A Funny Thing My Grandmother Said To Me

Now that I've told you about my grandmother's funeral and a little bit - a very little bit - about her life, let's travel even farther back in time ... no, wait ... this post is about something she said before she died (probably obvious), but after I ate all her tums. Okay, it's in the past. (I'm sure the Germans have a tense for this occasion.)

One of the last times I visited with my grandmother, she told me to "Always have a boyfriend on the side." When I told my mother that Grandma M said this, her reaction was "Why didn't she ever say that to me?!?" No idea.

Was my grandmother just telling me to live life and throw away societal norms and give in to my passions? No, not at all. This fact may shock you, but being a ventriloquist on the radio was not exactly a lucrative gig. I know, your mind: it is blown. My grandmother was a secretary throughout my mom's childhood. Given the fact that she was blind, this job garnered her a mention in an article. She wasn't, however, a proud feminist showing that women can have it all. No, she was a woman trying to keep food on the table and a roof over her family's heads.  Instead of thinking that skills and education were the way out of this predicament - after all, she had both courtesy of the Lighthouse for the Blind - she believed the answer was to have another man to fall back on and help provide. If something happened to your husband? Make sure someone was there to step in. My grandmother didn't want my mother to go to college or wear pants and when I transferred colleges and broke up with my boyfriend, whom my grandmother liked, I think she was concerned for my future.

My grandmother during her secretary days.

Unlike my grandmother, I am a feminist. I want my girls to have both education and skills.  When people talk about the Good Old Days when women were women and men were men, I'm not sure what they are talking about. Most women have always had to work, although in the days of cottage industries, not all needed to go far. We do our daughters a disservice not to prepare them for the real world.

Am I saying a women can't have a life goal of motherhood and staying home to care for their children? No. I have always wanted to be a mother and H and I made plans, so that I could be at home the majority of Q and Z's babyhoods.  If something was to happen, however, I have the skills to find work and, more importantly, a belief that I can take care of my family. I think that we need to make sure that our daughters are prepared for all possible problems and that none of them need or believe they need "a boyfriend on the side" to handle it.

My Grandmother's Funeral

My grandmother passed away right before Christmas my senior year of college. I boarded a train with my grandmother still alive and when I stepped off it and asked my father how she was, he replied, "No one called you?" Not a good sign and it wasn't. (Better, however, than the emails my father now sends to notify us if someone died. If you receive an email from my father and the subject line is a person's name, assume that person is dead.)

Relevant details about my grandmother for this story: she was blind (had been since age 2) and liked to sleep with her "things about her" as we put it.  Since my Grandpa Elias's death, my grandmother had slept on the right side of the bed with her suitcase and small radio next to her. She listened to this radio all night long. When I was little and she stayed with us, I used to sleep with her in my bed and we'd just listen to the radio all night. (She would also snap at me for any movement. According to H, I don't speak or move in my sleep and he often thinks I am dead. Early training tells. She also used to bring tums and forgot them one time. I hid them and ate them like candy for weeks.)

My first trip to Florida. I was 2 months. 

She would probably kill me for putting up a picture with her in a housecoat, but her hair and nails are perfect.

When she died, my mother and uncle wanted to bury some of her things with her, including her radios and a phone as she loved calling people. This conversation ensued:

Mother: Should we put in her phone? Maybe we should buy a cell phone and put it in?
Uncle: No, because then I'd worry that she'd call me in the middle of the night or what if I called the number and someone picked up?

An impasse had been reached, you might say. But the morning of her funeral, I saw my sister place what looked like a rotary phone in the casket. After we had our final moments with her, they closed the casket and wheeled her out of the room to go to the church. I turned to my sister and said, "You know, that phone looked like my fake-rotary phone I used when I lived off-campus."

My sister replied, "Did you want that back?"

It was my phone. I turned to my mother and said, "G put my phone in with Grandma."

My mother said, "Oh, do you want us to get it out?"

No, no. I think I'm good.