I was about to finish up my freshman year of high school when my mom broke the news. Grandma is selling the house and supposedly going to help my mom get her a place. I thought, wow that is out of the blue. What it was about, is my grandmother was jealous my mom and I went to Hawaii the previous year and decided she should also need to visit. She had little to no cash. All the equity is locked in the house. If she wanted to go, she had to sell it.
My life was about to get turned upside down once again. It had been four years since my parent's separation, but still no divorce. My mom wasted all the money from the sale of the motel.
She wiped out close to fifty thousand dollars in four short years. She blew the money on clothes, cars, going out, and anything else to make herself feel better. Even the trip to Hawaii for my eighth-grade graduation, which I was adamantly against, but she insisted on going. All that money from her taking from my dad when they separated, and from the settlement of the motel my dad and her owned, all the money was eaten up. She had nothing to buy a home. She believed my grandmother was going to help her. She found out the hard way… my grandmother, her mother, was a lying, manipulative witch.
My relationship was quite strained between my grandmother, my mom, and my brother. We all lived under the same roof, and it was horrendous. My brother who was eight years older and had a short fuse, would physically take his frustrations out on me. I never defended myself because how could a one hundred-pound girl fight against someone over six foot, two hundred plus pounds.
I would tell my mother and grandmother all the time what he would do to me, but they would tell me I just needed to understand my brother was just angry. I should have known better. The same brother molested me as a child, and my mother defended him then too. I was the garbage child who deserved her wrath.
My depression got a hold of me so bad, that summer, I contemplated suicide several times. I hid in my room and barely showered. No one in the house noticed or cared, they were all angry at one another.
As the time grew near the closing of my grandma’s house, my mom and she got into a huge argument. I was in my bedroom as I usually did each day. I heard upstairs in my grandma’s apartment a lot of shouting and stomping. I knew my mom and she got into a huge fight. I heard footsteps coming down the back porch and the door to our kitchen fly open. I saw my mom go grab her purse from the kitchen counter.
As she stomped away, she yelled back, “I hate that bitch.” She went out the backdoor and I assumed went to her car. A few minutes after she left, my grandmother storms downstairs and I was in the doorway of my bedroom. She goes on a long tirade about how she never promised to give money to my mom to get a house. She screamed other obscenities. She went on for a good five minutes. I stood motionless, not speaking a word. I honestly didn’t care.
She went back upstairs, and I went back to my bed. My depression was swirling. I had no idea where my mom and I were going to end up living. My brother secured living arrangements with my dad.
I barely noticed what was going on after the huge fight between my grandmother and mother. They kept civil with one another. My mom ended up getting an apartment in a suburb just outside Chicago. The positive aspect, I no longer had to attend a Catholic High School. She enrolled me in a public school.
The day we moved I had to say goodbye to my collie mixed dog. She would be going to live on a farm somewhere outside Chicago. It broke my heart, but again, nobody cared. My grandmother moved a couple of weeks afterward. She bought a condo a few blocks from our apartment. My mom didn’t visit my grandmother all that much during the first few years after our move.
My grandmother ended up going to Hawaii. From what I gathered from my mother, my grandmother had a miserable time and barely spoke of her trip.
Mom and I were not on the best of terms living in the apartment. She hated it, and I did too. She of course tried blaming me for her not having any money left over from her stealing from my dad and the sale of the motel my parents both owned in Canada. My private schooling broke her financially. I didn’t. She always needed to place the blame on everyone but herself. She learned that from her mother.
As the saying goes, “The apple never falls far from the tree.”