Reader’s Question

Growing up, there were several issues that made things very difficult for us as a family. My grandfather had a series of strokes. I was very close to my grandmother, who was more like a mother to me. My grandfather’s bad health incurred many debts until he passed away 10 years ago, and things were really hard for my grandmother as a result. We eventually moved out of state to have a new beginning. But within 11 weeks of my grandfather dying, my father died of AIDS, which had been kept a secret from me until he died.

Although I had always been close to my grandmother, when I turned 15 everything seemed to change between us. Out of the blue, she accused me of being “secretly” married to a boy I dated for only a few weeks. No marriage ever occurred. I tried to do well in school and to be a good granddaughter, but her paranoia only got worse. Eventually, I couldn’t live at home and had to move out. After graduating high school and at summer’s end, I moved back to the state where I was born and lived with my mother. Eventually I went to college and graduated and found a good job. I really have not been home to see my grandmother (my father’s mother) since 2002, which was the summer before my final year at college. I saw her during the Christmas after my father’s death. She still won’t accept that I have not been married and was only keeping the truth about this hidden. I keep trying to keep communication open and reach out to her, but the gap between us never gets bridged. At one point she became paranoid that I wanted money from her when I was talking about getting a car. I did that by myself and did not need her.

It bothers me that my grandmother was such a huge part of my life until I was 15 and uses such a poor excuse to have nothing to do with me anymore. Fifteen years after this all started, it still hurts. My grandmother is 80 years old now, and I realize that she might have had a disorder or is just not coping well. I do have a mother who I feel loves me, but it seems like she only loves me half the time and resents having me the other half and is much more like a sister to me than a mother. We are in the ever-growing process of building what we never had. But I’m still very frustrated that my grandmother, who was once more like a mother to me, still has these strange thoughts about me and now chooses to act like I don’t exist.

Our Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

It’s understandable that you feel hurt and disappointed with respect to your relationship to your grandmother. But the likelihood is that rather than “choosing” to act like you don’t exist or using “paranoid” thoughts as an “excuse” to have nothing to do with you, your grandmother is suffering from rather serious conditions which are not under her ability to control. You have suffered many losses, so the prospect of never regaining what you once had in your relationship with your grandmother is understandably upsetting. However, perhaps the pain of that reality would be easier to bear once you accept the notion that your grandmother is not deliberately deserting you but has become impaired. And you might be able to take additional comfort in remembering that she loved you to the best of her ability for the whole time she had the mental and physical capacity to do so.