Grandma's+Crazy

My Crazy Grandma Good Mood “Make sure you call your grandma today, she’s having one of her good days.” For a few years now this is has communication with my grandma has taken place, only during her good moods. Because otherwise she doesn’t necessarily know who we are, her grandchildren, the kids that she pretty much took care of for the first few years of our lives to help out my mom. But that’s okay, we don’t take it personally. I don’t really like calling her that much anyway. It freaks me out, sort of like maybe this is what I have to look forward to by the time I reach her age. I don’t want to be crazy like her though, it just freaks me out. “Oh hi grandma, how are you? Hi sweetie, mmh, I’m all right mmh. How’s school going? School’s going good. That’s great mmh. Things are good to? Yeah, just fine. All right I love you sweetie. I love you to grandma, bye.” This is about as much conversation as my grandma can handle on her good days. She constantly makes this noise that sounds like she’s purring. It’s always an internal struggle to pick up the phone when I see her name on the caller ID. Her brain has been completely fried by all the drugs her psychologists have prescribed for her over the years. She used to be perfectly normal; I remember Christmas dinners hosted at my grandparents’ house. My grandma cooked everything herself, she’s 100% Italian so we were treated to the most amazing pasta dishes. But now we’re lucky if she can remember how to boil water. My grandma used to be my favorite person; she would take us to the park and when we got older her and my grandpa brought us to the pier so that we could fish with them. Her functioning abilities used to be perfectly normal but now she’s incapable of dealing with even the simplest problems, like dressing herself. Bad Mood My boyfriend and I were sitting in my kitchen one day as he was enjoying a homemade fajita that I warmed up for him. He hasn’t met my grandma yet, but at the rate that she’s losing her mind he probably never will. My mother and I know better than to bring new people around her. She scares them away. But that day we were sitting in the kitchen, the phone rings, I check the caller ID and it’s grandma calling like she does so often. I let the machine pick up, by the tone of her voice I can immediately tell she’s having a really bad day. “Hi Debbie. Listen you need to come here now. Something really bad happened. We need your help. Please get down here quickly.” “Should you do something about that call?” My boyfriend looks worried and I laugh. “Listen, this happens a lot. You can’t worry about it.” My crazy grandma often makes calls like that, asking for our help for some terrible situation that’s occurring at her home. Most of the time the crisis situation is that she thinks she was overcharged at the bakery. When my little brother was born, my grandma was diagnosed with breast cancer in both breasts. She had to lose them both and this caused serious psychological damage to her. It broke her self-confidence and torn her apart inside. This started her downward spiral into her depression, leading to her use of multiple anti-depressants that barely made a difference. The only thing they did do was fry her brain completely. Her doctor put her on everything; Zoloft, Prozac, even Lithium pills. But nothing helped. Days my Mom Goes to Visit My grandparents still live on their own about two hours away despite my parents’ pleas for them to move closer to us. They’re still able to function but just the fact that they are old they tend to forget certain things. Whenever my family goes over there for the day, my mom warns us to check the inside of the glasses we’re drinking from because my grandma no longer cleans things. Instead she puts everything back in the cupboard. My mother and I often joke that we could write our own memoir full of stories about her mother, my crazy grandma. Most of the time I’m not there to witness every moment myself. Usually after my mom gets home from a long day at my grandparents house we sit and discuss all the things my grandma did or said. My mom works really hard to take care of my grandparents. They barely survive living on their own and we’re trying to get them to move closer to us, but old people are so stubborn. One of my favorite stories my mom told me is a recent one from about a month or so ago. She went down to visit and to take my grandfather to the doctor. Back at the house she brought her steam cleaner to thoroughly clean their dirty floors. My grandparents forget to do even the most basic house cleaning these days. It’s really quite sad. The worst part is my grandma used to have the most intense case of OCD I ever experienced. She used to make me clean the house whenever she came to visit us. She would even come over our house, on days she could still travel, and she would scrub the bottom of our pots and pans, even though it was a futile practice. So my mother cleaned their linoleum floor and finally got layers of grim off it. After a long day of hanging around them, my mom was exhausted and was ready to leave. My grandmother comes into the room after napping and asks if my mom was also going to clean the carpet floors.