valis2 | A leetle story about my grandmother's gifts...

...because

rickfan37 was talking about sad gifts...I just couldn't resist.

A little bit of background: My maternal grandmother is a passive-aggressiveness case study waiting to happen. She's also OCD, I think. She's the undisputed Mistress of the Knick-Knacks. If she likes Garfield, she buys eighty stuffed Garfields. If she likes crystal, she buys a hundred and fifty crystal pieces. These are not exaggerations. (And clocks, she has about ninety of them displayed, and they used to all be wound and chime at different times.)

So for years my paternal grandparents would ask us for lists, or ask our parents what my sister and I wanted for Christmas, and then they would obtain it, and much joy would be had. I still have the alarm clock and the tape recorder, and some of the albums they bought me, and I still think of them, and miss them.

Not so much for my maternal grandmother.

A few background examples are in order, I think.

My parents purchased a dollhouse for my sister when she was around ten or so. She was very excited, and decided that it was to be decorated in the American Colonial style. (And when my sister decides something like that, Lo, It Is Graven In Steel, you see.) My grandmother was very excited, I think, because she likes things like that (see above).

My sister told her several times that she was decorating it in a Colonial scheme. And for the next...oh...six years, for every occasion, she received dollhouse furniture (and dollhouse knick-knacks), all in a Victorian style. Yes, Victorian, which is...well...quite different from Colonial. Also, that's when the repeating began. My sister received the same hideous ornate blood-red Victorian fainting couch at least three times. She received flowery chairs, bureaus, and tables multiple times. She received at least twelve coffee mills. No, really. The dollhouse had a coffee mill in every room.

Another example? Let me think. Oh yes. Le Jardin (sp) perfume. My sister liked that perfume (well, at one point she did). She received it for her birthday, for Easter, and for Christmas, in short, for every possible gifty occasion, for four years. She could have filled a swimming pool. Our paternal grandparents sussed it out at once, and stopped purchasing it for her, but my grandmother continued on for ages, until my mother privately told her to stop.

I was continually given gifts that I was too old for.

And then we come to the point of this story. You know, when you're young, you just kind of accept the strangeness of adults, because you don't realize it's strange. You just think, "Oh, that's just Uncle Steve," and you go your merry way. But when you become older, sometimes you look back on things, and you think, wow...that really was odd behavior.

I used to play a lot with Barbies and plastic dinosaurs/animals. The Barbies were a pantheon of goddesses with distinct personalities, voices, and abilities, and the animals were usually part of a large caravan forced to wander until they could find their true home (the island in the middle of our Persian rug...remember the carpet island cultures post from Lumos? yeah, that's where it all stems from, my bizarre childhood, spent positioning white marbles on the flowers on the carpet as the central Mystery for the animals, who lived on the edges, and could only cross the "river" when the bridges...oh, never mind). The point of this is that I had no Barbie furniture at all, mostly because they lived (ahem) on the Plane of the Goddesses, and didn't really need the furniture. Mostly they talked about their enemies, anyway. Well, their main enemy, who was this very strange Barbie who was rather silly and dumb and not much of an evil mastermind at all, but did really drive them crazy, and then they'd have to plot against her. Also, there was one lone Barbie who was a solitary goddess who could turn into a wolf...y'know, I do have my Barbies still, somewhere, and this makes me want to write up an entry about them and their pantheon, and include pictures. Hell, my LJ jumped the shark a long time ago, anyway.

So one day, when I was about eight or so, I'm over at my grandmother's house, and she orders pizza from Pizza Hut (which for me was a rare thing, my mom is a great cook and we almost never ate out), and there's this little plastic insert in the middle of it to keep the pizza box from touching the top of the pizza. It's white and flat on top and has three little legs.

Immediately I grab it and say, "Wow! This is like a little table! It would be perfect for my Barbies!"

I remember the look of surprise on my grandmother's face quite clearly. Little did I know what I was in store for. She washed it and gave it to me, and I took it home. Within minutes of attempting to play with the table, I realized that it was quite flimsy, and, seeing as my Barbies almost never used furniture, it was pretty useless. They (the Barbies) didn't even have anything to put on the table. So within moments I was back to my usual plot, save the world from the scary Barbie, and that was that, I thought.

The next time I saw my grandmother, she brought three more of the "tables." I politely accepted them, but didn't really have any use for them.

For the next year and a half, every time I saw her I would receive more "tables." At one point she brought me (I am not making this up) fifteen of them, all stacked together. (As an adult I am thinking that's a hell of a lot of pizza.) When I saw the tables I cringed. Usually we had to use my mother as an intermediary, and tell her that enough was enough, and she would tell my grandmother, but in this case I just kind of blurted out, "Oh, wow, I think I have too many already" or something to that effect.

My grandmother became angry about it. No, really. How dare I not accept these pizza box inserts! I think now that she probably ordered more pizzas than normal, just to get the inserts, and then of course she always had to wash them, so there was a lot of rage in her about this...she felt as if she had "worked" for them, and that I was a silly ungrateful little girl, etc. Anyway, I had forgotten about this story until recently, and now you all have to suffer through it (well, if you've gotten this far, at least). I think about it now, and I just think that she has always had problems, and I feel very sorry for her, that she's never gotten help, and that she is now a lonely, awful woman.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

aubrem.livejournal.com

Gosh, that is sad. I can recognize bits of that sort of behaviour in my relatives but your maternal grandmother appears to have had it in spades. I'm trying to understand what her POV might have been. Maybe she didn't know how to relate to people and what to do for them so when she hit on something (a perfume, pizza "tables") she got stuck on that thing and then when she discovered she was wrong she'd be so upset at failing she'd be angry? That doesn't explain the victorian furniture though. Maybe she didn't know the difference?

Your poor mother having to try to mediate that. (That's the bit I relate to : )

From:

Bornino

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