Admiration and resentments – my grandfather

Traducerea in Română e disponibilă aici.

It’s funny how most of us have in our lives at least one person whom we admire, respect, maybe even love, but who, at the same time, is a person we despise in some aspects and towards whom we can even experience a sort of unexplained hatred. It makes me aware of how complex our human interactions are and how irrational our traumas or feelings of liking or disliking someone can be.

For me, one of these people is my grandfather Ion (may he rest in peace!). If you only knew how much I loved him throughout my childhood and how much I hated him during my teenage years. I can’t explain to myself this antithesis of emotions, but it’s just what it is. Even though today I’ve made my peace with everything this person has represented for me and I bear nothing but empathy and gratitude for him, I still find it important to touch upon the impact my grandfather had in my life.

Childhood admiration

When I was a child, I was considering my granpa to be the wisest person in the world and a person our ancestors would be deeply proud of. He was a smart and respected mathematics teacher in his village, even tutoring plenty of pupils besides teaching classes. He was the one who taught me the multiplication table at four years old (which I had fortgotten by the time I reached second grade in school). Besides teaching, he was also working a lot in the garden, reading, analyzing, he had grounded beliefs on politics, he was very knowledgeable in history and possesed a special ability of telling stories from his sons’ childhood in the most hilarious way. Now that I am writing this, I would love to be able to hug him and thank him for all these great memories he has given me. He was the one singing me the lullaby – the song Delilah in Russian, making it seem like the best song of all times of Filip Kirkorov (I found out at about 20 years old that this wasn’t actually a Russian song,  the original being Tom Jones’s Delilah song all the way back from 1968). All in all, my admiration for him was beyond limit and there truly is an unconditional love which is undeniable.

Teenage resentment

As I was growing up, and especially since I was studying at school in a city, the excitement of the trips to my grandparents had started to gradually fade away. What is more, during the ninth grade, I endeavoured to participate at some Olympiads for different school subjects in order to get some extra grades. Completly by chance, I found out that I was good at geography. I really liked that subject and studying it came very easy to me. It was a pleasant experience and I was truly enjoying the actual process of learning new things about the geography of the world. Much as I was supported by my grandmother (with her being a geography teacher herself), I was being scolded by my grandfather for this choice. Truth be told, I don’t even know if I chose it, it was just a passion I happened to explore because if felt right at that time. For the following five years up until his death, my grandfather had considered me a huge disappointment and wasn’t missing any single opportunity to let me know that. Unfortunately, with all the self-awareness tools I had (or didn’t have) in those years, I was quietly listening, believing and accepting his opinion as granted without even realizing it. A situation like this is what I call a decent goodbye to what little self esteem I had at the time:

How to lose self-esteem 101: when a person you admire and love so much, someone who should accept you and love you simply for who you are, is looking down on you instead, and verbally humiliates you for the choices you’ve made towards your inner path of happiness.

Besides that, along with me going all in in the geography field, my best friend at the time was and still is brilliant in mathematics. She was performing outstanding in many other school subjects, which was great for her, for her abilities and likings. I was very proud and happy for her, but I also had a teenage ego nurtured on the beliefs of my grandfather that her choice (mathematics in this case) was the absolute right one, while mine was wrong.

How to lose self-esteem 102: when parents/grandparents/teachers (authorities to some extent) compare us with our peers and seem to notice all the right and good things others are doing while being blind to the treasure of individuality that is growing up right in front of them.

Today’s reality

These experiences with my grandfather led to the present-day me being in a continuous process of building-up my self-esteem, as well as the belief in my own abilities and my own authority. Interacting with people who feel confident simply by nature, people who defend their rights and express their opinions in a healthy way, I usually need to remind myself that comparing myself with them in not an option anymore. We all perceive and feel things in a very different way. What seems unfair and traumatic to me is what someone else may perceive as absolutely unimportant. When I say that my grandfather had a negative impact on me, someone else says: You should, at least, say thank you he didn’t beat you like some grandparents do. But one thing I want to point out through this post is that abuse, pain and beating comes in diverse shapes and forms.

There are also abuses which are rarely touched upon, not only in post-communist Moldova but also in the liberal west: the verbal or psychological abuses. These ones don’t leave bruises on the outside, just an intangible ocean of pain on the inside. One example of both verbal and psychological abuse is that of my grandfather during my teenage years. The things he was saying, the looks he was giving me, the way he was treating me had, involuntarily, created a state of pressure between us. However, this tension was never addressed. He wasn’t even realizing what he was doing because the concept of verbal abuse was almost non-existent to people raised in URSS. Myself, on the other hand, I wasn’t saying anything because, although it felt tremendously uncomfortable and I never wanted to see him again, I still had to be nice and polite with him because he was an authority – my grandfather – no one goes against him, not even my father, so who was I to have a voice against him?

Through this experience, I realized that 1 kg of feathers hits just as hard as 1 kg of iron. Unlike the iron which hits unexpectedly, all at once and awakens you immediately, the feathers can become small comments, humiliations, looks from above that keep on pouring throughout five, 10 or 20 years. Unfortunately, we feel their consequences many years after, some realizing it and breaking the patterns, others passing it on in the way how they treat their own children, partners or peers. Someone said that our traumas were not our responsibilities, but it is our responsibility to overcome them.

As I said in the article Growing up with parents working abroad, the Ho’oponopono forgiveness technique might be helpful in this case. I may be able to refer you to some guidance videos if interested. The true work is to be done on the inside, in the quietness of own mind and spirit, in meditation, prayers of forgiveness, letters of forgiveness or whatever other technique works.