Barbara

My last entry for this project took an interesting turn.  Equally enlightening, in a different and more painful way.  I spent my last eight hours with my grandmother on my mother’s side.  Barbara Elliot, 85 years old, lives in a big house all by herself.  Her 3 daughters each live about an hour away in 3 different areas.  In many ways, knowing Barbara is a lesson in remembering what is important in life.  According to Erikson’s theory of personality development, people are faced with choices in their development.  In the case of my grandmother, it is my opinion that she has made misguided decisions.  Even going back as far as young adulthood, it seems that isolation was chosen over intimacy.  While she has almost always had a husband and fulfilled marital duties, she has no friends, her first husband described her as a “cold fish”, and her 3 daughters are all isolated from her and from each other.  While there is the appearance of intimacy and fulfilling societal duties, when it comes to the relationships, there is no intimacy.  Moving further in time, one is faced with generativity vs. stagnation.  This is where the story gets interesting.  Barbara was a schoolteacher and taught reading to young children for many years.  To hear her pull from her episodic memories of her youth, she was the best teacher in the school and all the other teachers were jealous of her talent.  As we learned from the reading and the lecture on memory, we know that not all episodic memories can be taken for absolute truth. In the sense of her classes and students, she achieved generativity.  She passed on the skill of reading to many children.  Unfortunately, at home, much more emphasis was put collectables and having nice things, rather than having good relationships or teaching her three daughters that they matter.  I would say that her most intimate relationship is with her pet boxer dog, Frosty.  Now, in later adulthood, Barbara measures her ego integrity by the things that she has in her home and how much the things are worth.  She is more outwardly proud of her things more than any of nine grandchildren or 5 great grandchildren.  The week before she and I spend time together, she attended a birthday party for one of her great grandchildren.  One would expect that most of our conversation would have been about what all the children are up to, but instead, the conversation was about Barbara and how great she was in her youth.  I heard all about her experience as a child in the first grade, her experience acting in the school play in college, her experience writing her master’s thesis (and how she got a better grade than her husband).  I also heard all about how gorgeous people said she was when she was young, her experience teaching the first grade, and the fancy restaurant she got some of her Christmas ornaments from.  I believe that this is a prime example of Life Story.  She has composed a certain view of her life that makes it easy for her to establish the identity she wished to have.  Incidentally, the only things I heard about the birthday party, were my cousin’s significant other’s tattoos and how awful they are.  Needless to say, she practices remote grand parenting.    I believe that she has constructed these myths about her life to build up her self-concept and her self-esteem.  This is what my mother has identified as the reason that she has never fully disclosed to Barbara all the emotional damage and painful memories she has of her childhood.  She doesn’t want to jeopardize her mother’s Self-esteem by damaging the truths she constructed for herself.

            It was also interesting to me that much of the episodic memory she shared, were from the reminiscence bump (the time in which the most change was occurring).  Mostly she told me things from her college years, but no stories of her children, another time of great change.

            Needless to say, my time with my grandmother was difficult for me.  The times I tried to share with her, such as my upcoming graduation or my place on the dean’s list, I received a polite nod and “Well, anyways…” and the conversation would return to whatever story she was telling me.  The times we did discuss people in our family, it was negative things.  I actually had to excuse myself and cry in the bathroom after she said some particularly hurtful things about my father.  Even though I wanted to leave, I didn’t.  The reason I didn’t leave was because I didn’t want her to get on the phone as say mean things about me to whoever would listen.