To be honest, my parents aren't really all that interesting of a topic to talk about, but because that's what the meme calls for, that's what I'll write about.
My mom is Bev. She's 56. She's short, and would be pixie-ish if she wasn't so muscular from years of gardening and housework. She has brown eyes, greying brown hair, and wears glasses. I don't look like her very much at all. She's pretty much been a housewife for the entire time my parents have been married, though she's also done part time housekeeping for other people off and on as well. She's into gardening, quilting, reading mysteries, and is a total clean freak.
My dad is Carl. He's 63. He's a foot taller than my mom, and used to be approximately three times her weight, so they looked very Mutt-and-Jeff-ish. He just hit his goal weight, though -- I don't know how much he's lost, but it's a lot -- and he looks great now, although losing that much weight has made him really start showing his age. He's retired, but was an electrician before he retired. Now he spends his time taking
awesome photographs, mostly of wildlife and sporting events. When he was younger, he used to like to fish and hunt, but his health doesn't let him do it much anymore. My dad has blue eyes, pale irish skin, and I think his hair was dark brown to black before he went grey at a fairly young age (it's now pure white and there's not much left of it). I look like a female version of my dad. I also apparently share a lot of personality traits with him... especially with how stubborn I am. :)
My parents have been married for almost 37 years, and will likely never divorce. They're so co-dependent at this point that I don't think either could survive without the other. They communicate by bickering and teasing, but get along really well still, though I think my mom sometimes wishes my dad hadn't retired because having him around all the time drives her crazy. :) Gee, I wonder where I got that from?
So that's my parents. Not particularly interesting, eh?
Now I shall talk about my other parents: my grandparents.
This is my maternal grandparents I am writing about; my mother's parents. My grandma Helen and my grandpa Paul. Both born in little towns on the prairies to Ukrainian parents (though I'm not sure how many generations since immigrating to Canada), my grandmother just turned 82 on August 22nd, and my grandfather was 84 in July. My grandmother was one of six children and had a grade eight education, I believe. I'm not sure how long my grandfather stayed in school. They've been married 60 years as of this past June.
And they are the most wonderful people in the world.
My grandparents had two daughters, both of whom ended up out in British Columbia in their 20s. Almost 25 years ago or so, my grandparents decided that since both of their children, and therefore all of their grandchildren were in BC, they might as well be, too. So they spent a month living in a motel in the town I grew up in, to see if they would like the area, and then decided to move to a town about 45 minutes away from the town I grew up in. Looking back, I really don't blame them for not moving to the same town we lived in, otherwise they never would have gotten a break from us. But having them that close made a huge difference in the person I've become.
When I was in my early teen years, I ended up spending close to every second weekend with my grandparents. They would come get me, or I would ride the Greyhound bus, and I would spend from Friday evening until Sunday evening with them. We would go shopping, go to the beach, go for drives, and play cards. My library card was good at their library as well as my own, and I would read like there was no tomorrow. My grandma fed me good, home-cooked food, some of it Ukrainian, and they treated me like valuable human being, whose opinions were valued and respected.
I honestly don't know what I would be like today without my grandparents. You see, my parents, for all their normal-sounding lives, treated me as a human guinea pig. They tried their ideas of parenting on me, and when they didn't work, they changed how they did the same things with my siblings, but they didn't seem to think about how their actions affected me. My parents essentially had different standards and expectations for me than they did for my siblings, and it's affected me on numerous levels. I found out about 5-6 years ago, maybe a little more, that my grandparents actually didn't approve of how my parents were raising me, which is why they encouraged me to spend so much time with them. If it weren't for them, I would be even more of a disaster than I am now.
I love my grandparents to bits, and that is why I wrote about them as well as my parents.
It's taken me a long time, but I have basically forgiven my parents for the countless
mistakes they made and the way I was treated growing up. There's absolutely no point in continuing to be hurt by it, because it does me no good. They did what they could with the knowledge they had, and how were they to know that their genes had combined to form someone highly sensitive and pre-disposed to depression? So while yes, it was technically their fault, it wasn't really intentionally their fault. And that's that.
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