Accidental Ambivalence

Role Models

You know about my action plan. The catalyst for the plan was Gala's iCiNG Transformation Challenge. Her site makes me unimaginably happy most days, and the idea of changing myself for the better over twenty-eight days of small steps was enticing. Since I started after she had actually begun the challenge, I've been reading the daily posts for the day that I am on - rather than the day that she is on - through the archives. The post for day ten advises thinking of a role model and then imagining that she is watching you as you go through your day and work towards your goal. So, I began to think about role models.

I have more than one person who I look at and think "I want to be her." Audrey Hepburn is my unparalleled style role model. I want to look that beautiful and elegant; I want people to look at me and see how put-together I look. I adore her intelligence and her charm. Marilyn Monroe is the woman that I think about when I think about seduction. So confident, so open, so willing to risk things for love. Yes, she married more than once, and yes, she was more than we saw. But what we did see was a confident, glittering, unapologetically sensual - and sexual - woman. Rory Gilmore, Oscar Wilde, Barack Obama, Kate Winslet, Philippa Gregory, Holly Golightly, Queen Elizabeth I - the list of people whom I admire and who have qualities that I emulate is long and varied.

But my role model, the woman who I wish to be like the most, is one of the easiest questions for me to answer: My grandmother. My great-grandmother loved me unconditionally, the kind of love that I am aware that not everyone gets to experience in their lives. She was 86 when she died three years ago, and I've always marveled at her strength and her ability to love her family and her friends so dearly.

She was born in 1919 as the middle child of thirteen in a Catholic family. Her father was an alcoholic who brought home the man that she married, a man that I don't know if she loved. She never talked about him except to say that, in the end at least, he was a "tight son-of-a-bitch." She had two children with him, and he constantly moved them around from house to house. He expected his son to be polite and his daughter to look perfect all the time. For her, the final straw came when the house he moved her to - in the beginning of 1960 - had dirt floors. She had met the man that I knew as my grandfather and, I can only assume (since she never talked about it), fallen in love with him not long before the move. Fed up, she asked him to take her to the courthouse one afternoon, where she had divorce papers drawn up and left her husband. She married my grandfather in September of the same year.

Her daughter, my mother's mother, hated her for it. She had loved her father, in spite of his flaws, and hated her mother for leaving him and taking her away. Their relationship was altered by that, and her daughter left as soon as she turned eighteen and immediately became pregnant with my mother at the end of 1966. While dealing with her daughter, my grandmother and her husband had purchased ten acres of land that was a perfect 2 1/4 miles from town and added on to the tiny house that had been there. For all of the strain in her relationship with her daughter, my Grandma knew her grandchildren - my mother and her sister - very well and had excellent relationships with them, particularly my mom. When my mom was thirteen and had the ultimate fight with her mother, she went to live with my Grandma. Grandma raised her for the next five years - really just a continuation of what she had been doing, for my mother is far more like my Grandma than her own mother - until my Mom got pregnant with me in the summer of 1985 and married my father. My grandfather died in 1990 when I was too young to really see the grief of those around me.

I was the first great-grandchild, and the first grandchild that she'd had without dealing with a bad relationship. She was my only real babysitter, and I loved her. I have absolutely no doubt that she would have given me anything within her power, and all I would have had to do was ask.

The thing that strikes me when I think about her is how unimaginably strong she was. To have survived having so many sisters (I think there were nine girls and four boys), being married to someone who treated you like dirt, getting divorced and remarried in the Midwest in the 1960s, being hated by your own child, turning around and raising a teenager thirteen years after you'd finished raising your own, and then living without your husband for the final sixteen years of your life. I think that if I were to experience all of that, I would come out the other side a bitter, cynical, jaded human being. At twenty-two I'm already flirting with jaded, and that makes me sad, particularly having seen just how happy and loving my grandmother was after her long life. She still loved her daughter and my aunt, even when they didn't visit for the last three years of her life. She never treated anyone around her as if she was entitled to anything, the way some elderly people do. She was always, above all, a loving, happy, appreciative woman who was perfectly content - no, happy - with the people and the things that she had.

I want to be that strong, that loving, that happy, that content with what I have without coveting something else. I want the chance to make someone else feel as unconditionally loved as she did for me, as perfect and loved as I knew she saw me. She believed in providing for your family as the way to show them that you loved them. She also believed that if "you piss on me, I'll shit on you." She was perfect.

If at the end of my life I can see that I made someone feel about me the way that I feel about her, then I will feel as if I have been adequate. And, as for pretending that my role model is watching me, I don't have to; I have no doubt that she's watching me.

Labels: personal growth

posted by nicalyse @ 12:40 PM