"Pop's ex-wife was my biological grandmother, and there is no generation in our family that was not touched by her emotional, physical and financial abuse. In 1980, she kicked my teenage parents and me out of her house when I was an infant. She'd decided on a whim that my underemployed father and postpartum mother were able to make it on their own, without a single resource to their names."
"When I was a young child - after my parents had reconnected with my grandmother (reconnection with abusers is often a feature of the dysfunctional family cycle) - my father felt it necessary to supervise my grandmother's visits with my little sister and me, citing how physically and emotionally hostile she'd been with us when she thought no one was watching or listening."
"This woman's most morally corrupt (and sometimes criminal) behavior was often carried out in private - reserved only for those who lived life under her toxic thumb. Therefore, I can easily understand why casual friends, acquaintances, distant family or anyone else on the periphery of her life would find such nasty details hard - if not impossible - to believe."
A grandmother's generational abuse included emotional, physical, and financial harm, including evicting teenage parents and their infant in 1980 over a trivial dispute. The grandmother later claimed credit for the parents' resilience while showing breathtaking lack of self-awareness. Reconnection with an abuser led the father to supervise visits due to past hostility. Trauma-informed therapy revealed the grandmother's far-reaching, private, and sometimes criminal behavior that outsiders could not easily believe. The secrecy of the abuse obscured the truth and supports rethinking obituary practices so survivors can record accurate experiences and challenge sanitized public narratives.
Read at BuzzFeed
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