That One Person Who Changed You Forever
Who is it For You? For me, it is my Nana
My mother was trying to throw my birthday cake in the bin, and my nana was trying to stop her.
I was six years old.
My Nana had bought an ice cream birthday cake for my sixth birthday and put it in the fridge at my house. My Mum had found it. She was trying to throw it away.
My Mum had become a Jehovah’s Witness (JW) the previous year. She had told all the family that she would no longer be celebrating birthdays.
My Nana was saying to my mother, that my mother may not want to celebrate her own daughter’s birth, but SHE (as Nana) DID. She had bought a cake and wanted to have a piece with me.
SHE loved and wanted to acknowledge me.
I do not remember all the words. But I remember the anger. The fight. The aggression. I remember my Mum won.
The cake went in the bin.
Nana cried. Mum cried.
Nana left.
I remember feeling fear.
I felt confused. Why did my mother not want to celebrate my birthday anymore?
I loved and adored my Nana.
I remember the feeling of being at her house, being pressed tight against her massive bosom and her stroking my hair and murmuring into my head sweet nothings. It was a feeling of comfort, relaxation, acceptance, and love.
I remember her smell.
The smell of the particular talcum powder she always put on after a bath and how flecks of it would remain in little speckles on the floor in the bathroom as a constant reminder of her presence.
When we left Australia and went to New Zealand to live I was nine years old. Nana stayed in Australia.
My Nana sent me cards and letters frequently with messages of love continually repeating that she was thinking of me.
I kept them as a child under my pillow. I used to reach under and touch them when I missed her, and my heart hurt.
“Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.” — Alex Haley
My Nana had unconditional love for me.
She made me feel loved by always remembering me, acknowledging me and always including me.
She was copious in her physical affection.
She was not stingy in her words.
She told me repeatedly every time she saw me or wrote to me that she loved me.
I loved Nana back with a fierceness equal in strength to her love for me.
My mother suffered from deep untreated depression so was not always emotionally available for me in the ways I needed.
I never FELT loved by her, although I know now as an adult that she also fiercely loved me when I was growing up.
Later on, as an adult, she confided how she struggled with feeling like she always was in a battle of wills with me when I was a child.
The religion she adopted and followed to the letter, instructed her to “break my will” to save my soul. So she and I engaged regularly in a battle of wills.
According to my Mum, she was determined to “break me” as she did not want a disobedient child who would not submit to her parents and therefore would later on not submit to God.
But, her “breaking my will” led to creating an emotional wall or barrier 10 feet thick between the two of us that is still there today.
My Dad was away with the army four years and nine months out of the first six years of my life. The military was his life until he got out when I was nine years old.
So Dad was not present in my childhood life or memories.
He was a shadowy figure that occasionally showed up, and I hovered shyly on the periphery until he went away again. I have photos where I am standing next to him, and he has his arm around me, but I have no FELT memory of him, and what sort of relationship we had.
My memories of being with him during these first nine years connect to other people’s interpretation of the photos.
My Dad also was jealous (when I was a child) of my mothers’ attention on both of us children when he was home and wanted her all to himself, so we frequently stayed in our bedrooms or went to our grandparents’ house.
The memory of having to remain quiet and stay separate is very vivid to me.
His expression of irritation if we came out of our room or we claimed too much of our mother’s attention when we had been told to stay put vivid in my mind’s eye.
So it was my dear Nana who filled the gap.
It is my Nana whose big heart towards me lives on in my memory.
It is she who filled me with love. I was the empty glass, and she was the cold water that filled up the glass with refreshment and quenched my thirst.
It was Nana who made me feel valued, made me feel SEEN and who provided the physical touch, and affection towards me that validated my existence.
I felt alive when I was with her and not just existing.
My Nana was my everything.
When she was in her mid-40s, she discovered ballroom dancing.
Dancing became the love of her life.
She discovered this long before I was born.
The photo at the top of this post is one that my Nana gave to me. She told me with pride how she hand made and sewed all her ballroom dancing dresses. She sewed every sequin on by hand.
“Sometimes our grandmas and grandpas are like grand-angels.” — Lexie Saige
She died at the ripe old age of 96 years long before I discovered my love of painting and art.
My Nana had painted Holly Hobbie (a little girl with a large blue bonnet and gingham and calico patchwork dress which came onto the scene from 1974) and loved painting and all similar little girl images.
When I was a child, she sent me two paintings she had painted as well as a Holly Hobbie card, and I still have them today.
Sometime after her death, my Dad revealed to me his memory that she also used to melt old records and make fruit bowls out of them, painting the outside of them for decoration.
I would love to share my recently discovered love of art with my Nana. It is something I now know we have in common.
But during this time in her life, when she was painting, dancing and making fruit bowls out of records, we lived in different countries, and it had been many years since we had spoken. But that is another story.
Thank you, Nana, for having loved me so deeply when I was a child. It meant the world to me, and I have only realized as an adult later on in my life, how much your love sustained and nourished me over this time in my childhood.
Nana, you were the sun in my life, and you brought sunshine with you whenever you visited.
I will forever miss you, and cherish your memory.
If I can be half as loving a grandma to my grandbabies as you were to me, my grandkids will be fortunate.
Rest easy, dear Nana. Forever missed and always remembered.
