…………or at least at times it has kinda felt like that. Now you need to know, I love and adore my Grandmother more than anything. I am very close to her and she means the world to me.
However, she is a woman who speaks her mind. Sometimes its kind of like she has no filter. Now, I can be brazen myself, and have told her many things, but never have told her this. Sadly she has offended us at times. But I don’t often get offended, especially because I know she just loves us and wants the best for us. I don’t think it occurs to her that this brutal honestly can be……well brutal!
Examples? Well I observed this at a young age. For years I never understand why when Grandma was coming over we had to clean for days. And to be honest, our house was way clean. Sometimes if you took too long in the bathroom, my mother had already put your homework away. So anyway, one time she came and my job had been the living room. I had to vacuum under the cushions even and all around and under the couches. When my grandmother came and sat down, she dusted off the cushion, as if there was anything there! I suddenly realized why we took such measures. My poor mother. Oh she and grandma were close and all that. But, here she would clean for hours and hours, and my grandmother would lecture her on how the rose bushes needed trimming. Hopefully my mother understood, and at least she probably does now that my grandmother was just trying to help, she didn’t realize she comes off as overly critical.
So anyway, sometimes I feel like its my job to say things to my grandmother that my mother never had a chance to say when she was alive. I swear she tries to speak through me, as weird as that sounds. One thing my grandmother always told me was about my weight. Things like “Oh Holly, if you could only lose weight, we could get you married. You have such a pretty face and cute personality”.
One time in particular I’d had enough, and my sister Jen LOVES this story and still to this day can’t believe I said it. I was living with my grandfather who was a dr. He has now passed on. He was eye surgeon but for years practiced general medicine. Now I loved him dearly as well, but good grief he could also hound people about their weight. And nothing was good enough for him. If I told him I lost 3 pounds that week, he wondered why it wasn’t 5. If I was somewhere besides the gym, he wondered why I wasn’t there. Yet when I came back from the gym he told me that working out would only make me hungrier. It could be exasperating. Well he had just lectured me and put up some fat jokes/cartoons on the fridge and then my doctor had given me the “morbid obese” lecture all in the same week.
And then I headed to see my dear grandmother. I hoped that weight would not be brought up as I was feeling kind of low. Sadly it did come up. She gave me the whole “pretty face but fat ass” routine. (lol, she never said I had a fat ass I promise). I took it for a bit and then something in me just flipped out. I was sick to death of people telling me what I already knew.
So I told her how I really felt. I told her that when she says things like that it hurt my feelings, so much in fact that I would go home and eat ice cream after seeing her because that is what fat people do when they are sad.
I continued by telling her that unless she was going to pay for me to go on Jenny Craig or something that I no longer wanted to hear a word about it from her. I was well aware of the fact that I’m as huge as a whale, and am trying to rectify the situation. And besides I declared “Fat people get married all the time!”
I was so livid. And truly, she never brought anything up about weight for a good year.
So every time I tell her about my new “diet of the month”, it is with much hesitation. But I had to tell her about the body bugg. She is very excited for me, and impressed with how Adam has lost 80 pounds.
But anyway, it was kind of funny, the last time we went and saw her, she told me she knew exactly why Jen and I weren’t chosen for the Biggest Loser. My mind raced, bracing myself for something excruciatingly insulting. She told me that we didn’t make it because we are in no way big enough. I smiled. How inaccurate a statement that was, she had no idea. Then I think I gave her the shock of her life when I told her that at my heaviest I was 414. I really don’t think she believes me.
So how funny, the kindest think someone could say came from her. Thank you grandma! When you get a compliment from her, it really is one. She certainly isn’t one to blow sunshine up your butt.
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