The fear of the grandmother

She was the resolute grandma par excellence, told me her granddaughter, now a competent woman herself. Just like a resolute grandma: clear rules, clear announcements, mixed with a lot of grandma love! A grandmother as if from a picture book.

In fact, she was the adoptive grandmother: She had adopted the mother of the granddaughter who told me this story.

But she didn’t know that for a long time. She grew up convinced that her grandmother was her grandmother (which indeed she was!). Here we have it again, the taboo, the cover-up. But that’s not our topic this time.

When the granddaughter, she was 16 years old, learned of her mother’s adoption — and the grandmother learned that she learned it (correctly: had learned it, but the pun is too beautiful!), the determined grandma became another person.

She was transformed; her resoluteness was gone; her sovereignity was gone.

“Before, she always told me what to wear and what not to wear. This was over from one day to the next," the granddaughter told me.

“She mutated from grandma to fan, and all of a sudden everything I did was great.“

And when a short time later the granddaughter wrote her grandmother a birthday card and by mistake — she came from Russia and still couldn’t speak German so well — signed with the word “your niece“, her grandmother “broke down crying in front of me," the niece, pardon, granddaughter, told me,.

She didn’t have to study psychology to grasp, even then: her grandmother was in fear, in fear of losing her granddaughter.

Grandma blamed her daughter for telling “it“, but it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle. The genie of truth, if you ask me.

Grandma could no longer maintain the illusion, the illusion, well, what kind of illusion? The illusion of being her granddaughter’s biological grandmother, no more and no less. For the granddaughter she remained her grandmother. I could feel this when she told me the story. I could feel the love she had for her grandmother, even today, even after her grandma was gone. Indestructible love.

But her grandmother obviously couldn’t feel it (anymore), her antennas were blocked. She could not understand that nothing had changed for her granddaughter, and that nothing would ever change. She was afraid. And it stayed that way.