Here is a story related to me by too many women over the past fifteen years, one of the most corrupt dialectics I’ve ever seen. A girl is raised by a toxic mother who is a stillborn child, bitter and needy and hating, in her daughter, the innocent child that she could never be. The mother turns a blind eye to her daughter’s incest, is physically and mentally abusive, is self-medicating with boyfriends and drugs, Borderline Personality and tears and sharp designer claws. The young daughter grows up somehow. She rejects caring, respectful love because she’s had to defend against the starvation of it, but needing love (or some dream of it), she sleeps around or marries or shacks up with a man at sixteen. As so often happens, the next generation improves slightly on the previous one, and when she has her own baby, it is not so abused, not so neglected. There are problems, but more from the new mother’s hurt, less from hate. And into this scene – the precarious and barren graduation from childhood – swoops the Toxic One, the matriarch without portfolio, to materialize as the beneficent and loved grandmother. She is two-faced: smiling at the little one, sneering at her own daughter. She gives her new possession – her golden hostage – expensive gifts, demands weekends and sleep-over time which the grandchild’s mother, too punctured and needy to feel justice, allows. In a special demonic twist, grandmother, still and always made of vengeance fury, may try to wrest custody of the grandchild, spuriously calling Child Protective Services to the home, fabricating delusions about her daughter’s incompetence as a mother.
I have rarely treated these women, mostly their adult daughters fighting to keep their child. If the older one came to counseling, she would smell like a rose, grieving falsehoods about her sick daughter who carouses with men, lives ramshackle and irresponsibly dumps the child on her. The contrast between them will indeed be exquisite, because these grande dames invariably live in nice houses, comfort, circle of friends, deceased husband’s pension, a sham aura of "arrived" that adds to the maddening injustice.
This is a warning to you, grandmothers. What kind of warning? That you are being exposed, that your daughter is in therapy and now has an ally in strength? But the warning will fade like a shadow. The dialectic of life that turns childhood pain into adult actors plays on like endless Muzak. A wronged child becomes fifty generations. Each somewhat worse than the next one.
