Everyone has this image of grandparents being these sweet, fun loving people who love being around their grandchildren. But what about those who are not so nice?
Case in point - I had one grandfather who just hated kids. He hated when we visited and always expected us to be quiet and never bother him.
Now I’m not talking perverted or abusive persons here. It’s just those relations who hate children. It’s tough for we as grandkids to be told “dont talk to Grandpa/Grandma” when we see other kids having fun with their grandparents.
I had three excellent grandparents (one is still around) and one hellbeast that was my maternal grandmother. I couldn’t stand the bitch and refused to go to her funeral because I would have been lying if I said that I was sad that she was dead. Quite to the contrary, it was the best news I heard that day. She never abused me personally but she did abuse my mother and her brothers plus she was just a terrible person in general. No one could give her a gift without her criticizing it as a minor example. My one shining moment was when I had her banned from the supermarket that worked in during high school. I feel a little bad because my mother loved her for some reason but I have never backed down. A bitch is a bitch and the world is better place without her as I calmly explain every time she comes up.
I didn’t really know them. My father’s parents both died many years before I was born. My mom’s mother never learned to speak English, died when I was about ten. Mom’s father died a couple earlier, I have only fleeting memories of him. By all accounts a good resonsible and hard-working man, but apparently an old-country patriarch. Mom quit school and left home at 16.
My dads father died when Dad was 12, so as the oldest child, he had to quit school and go to work to support the family. But until then, he had been indoctrinated with honesty and a strong work ethic and great respect for education, which was never realized formally.
One way or another, the upbringing of both my parents instilled in them great qualities, and they were admired and respected working-class people. I doubt if anyone ever said an unkind word about either of them.
My maternal grandmother was also an unpleasant woman who had led an unpleasant life and surely contributed to my mother being unpleasant. All that hasn’t done much for me either. My father’s mother was a piece of work also but she treated us grandchildren fine.
Wish I could answer that from personal experience. Both my grandfathers died before I was born. One of my grandmothers was already suffering from dementia from my earliest memory, so I have no idea what she was like in her earlier days. The other grandmother was a feisty firecracker, but a lot of fun to be around.
My maternal grandfather died long before I was born, paternal grandfather when I was too small to remember. Older cousins tell me the latter believed grandchildren should be seen and not heard though.
My grandmothers lived till I was pre-teen. My maternal grandmother was pretty indifferent to me and my siblings as I recall, used to always refer to me by the third person pronoun when I was standing right there and old enough to understand. My paternal grandmother was the prototypical sweet granny though.
Urgh. My husband’s living set of grandparents are pretty awful.
His grandma thinks it’s still 1938 and everyone needs to suck it up and laugh. She thinks this gives her license to say all sorts of mean things, and it’s all in good fun. She’s never gotten to me–I play her game and get her giggling instead of criticizing. She’s made all three of her great-grandchildren cry, though, and when my daughter gets taken there, she refuses to go into the living room. Just sits in the front hall by herself the whole time.
My husband’s grandfather, though, holy shit. I hate his stinking old guts. Born and bred in the Southern Baptist church to think he’s God’s Gift anyone who isn’t free, white, and 21 … and a man. The old fucker seriously believes it’s his duty to tell people how to live right. I lost patience with him when he gave me a lecture about not overeating … in the buffet line for Thanksgiving dinner … when I was six months pregnant. After his wife greeted me with “hello, fatty!”
My husband has his own business, which grandpa doesn’t believe in. He’s made my husband so mad that we had to pack up and leave, ASAP, before they resorted to fisticuffs.
My grandfather as I knew him was a grouchy old curmudgeon. I do think he loved his grandchildren, he just couldn’t remember our names and didn’t want us to bother him. He did enjoy freaking us out by removing his glass eye and his false teeth, and laughing.
The odd thing is that my mother and my aunts all remember him differently from each other, like he was a different parent for each of them. My mother: “You think I’m strict? Hoo boy, I’m nothing compared to my dad.” My aunt: “If there was a circus within 100 miles he would take us. Most funloving dad ever.” An uncle: “He was the most tightfisted old cuss ever.” Another aunt: “He always made sure when we girls went out that we had a pocket full of mad money.”
My kids unfortunately had a bad grandpa. Nothing much we could do about that. He was a drunk, he was often homeless, and basically it was like they had NO grandfather, but what can you do? The worst was when he stayed with us after he’d been in the hospital. His living arrangement at the time wouldn’t let him come back until he met certain standards (like dress himself and walk up three stairs) so he was with us for three weeks until he could meet those standards. He chainsmoked, even though one of our kids had asthma, snuck booze into the house and got drunk, and snuck out to a bar leaving the front door wide open. I once left him in charge of two children for about 15 minutes while I ran to the store and he let one get away. (Who was 3 at the time. We found him wandering the neighborhood.) He never once recognized a birthday or other significant event, I don’t think. According to my husband he wasn’t exactly Father of the Year either.
My maternal grandmother wasn’t ever particularly happy to see any of her grandchildren. As kids, we got dragged there every other Sunday or so to sit for an awkward hour or two. Nobody involved enjoyed these visits.
My paternal grandmother wasn’t horrible or abusive in any way, but she was stern, demanding, very religious, and completely nonaffectionate. Having raised three sons, she was good with her brothers’ sons, but was clearly disappointed that her only grandchild was a girl.
I once spent 3 weeks alone with her while my parents were at Mayo Clinic. I was 9 years old. She fed me, braided my hair, washed my clothes, and helped me with homework, but she worked me hard doing chores before and after school and I never recall her giving me a kiss or a hug.
My mother-in-law doesn’t care for babies or little kids at all. She’s good to her grandchildren when they get old enough to deal with like real people, though (~7 years old). But she’s not mean to them, she still gives birthday presents and stuff. She just pretty much ignores them in person and deals with the older grandkids or with her kids/kids-in-law.
My paternal grandparents had a beef with my dad (he wanted to be a teacher and they wanted him to take over the family farm) that carried over when he married my mom and and moved 6 hours across the state where they both had teaching jobs.
They stopped speaking to my folks for a year when I, the firstborn, wasn’t a boy.
I only knew my maternal grandmother. She was nice enough to me, but not in a “Oh, honey, let Grandma hug you to death” sort of way. She was also from Kentucky and quite the racist, although I never saw that side of her.
This pretty much describes the only grandmother I ever knew, except she was my paternal grandmother. I think she resented my mom for taking away her baby boy and her dislike extended to us, her grandchildren. She tried to kiss up to us kids when my dad died, but the damage had been done and we actively disliked her by then.
My father’s mother was a cold, distant person. She was never cruel or physically abusive, but it felt like she didn’t want to bother with us, either as kids or adults.
I asked my older sister when we started calling my father’s parents “grandmother” and “grandfather” instead of something less formal, and she said, “We were never told to, it just felt like the proper thing to do.”
I should point out that at least a couple of my cousins have fond memories of our grandmother, so maybe she wasn’t that way with everyone.
My maternal side were not stereotypical but didn’t fit that mold at all. I spent the first six weeks after leaving the hospital with them and effectively became their youngest kid. That included what was effectively shared custody during the summers. IF it weren’t for them my image of grandparents would be pretty ugly.
On my paternal side, my grandmother enabled her alcoholic brother who lived with her. She was pretty high maintenance which fell into high demands on my Mom’s time to help take care of her instead of us. She’d early on thought about becoming a nun, before getting married and having her husband disappear after my dad was born. By the time I came around, her greatest regret about not having become a nun was underlying everything and directly said at times. (“Wait wouldn’t that mean you greatly regret Dad and me grandma?!? You feel the need to say this directly to me? I feel so loved.”) Despite being Catholic she wandered off into listening to the weirdest fringe evangelical radio shows and espousing what she heard there to us. Having to hear things like rock and roll is just satanic messages played backwards… part of my childhood. It didn’t matter if the message of the month conflicted with the family Catholic faith, or even last months message. As long as there was a scary Satanic conspiracy message she could pass along. After I became an altar boy, I then became the one she was going to live vicariously through. She didn’t become a nun but I WOULD be a priest.
I think I’ve mentioned in passing that my maternal grandfather was a hard, hard man. I’m sure some, if not all, comes from being a black man in the old south. He could be nice and fun but gods help you if you got on his bad side. He was ALWAYS armed and was not hesitant about firing on people, dogs, birds or anything else. He was also a womanizer. I grew up with a staggering number of 1/2 cousins, aunts and uncles. No one ever said anything about it being out of the ordinary.
My maternal grandmother was much sweeter by comparison but she was hard also. I remember her sending my sister back to school because of a fight. Apparently, my sister didn’t win the brawl outright, which was unacceptable.
She was also probably the best cook ever to grace this planet.
I loved them both greatly. It wasn’t all hard times, and we were never abused or molested so I guess that’s a win.
I spent just about every summer working on my grandfather’s farm, I think that’s where I got my work ethic.
