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[quote=Anonymous]This has been so interesting to read and has really made me reflect.  I think my grandmother - my mother's mother - was like this.

She died with I was 11, so I think I never really felt many of the impacts, and my mother is very private personally so it wasn't until I was in my 30s, I guess, that I found out my grandmother was an alcoholic.  When I was born my parents had to tell her that she could not watch me alone when she was drinking, for example.

My grandmother stayed in Girl Scouts long after her children were grown and done, and pre grandkids.  She was always "adopting"  troubled girls from Girl Scouts who would stay with her.  (Heck, actually she (and my grandfather) legally adopted a young girl whose mother couldn't take care of her - my mother was an older teen when a toddler came to live in the house as her sister).

Once, my father had a terrible death in his family, and my parents had to travel to the funeral.  It was in the middle of school, and we had no money, and it was a difficult, emotional loss (a cousin of mine - my father's sister's child - had died from childhood leukemia) and so my parents left me and my two years younger brother with my grandmother.  I was 8 and brother was 6.  My grandmother packed my brother and me up and along with the latest random teenage Girl Scout living with her and drove us to a city 4 hours away, where we spent a day going to museums.  In my memory, it was a fun, but weird, trip. My grandmother was just kinda fun but weird was how I always thought of her.

Anyway, decades later somehow this comes up and my mom and dad tell me how upset they were with her and how it was a huge blow up and they could not believe she would have taken us on this getaway.

I think it's a true testament to my mom (and dad) and to their ability to break the cycle that I knew something was weird when I was a kid, but it never impacted me and I had a good relationship with my grandmother.  I have wondered on and off if she had lived into my teenage years if things might have been different between us, but for me now, it's easy to see that she was a difficult, troubled woman and my mom really overcame a lot.  [/quote]

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