Cruelty and its loving legacy

Some women don't inspire us by their humility, they don't inspire us by loving us through thick and thin. Some inspirational women don't even like us. They don't have a kind word, a piece of wisdom to share, or ever held our hand and urged us to keep going. Some women inspire us by simply showing us how to fight never to be the person that they are.

My grandmother passed away two weeks ago today. The family, what little I have, have splintered into opposing groups, some desperate to fabricate a person whose life was lived honestly and lovingly, and some searching for the kindest thing to put on the flower card, as now that she is gone, it's almost disrespectful to say that she was a better person than she was.

I have battled with myself about writing this article, whether it's too soon to tell the truth, whether it would hurt people, and whether it would actually do me or my family any good, but the fact of the matter is there was only one person's permission I was concerned about getting, and now my mother has given it to me we can begin.

My grandmother to my knowledge didn't ever like anything. And I mean anything, there was never a time when I heard her say that she liked a picture, a place or a food. She sat most of the time in a plastic covered beige chair telling me that my granddad is a monster, and questioning my hairstyle choices whenever I came to visit. I watched her garden almost by systematic destruction, she walked around where I had been put to work weeding the lawn, snipping the heads off of dead flowers cursing at them while she did it, almost as if dying was an insult to her specifically.

The house was magnolia and clinical, not at all like other grandparents homes, there were no pictures on the wall of me, only the men in the family, and one printed out curled up A4 school picture of mine blue tacked in my granddad's study. It smelled of bleach and engine oil, not cupcakes, and the one sound I will always associate with her is the sound of my nan sharpening a knife ready to cut a slab of meat.

When I was younger there was a sense of duty to go and visit them, and I never understood how my mum could have been raised by people so different to her, my mother the ever kind and jovial soul would tell me,

“No matter what they say to you today, you don't ever ever listen to them okay?”

And off we would go, steeling ourselves for a weekly Sunday dinner. My nan would get gradually drunker as the day wore on, taking another bottle of hidden Bacardi from a cupboard. She would cry over her lost youth while making dinner, telling her ten year old grandchild never to marry, that love was a lie, and that all women get ugly when they pass forty. There was never a place to sit, (that would have made us feel welcome which was the complete opposite of the aim of the game), so I sat on a rug on the floor, watching my mothers tense expressions waiting for the next verbal blow to hit, all the while giving me a jaw locked reassuring smile, almost as if here being close to me could protect me from them.

I was a curious and creative child, I remember distinctly that every time we visited she would dump out a tub of office highlighters on the floor for me next to a stack of used word processor paper to keep me quiet, the irony of this is that it never made me quiet. I watched my mum try and hold back laughter as I would bound into the kitchen with my latest creation, interrupting my nan talking about how awful people were and what a disappointment it is to have children. Her logic that she gave to my mum was that,

“If you never have children, you never have to have the pain of them leaving you all alone”.

The thing about having a female influence that is supposed to be a benchmark for a young mind to look up to is that when they fail to give you any sort of love or nourishment you start finding humour. As I got older the reprehensible acts only grew more unbelievable, when she left me upstairs for two days with a fever of 103, fitting and hallucinating without so much as a glass of water I later wrote it onto one of my acts, and it brought down the house. The irony isn't lost on me that the only time my nan and granddad had come to watch a play of mine when I was a child, I saw them get up and leave right in the middle of my solo in a sea of beaming parents watching their children perform.

Mine and my mums life became a proverbial “fuck you” to the the loveless environment we grew in, more so for her, she found power in doing what her mum never could. She loved me so hard and so fully, embracing my every flaw and my every wild idea that we became unstoppable. For every memory of her mum chastising her or poking painkillers through the letterbox when my mum was too sick to leave the bed rather than come and look after us, we had ideas, played games and found joy in each other and other people.

For every night when my mother was left out in the cold so that her mum and dad could drink and smoke and party with their friends, my mum always had an open door for me. I am never left out in the cold. I am never dismissed and I am never disbelieved. We learned how to be kind and how to love with no teacher. I had no father and really no other family, so my mum taught me to create my own, forcing me to make friends and be brave. I often think that's what pushed me towards my career on the stage.

In every path I ever wanted to take that would make me happy I learned never to tell my grandparents, as a creative I was always told that there was no money in it. I was instructed to find a good husband and settle down, so it was much to their dismay when I came out as gay later on in life and became a cabaret singer, as I recall my mum had wanted to go into the navy but told she couldn't as there were too many “dirty lesbians” in there according to my nan. A fine thing to say as one of the first women to work as a prison guard.

Having children was her allocated job for me, I have no idea why, she never seemed to like any of her own or enjoy having them around. I am almost sad for her that she couldn't experience her life fully, instead making it a constant game of one-upmanship and manipulation, but perhaps wishing her any different would have made me weak, and complacent to empathy. Children have never been in my life plan, but I do find myself maternal to adults, perhaps my role in helping my mum decipher her childhood made it grown adults I was always supposed to care for, not children.

The hateful things she said to me and my mum either in passing as a direct insult I will carry with me, I have no sadness or betrayal attached to them, only thanks that she wasn't my mum, and that I know what it feels like to be torn down by someone that is supposed to love me, and get back up again.

No, my nan isn't an inspirational woman, but she did inspire me. She lived a mean life, cruel to almost everyone, and had no friends to speak of, but she did teach me exactly what not to do. She taught me to find the joy in myself and not to count on others to provide it for me. Through knowing her I know how brave it is to be soft. I have friends and a chosen family because of her, and for that I am eternally grateful.