood; that’s what she had learned that parents did… among other things.My mother had always been hard on me, as her father had been on her… and just like her father, she thought that she knew what was best for me, and we were often at odds about that. As she aged her manner softened and later, as she began to lose her world-class smarts… she relaxed her grip. I grew to like her better and we talked more. I started asking her questions about her younger days which I never would have dared to before as, unlike many people, she didn’t speak much of her youth. But

My mother’s mother, who was heavier than she, had always looked old to me because, in my limited time on earth, she had always been old. She and my maternal grandfather were what “old” looked like to me. Then I met my Cuban grandmother, and she was whole ‘nother story! They were the same age, these two grandmothers, but their appearances could not have been more different. My maternal grandmother, to me, looked old. Her hair was on-purpose pinkish — she was “at the shop” every couple of weeks to ensure that it stayed that way — and it was, like my mothers, very thin. Her skin, too, appeared thin, and was covered with very fine wrinkles. My paternal grandmother, however, appeared to be ageless. Her almost while skin — she, unlike her Cuban husband, was of Spanish descent — was smooth and utterly flawless. (In retrospect, plastic surgery may well have been at play.) Her pitch-black obviously-dyed hair was, at all times, (even, somehow, first thing in the morning!) an utterly flawless — and apparently immoveable — construction of tight curls that rose some distance from her head. She was kind of scary. Both grandmothers, though, were take-charge, active women and both had dominant husbands. That was an interesting dynamic for me to observe as my world-famous brilliant mother was as subservient as she could have been to my father.

Until I married and later met my first husband’s grandmother, Nanny, my mother and the two grandmothers I’ve just described were what I thought ageing might be like for me — with weekly trips to the beauty parlor as icing on the cake. But Nanny was another story altogether. Both my parents had “come from money;” Nanny was a product of the working class… and looked as if she were still working… and working hard. I believe she was in her 80’s when I first met her. She was seated where she would almost always be every time I visited thereafter, regardless of the time of day, at her “breakfast table” in the kitchen of the home she’d lived in since she was 18 and just married. Nanny was little more than skin and bones; what hair she had was thin and wispy and unkempt. She was filled, though, with the stories of her life and the family she’d raised. It was a story far different from anything I’d been exposed to, and I was enchanted. Because she gave us the land, my husband and I built a house next door and had two children there and the children and I visited Nanny regularly. Nanny outlived both of my grandmothers, dying at 104. I went to see her on her deathbed, and it was one of the most precious moments in my life. I treasure her memory still.

Nanny embodied how I wanted to be when I got old… not necessarily in her appearance, that was neither here nor there, but in her calm acceptance of life. She’d outlived all but two of her five children, one of whom had died as a child… so I wanted to be able to mirror her strength as well. I’m proud to say that, at least in the endurance factor, I think I’ve done her proud. My so-called “battle” with progressive systemic sclerosis, which lasted for about four years, gave me one opportunity to do that.

The psychological grown-up me, though, is the end result of decades of therapy that were made necessary because of CSA (childhood sexual abuse). It took most of those decades for me to come to the realization that my mother had probably acquired, in her own childhood, a sort of a template for that being OK. At this point in time, I strongly suspect that her father had most likely abused her and that her mother most likely had gone along with it because that’s probably what had happened to her when she was a child as well.

Both my mother and her mother lived a long time. My mother died in her early 90’s.

I’ve grown up as I’ve grown old… I’m not sure what the start date is for “old” but at 75, I’m pretty sure I qualify. Thing is, though, I’ve only really grown up in the past 10 years or so. My behavior in my thirties and forties would put a teenager to shame. I had been broken… and I acted like it; I acted out, as they say. I had managed to skillfully repress the childhood trauma until I was triggered by a fairly innocuous comment made by one of my more fortunate younger sisters. She’d managed to escape the sexual trafficking because my mother’s father had died the weekend that she and the sister closest to her — two more “little Cubans” — had been scheduled to “visit”. (I actually traveled to the hospital where he was just to make sure he was actually on his way out because there was a saying my father used to use: “el bicho malo nunca muere”; It means “the bad bug never dies.”) I went, poked at my grandfather’s unconscious body, and felt the truth: he was, indeed, dying. Both my parents were doctors; I was in and out of hospitals a lot, especially as a kid when week-end babysitters were hard to come by. I was familiar with both dying and death.

One day, in my early 50’s — a day that had been a momentous day for me as I’d just been let go from the experimental program that had ‘cured’ the incurable disease I’d had — a day on which I watched as my doctor suppressed tears, imagining that he was signing my death warrant as he released me from treatment as no one else had survived going off program — one of the two younger sisters that didn’t get trafficked came to congratulate me and caught me just as I arrived at home. Somehow, something she said unintentionally triggered some very discretely hidden-away switch in my brain and suddenly, without knowing how it had happened, I’d gotten from the parking lot to the kitchen, I found myself standing, leaning on the kitchen table, ‘watching’, in my mind’s eye, a kind of newsreel of all the memories of abuse from my father and from my grandfather’s friends in my childhood and I pretty much collapsed. That was the day I mark as the beginning of my journey to growing up… so, really, at 75, I’m probably where most people are, developmentally, in their 30’s… I’m not sure what that even means but it feels correct as “buried” realizations still pop up from time to time.

It’s fascinating, this life process. I feel grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to both grow old — and to grow up — before I die.