Two Influences

I've often heard that how your kids see you treat your mother is how they will treat you. Kids learn from their parents or other adults in their young lives.

My mother, she didn't visit her mom, she didn't teach me about extended family ... my Aunt Jay, the care giver to my Polish Grammy, she taught me how to be a Care Giver, she taught me about the importance of an extended family.

Two things that I've experienced in my life that have kept my mom out of a nursing home.  First, visiting a mental institution to visit my grandmother and second was seeing how Jay took care of my Baci.

We visited our mom's mom when I was 8, she was institutionalized. It's where I saw what a mental institution looked like and it scared me. Everything was painted battleship gray and the TV hung from the ceiling with a piece of chainlink fence in front of the glass tube.

The TV flickered images and people sat in chairs, gazing into the air, no expressions, no laughter. Every so often someone would fling a hard object at the TV, which helped my young mind understand why they had the section of fence stretched across the glass tube, safe from any projectiles that could send a shower of glass over anyone unlucky enough to be in the direct line of fire.

The day I met my grandmother for the first time, I also saw the scariness of a mental institution. I remember walking by a room that had a metal door with rivets with bars covering a little window. I didn't look inside, I couldn't, we were rushed along and the window was too high. The place scared the shit out of me.

My mom never knew her mom, she was institutionalized when my mom was just 14. I'm sure my mom was scared, being left alone at such a young age; having your mom taken away and locked up in an insane asylum.

Shock treatments. Drugs. Abuse. All realities that my grandmother and my Aunt Flo faced every day of their lives. They were alone. My grandmother had no idea that she had 5 grandchildren, all children of her youngest child, my mom.  That was also the day that my grandmother didn't know who my mom was, she didn't recognize her and it hurt my mom's feelings.  I saw it on her face.

Life was hard for my mother, she worried about the crazy gene. She met my dad, they married and they had a hard life together. My dad was uneducated and my mom had no mother role model, they winged it. My parents did everything they could for us, they made sacrafices so that we could have a better life than they had; this appears to be a common theme among parents.

My Aunt Jay, she helped my family a lot; because of what Jay has done for me personally she holds a special place in my heart. I want Jay to live with me, she deserves to have me as her Care Giver ... another story for another time.

The two influences in my life that have made me a Care Giver is visiting a mental institution and having Jay teach me how to take care of the people I love.