I admire people like you and my mom who somehow managed to break free, refusing to pass along whatever abuse and neglect they suffered as children.
My mom wasn't an outstanding parent, she didn't really know how, but she did not raise me and my siblings in the manner she had been raised. She was always there for us and we were never forced as children to "be the adults" in our family as a consequence of our parents' failures. The buck stopped with them.
My grandma was a Holy Terror of the Wild West who eventually had to be removed from the home she owned as a danger to herself and others.
Half her neighbors loved the little old lady, half were terrified of her. She was handy with guns and knives and her tongue was sharp enough to kill.
The worst Thanksgiving holiday of my life, the one that led to a bad car wreck, me being "asked" to take a time out from school and far worse, began with my grandma. She was living with my parents at the time because no "assisted living place" would keep her and it would have been wrong to smother her with a pillow.
In retrospect, examining my own scars, I can sorta figure out why my grandma and my mom turned out the way they did, but it ain't always easy. I'm intensely aware that I'm a quarter of my grandma.
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