Our granddaughter spent this past week with us. It has been six years since she had done that, and it was quite a week! As her mom said, “You cannot spend a week with Gammie without processing!”
Our first processing was my bout with an intestinal bug the day she arrived.
The second processing was my missed opportunity. Stacey and all the kids refer to a winter visit with us as retirement training. True to form, our big evening event after watching Wheel of Fortune was a game of 500 rummy at the dining room table, during which Courtney said, “I am wishing I had my car.”
My missed opportunity was to just be honest with her and let her know I understood her feeling. Instead, I launched into an unskillful articulation of why it was best for us that she not have her car.
We did not have an overt scene, but there was definitely a loss of rapport, and as soon as the game of rummy was over, she retreated to her room.
I took the lump in my throat to bed with me.
The following morning, I continued processing as I sat with my journal (See Writing Down Your Soul).
Gratefully, after she got up, Courtney and I sat on my bed for over an hour just talking heart-to-heart about LIFE. I shared my painful history around the sexual double-standard. I admitted to having been unskillful the previous night, and I thanked her for not giving up on me.
We spoke of significant things including: my mother’s having hidden a first marriage; my pregnancy at age 16; the culture that forbade my attending school because I was sexually active and a bad influence on the other girls; Courtney’s mom’s divorce from her dad.
Generations of sexual guilt and shame has been carried by the women in our lineage.
Courtney and I took turns with the tears…
Thursday night she sang karaoke at the American Legion and she killed it! One women came over to our table after Courtney’s first number and said, “My husband has an amazing tenor voice. Your singing moved him to tears.”
At the end of her last number, the DJ took the mic and announced, “We have taken a vote, and Courtney R. cannot go home. We are going to adopt her so she can stay here with us on Pine Island.”
It was such a HUGE night of affirmation for all of us.
Retirement training continued….
Friday morning Courtney played shuffleboard with her Gampie and all afternoon she sat in our TV room with him and a half dozen of his senior citizen friends playing mountain music and singing.
After the music, Courtney decided to ride her bike over to Ragged Ass. She did not ask to use the car. She said she would go for a little while before dinner. She asked me to send her a text to let her know what time dinner would be.
Our rockin’ Friday night was to be spaghetti dinner and dominoes with some of our Michigan friends. Her last night of spring break.
As Courtney took off on her bike, I had a sinking feeling. I could not even tell you exactly what it was, but our good friend, Nancy, saw it in my face and asked me if all was well. I said, “We will see how it plays out.”
A few moments later, as I finished putting the house back together after the music gathering, I could not find my phone. I had John dial my number. Courtney answered! “I took Gammie’s phone by mistake.”
As we hadn’t finalized the time for dinner, and now I did not have my phone, I asked John to send a text message to our friends asking what time we were planning to eat. Dinner would be at 5:30.
Because I knew we would be out for the evening, and busy off-island all day on Saturday before taking Courtney to the airport, I had several things needing to be attended to. I asked John to send Courtney a text message telling her I needed my phone. He did that.
She did not reply.
A while later, I asked John to clarify exactly what he had said to her in the text message to about my phone. He had written, “Gammie needs her phone.”
More time went by and still no response.
I looked at John’s phone to see what time he had sent the message.
He had also sent her a message saying dinner was at 5:30 so she needed to be back to leave at 5:15.
I told him it was unfortunate he had done that as it had given her an implied permission it was OK to not return home with my phone before then.
I was trying to calm down, willing myself to accept what was happening, but as time went by with still no reply to the text messages, I was having a harder time finding my center.
John and I were both becoming more and more triggered, and clearly we were reliving a difficult event when Courtney had come to Michigan the previous summer.
John grabbed his keys, headed for the door saying, “I’m going to get her. I’ll throw her @$$ in the car and put the bike on the rack.”
(The bike rack was on the car, because we would be returning her borrowed bike to the friends we were having spaghetti dinner and playing dominoes with.)
I told John going to get her and embarrassing her would not be kind to any of us and would only make things worse. Already after 5:00, it was too late for me to take care of the things I had wanted my phone for, so we both needed to just calm down.
I called Courtney. “Baby, I need you to come home. Your grandpa and I are in a big drama that all started because you took my phone and then didn’t answer our text messages. Since you’re in the middle of it, we need you to come home and help us work through this.”
When she came in, she was red-faced from racing home on the bike in the heat, and she was obviously now upset too.
Fortunately, it only took us a couple of minutes of processing to realize John had been sending the text messages to my phone — thinking that was the only phone she had! She obviously was not checking messages on my phone.
We all saw choice points….
Courtney said she could have returned with my phone as soon as she realized she had it.
John said he could have asked rather than assumed if she had her phone too.
I said I could have used John’s phone to send the text messages myself rather than asking him to send them. I knew she had her phone.
It would have helped if I had noticed he was sending the text messages to my phone rather than hers when I had looked at the time of the messages!
It was important to me to have Courtney know her Gampie had been so triggered that he wanted to ‘drag her @$$ out’ and I had stopped him from doing that.
I thanked her for helping us release not only the difficult time of her visit the summer before, but more importantly, an old pattern of the painful triangle of parenting between Debra/John/Stacey. John would let me be seen as the bad guy.
We all cried and we hugged and Courtney said it really bothers her to be yelled at.
I clarified that I had not yelled at her. I had been emotionally upset, but I had told her what was going on and I had stated clearly what I needed from her.
We were able to recover without any additional processing; and I think we all enjoyed our spaghetti dinner. I know Courtney enjoyed winning at dominoes!
She sent this precious text message while waiting at the airport:
“I loved my week with y’all! Even the processing…. haha.”
Here are two treasured photos taken at the same restaurant near the airport: the first in 2013 when she was 14, and the second after an amazing week of processing with this beautiful woman who calls me Gammie.
This may be the most significant week of processing of entire my life!
