My grandparents are amazing! What they have accomplished amazes and astounds me. Lets start with Grandma. Grandma's mom, well.....she wasn't all that great as a mom. I have no idea why she was the way she was, or what life experiences brought her to this point, but when Grandma and her two sister were tiny, she left them. She married again, had more children and left them as well, only to repeat the process yet again. Grandma's dad, seems to have at least tried. He had a serious issue with alcoholism. He lost his girls to foster care more than once. He would get sober, work like crazy to get the girls back. At some point he would back slide. He would start drinking again and eventually loose his girls again. Finally at age 13, Grandma married my Grandpa.
Grandpa was born somewhere in the middle of a bunch of kids. (12 maybe?) He was very sickly as a child. He had some cognitive heart defects. At the time, my Great Grandparents were told he would never survive long enough to walk and talk. When he did that, they were told he would never live long enough to go to school and so on. As a result he didn't spend much time in school and never learned to read or write. He dropped out of school in the sixth grade and learned how to drive semi trucks with his dad. He married my grandma at the ripe old age of 16.
As you can imagine given their ages they had a few trails. One time my grandpa called my Grandma a rather unkind name in front of several of his siblings. Now Grandma was a shy nervous girl. She doesn't like to be the center of attention. Instead of fighting with my grandpa, she picked up her tiny newborn and walked home. When Grandpa walked in the door a few hours later she smacked him on the head with her cast iron frying pan. She then calmly picked up her baby and went to bed. In this day and age it would be domestic violence. The people would have been called and Grandma would have been in serious trouble. But in her little world Grandpa never called her a bad name again!
Another time, Grandpa didn't want Grandma to go grocery shopping. He took their little farm truck to a job, leaving only his semi truck at home. Several hours later he drove past the grocery store only to she his big rig packed haphazardly in front of the store. Inside Grandma and her little ones were happily shopping for groceries.
Grandpa must have had the weight of the world on his shoulders. My grandparents had seven children before my grandpa was 30. He worked at every kind of job he could to care and provide for his family. After several years of driving it was discovered that he didn't even have a drivers license. It was arranged for my grandma to read the test for him. He then answered the questions orally and she wrote then answers for him. That was how he continued to have a CDL drivers licence until just a few years before he died.
By the time I married, Grandma and Grandpa seemed to have the perfect marriage. They never argued or fought. They always kissed each other hello and goodbye. I once asked Grandma how they managed to stay married through all of their many trials. Grandma said this "We needed each other. Both of us knew that if we walked away, that was it. We were on our own. Whatever was wrong in our marriage, we had more incentive to fix it than to leave."
I have given much thought to much Grandma's advice. Do we forget to need each other? Are our problems, concerns or success shared with everyone one but our husband or wife? Do we ever value our own individuality more than the relationship we have with our spouse. I think it is something to consider. think at very least, we can focus on making sure that our sweetheart is the one person we want to lean on, that we want to tell all of our secrets to. They should be the shoulder to cry on and the one person who always has our back. And when happiness and success come our way, I hope that our sweeties are the first people we want to run to.
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