Family Dynamics

I just returned from another visit to my maternal grandparents. I've written about them quite a bit here, especially in this post. This more recent visit was much much much easier. I'm sad to say that the reason it was easier was that I went without my mother.

I went with one goal in mind... to introduce my grandparents to my one-year old daughter. In the past I was trying to help smooth the way for my mother to visit too, but that was just so difficult last time.

As my visit to them neared, my grandmother wrote me a worried email... my aunt and cousin were both sick with the flu and my grandfather was in and out of the hospital. At this point he's receiving repeated blood transfusions, is constantly on oxygen and struggling to breathe even with that. I arrived after a long plane ride and an hour long drive, just as my grandmother and another aunt were helping my grandfather into the house after another blood transfusion. He was so drained he barely spoke to me. I didn't know if it was because he was ill, because he's nearly deaf, or if he didn't want me there because of issues with my mother.

Well, I didn't want food to be too much of an issue, so what I did was tell my grandmother that I was coming in order to help. That was my reason for coming despite the flu going around, and also so I could take over the kitchen. By the end of my visit she and I had a long talk. She said this was the easiest it's ever been when any of us visited. In the past, she said, she felt that as accepting as she's tried to be towards my mother for the conversion and the need for Kosher food, that she always feels bad when my mother cames. She says, "It's my duty as a woman to cook for the family and it doesn't feel good when my daughter can't eat it. But when you come and just give me a break in the kitchen, we can all eat it and I get a break from cooking."

There were so many conversations about how much my grandmother loves my mother, how they are such dear friends, and how much my grandmother loves my mother, but feels like food comes between them. Oh, it was painful.

And it's not perfect... my very fundamentalist uncle and aunt are much less accepting of my mother's conversion and have made that quite clear in the past. "We didn't leave her. She left us," my uncle has said about my mother. And in fact, when I cooked spaghetti one day when they were there, they ate very quickly and left. Frankly, it didn't taste that good, but I get the impression they took issue with my preparing it at all. When I said to my grandmother that they hadn't seemed to like my cooking she said, "It was just fine. But honey, people pay a lot of money to eat in restaurants and get food they don't like, so you don't worry about that."

If I can just get my mother to emulate what I did. I can't though. If she cooks, she's going to complain about what she doesn't have available, about what spices and ingredients she just can't find in Wimberly, about how ignorant her mother is about all this etc.

I can't change that.

I can't change her.

But I can do my best to smooth the way just by example. From here on out I can just tell her how I did it, and leave the rest to her to work out with her mother.

There are problems still between her and her father which are much deeper, which I'm not even going to write about here. But at this point I have to just let it go. Not all of the conflict is about conversion. Some of it is personality and needing a therapist to step in and that won't happen. I hope they're both praying, in their own ways, to mend the rift between them before he dies. There isn't much time left.