The inheritance

 

My grandmother had a terrible experience with her first husband at an age where she was very vulnerable and also very pliable. She learned early on that men could not be counted on and, in her experience, were unreliable sources of support. She became a very independent woman after that and no one ever breached her boundaries again.

Unfortunately for my mother that meant even her father, my grandmother's second husband, was considered less than by my grandmother. No amount of kindness and no attempts at pleasing her were really considered important. She did not need him beyond a home for her children and some financial support. Her love was fractured and it influenced those generations of woman who came after her.

My mother loved my father. Their marriage was an amazing one.Until my father, in an attempt to please her even more decided they could move back to my mother's hometown so she could work in the family business with her mother. That was really the beginning of the end for their marriage as they had always known it.

My mother, who was always well intentioned, but also limited by her intense desire to please her mother, soon became part of the girl's club that found men flawed and simply things to be tolerated. My father continued to bend over backwards to please her, but it was pointless. My grandmother, mother, sister and even my aunt were part of an impenetrable clique that could never be breached. 

Anyone who was not one of them was less than and in the way of women who believe they are protecting themselves and their children, they cleaved to that idea like religious fanatics.

I never realized this for most of my adult life. I had moved away and only saw the slow disintegration of my father and their marriage from a distance. And that distance was filled with my mother's point of view that reinforced what she and my grandmother believed was true.

I am older now and having moved back to the same small town I am once more involved in family dynamics that people who have always lived here accept as gospel. It is only from an outsider's view that I see the damage that was done and that is faithfully carried on by my sister who spent most of her life trying to emulate the gods she believed my grandmother and mother were. Men are to be at the beck and call of the women they love. They are tolerated so there can be children.

It is a prime example of incestuous living that occurs with the best of intentions when children do not leave home and develop their own set of values.