An ode to grandmothers

In this episode, I talk about what it was like growing up surrounded by old women, and introduce you to my grandma and some of her friends :) 

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This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
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Transcript

[00:00:00] Laure: Today I want to talk about grandmothers.

[00:00:03] I don't really know what this episode is going to look like, but I'm about to go visit one of my many, many grandmothers for the first time in two years. And that made me want to talk about that. Now, before I start, here's the disclaimer that I know that not all grandmothers are like the grandmothers that I'm going to talk about in this episode. And you may have a difficult relationship with yours, but that's the great thing about grandmothers is that you can have many, you can have as many as you want.

[00:00:37] And I'm not saying that from a constellation standpoint, obviously from a constellation stand point, you only have two. But from like a spiritual, a soul standpoint, you can have many, many grandmothers.

[00:00:48] And I'm not going to talk about grandfathers, cause I don't have a lot of experience with those. I didn't know one of my grandfathers and the other one I wasn't really close to. But grandmothers, I was raised surrounded by grandmothers. I counted the other day and I had about 20.

[00:01:14] Because my grandmother, my paternal grandmother, the one I was really close with, had a great many female friends from childhood, from when she was in the army, in the war, there was also extended family members. And so the result of that was that every summer, our family home, in which we spent most of the summer and my grandmother lived about five to six months a year, filled with old women.

[00:01:49] And it was a very specific kind of time. Granted, the grandmothers that I was raised around and that I will talk about in this episode, they were not wild hags of the moor. They were very, very proper old ladies with pearls, and pantsuits and beautiful white hair that they would very carefully arrange, very big earrings. Very proper, very proper ladies. Actually, my grandmother's maiden name's was Propper, so can't get, you know, can't get more proper than that. But that doesn't mean that they didn't have wisdom and that doesn't mean that they couldn't present a way of being female, that was really far from everything that the society presented. And I was really lucky. I feel really lucky in the fact that both from my mother being who she was and, and being surrounded by old women, most of the time, a lot of the time.

[00:03:02] I never felt really constrained by the idea or the ideas of what a woman should be according to society, because I was growing up around women that were nothing like that. You know, either because they were way past the age of submitting to those demands or because they were my mom who was really not someone who would fit into what a society would expect a woman to be. So I feel very grateful for that, but coming back to my grandmothers or my grandmother, the actual one. We had a kind of love at first sight. I was at her first grandchild and I spent a tremendous amount of time with her, both in my childhood and early adulthood because I lived with her for 10 years when I was in my twenties. And I didn't realize until much later what she had taught me and how rich her example had been for me and still was for me.

[00:04:08] Part of that example was that community of women that she had gathered around her and that loved her, that she loved dearly. And that I could see from a very early age, I really had a strong sense of what female friendship looked like. And I realize now how important that is because I meet so many women who have uh, very hurtful experience with other women, either of competition or difficulty communicating in general.

[00:04:45] And that's not at all the story that I was told as a child or shown. I was shown people, a story of people who maintained their bond of friendship through everything. My grandmother had a friend that she had met in kindergarten when she was four and her friend was three and that friend was Scottish. Her name was Lilias and they had remained friends through the war they had managed to send each other letters they had managed to keep in touch even during the war, which I don't know how they managed that. And they remained friends all through their lives for more than 90 years. Can you imagine that, 90 years of friendship ?

[00:05:32] And they always had that kind of competition about who would live longer. And my grandmother died when she was 97 and Lilias died exactly one year later when she was 97. So nobody won on that one, but that was the kind of model that I had, you know, and I grew up watching old ladies picnic near the pool, talk about interesting subjects like which obviously you went over my head when I was a child, but just from where I was looking in, like, I was kind of looking at them and surrounded by them it felt like a really warm place. And. The community was real.

[00:06:13] And I have so many memories of my grandmother and her friends in the evening in the living room doing a puzzle together or doing their crosswords next to each other and kind of like asking each other, what do you think this is? Or what do we think this is? And there was such an ease, you know, I think that's what was modeled to me, really that ease of being with other women with whom you've been through a lot.

[00:06:39] You know, like all those women that were around my grandmother and a lot of them were married, you know, and they would come with their husband and she was, she was a very sociable person and she had had a status in life that got her to meet a lot of people, but a lot of these people had gone through tremendous odds together.

[00:06:59] They had gone through the war. They had experienced grief and divorce and illnesses , and there was such a tremendous ease and there was such a grace to them, all of those old ladies that I feel really grateful that I got to witness that. And to be surrounded by that as a child, because I can see how now it is a model for my own friendships. Again, I was talking about how in order to know that you can have something you need to kind of know that that exists and you need to have seen that story somewhere. And I saw that story everywhere pretty much as I was growing up. And of course, as I was growing up, I wasn't realizing all that, right. This was all normal. This was my life. It's only when I got older, that I could really, really appreciate what that had brought me. And one of the things you know, one of the main things that I think about when I think about my grandmother and her friends is kindness. And it's like, it's not necessarily kindness that was directed at me though it was, but it was kind of like a general softness that they had, all in their very, very different personalities.

[00:08:24] And she had friends from all walks of life and some of them were brilliant smart women and others were artists and others were very funny. Others are a little scary but there's this general sense of warmth, you know coming from them and from my grandma as well, that's one of the things when she died One of the things that my dad said was that in 60 years of knowing her, he had never heard her say a bad word about anyone, which is probably not entirely true, but it's mostly true. 

[00:09:02] And that was kind of mirrored in all the other grandmothers that were around her. In the way that I remember them because obviously, you know, I was a child. Most of it, I was a child and some of them were less kind than like, if I'm perfectly honest, some of them were less kind than others, but generally, you know, and in between each other they had genuine consideration for each other and genuine care.

[00:09:29] And that was already a lot, you know, that was already a lot. So that's one that thing. And then that kind of grace which also came from the fact that they were from another generation. They were from like old school high class European education. And so there was genuine grace to kind of everything that they did, you know, like the way they dressed and how they were with other people. They had been raised to be elegant and to have a smart conversation and to put people at ease. And that came through their behavior and my grandmother, she could make anybody feel at ease. She was a very distinguished lady and she lived in pretty grand apartment places and I brought her people from all walks of life and she always was genuinely curious about them and really made them feel seen, which is, was a talent, but was also something that she had been raised to do. You were raised to be a good hostess.

[00:10:41] She was born in 1917, right after the first world war. And when they were still like horse carriages and she was raised originally to be a good, a good hostess, a good wife. And then the second world war came along when she was 20. And she crossed the, she crossed the Pyrénées on foot to go in and follow De Gaulle and get into the army in Morocco because you know, her family was Jewish and there was not a lot of choices. And to give you a sense of the grace that my grandmother kind of embodied and not just her, but other people as well.

[00:11:22] The people that she surrounded herself with or the women that she surrounded herself with. My father told me this story that really struck him when he was a child. I think he must have been like eight or nine and they were watching television and overnight the Berlin wall had been built. And my grandmother who had lost all of her extended family in the camps, right during the war, looked at the TV and uh, the Berliners' plight and said, oh, those poor people.

[00:11:55] And my dad, even at nine years old, was really struck by that. Unfortunately I couldn't really appreciate when she was alive, I think the depth of compassion and patience and curiosity that she had and I really started appreciating it when I became a therapist and I was like, wow.

[00:12:21] She was really exceptional. When I started working in family constellations I thought, mm. You know, some of that stuff that we were working on, that seems to be so difficult for some people around me. In terms of having radical inclusion, like including everything and having compassion for everything and everyone and not being polarized in one stance or another, I realized then that had been modeled by my grandmother a great deal to me. And I also realized when I started studying shamanism, that that had been modeled by my very proper grandmother, a great deal as well, because she treated nature like a person, you know, she would talk to trees. She treated trees like people. She grieved for trees when we lost them, where there was a big storm in 99 here that fell about 400 trees in our park and very old trees and beautiful, and she grieved them like there were people . We had this amazing 400 year old Cedar tree in our family homes park, in the castle. You remember the first episode I was born in a castle? Well, that castle had a really big park with huge, huge trees.

[00:13:41] And the bigger tree of all was this 400 year old Lebanese cedar. That tree was the apple of the eye of my grandmother. And she had tree doctors come from England to treat it because it was getting sick and it had been hit by lightning. Because in France we don't really know how to care for trees and that hasn't changed at all. If you you're driving on the road in France and you see how people cut trees, and you can see how trees have been pruned and it's a massacre, you know, like we really don't know how to do this, but she had, she had tree doctors come from England to treat that tree. And obviously for me, this was all normal. Right. And I only realized much later than it wasn't. That actually, she had been preparing me all along for stuff that I would be doing later and made it much easier for me to connect to things once I grew older. And so this episode is maybe not it's not full of advice or opinions, I kind of wanted to be an ode to all the grandmothers that I grew up around because thanks to them I have a great sense of the support that a female friendships can bring. And I also have a sense of myself that is not conditioned by society's expectations for women. What's funny is that they all fit a lot, like most of them really fit into the expectation that society had for them as women. Obviously, you know, as I was saying, like they were raised in very conservative families. But because when I knew them, they were way past the age of childbearing or, seducing man um, like all the things that women are supposedly good for in our society.

[00:15:43] That was enough. It didn't matter that they actually fit into the mold that was made for them in a way. They didn't fit into the mold because of who they were at the time that I met them, they were crones, you know, they were elders. And so I had way more old women around me than I had young women or women who were still in the clutch of society's demands on them. And so I had a lot of cackling grannies who laughed extremely loud and who were not afraid to speak their minds while also having a twinkle in their eye, and a lot of kindness and amusement at the world, and that was so valuable, so valuable to me.

[00:16:36] And I'm so grateful to all of them and for all of the memories of just sitting in my grandmother's nightgown reading a book while grannies are talking around me. My grand-mothers brought me a great sense of safety and a great sense of freedom in who I could be in the future. And a great sense of what friendship looks like, which is so important. Because if you don't know what friendship looks like, you can't really recognize it. Can you? I've known many people who talk about their friends, quote unquote, and what'd they tell me about their friends for me, I want to say those are not friends, this is not what friendship looks like. But I realized that I was really blessed in that I had such great models of friendship surrounding me, all my childhood and young adulthood. Because it didn't just model the quality of the bond, but they also modeled like what you do in order to sustain it. They were extremely considerate of each other. They would call each other regularly to get news, they would do things together, they would write letters. Like I have so many letters written to my grandmother from her friends. And I didn't realize any of that until I was in my late thirties and really felt like, oh, I actually have all those tools. I know the blueprint of how to keep a friendship going until I'm 90, if I want to. Also my grandmother is the one that, is one of the ones that turned me on to stories.

[00:18:25] She would read to me a lot and we would make stories together. And literally she was the person with whom I was allowed to become someone else or to actually live in my fantasy. I had a vivid imagination. And I had a not super easy childhood and I would go to my grandmother's place every Tuesday.

[00:18:50] I think it was Tuesday night. And the moment that I would get there, I would change into a princess costume and I would raid her makeup box. And then from then on, she would treat me as a princess and I would behave as a princess for the next 24 hours, or as whatever, like, I was a very girly girl. I liked the princess, but I had other costumes. And if I picked another costume, it could be something else.

[00:19:19] The point is she went there with me. She was absolutely willing to enter my world. And I think that's much easier for grandparents to do than parents, right? Because parents have to parent when grandparents can just play in a way. And so she, migrant mother is definitely relevant to this podcast because I owe her a great deal in the way that I relate to the world and the way that I relate to my imagination and the way that I relate to story in general.

[00:19:51] And I highly recommend if you didn't have a grandmother that you were close with or if you didn't have a grandmother period, that happens, to go and find yourself one or many, because that will change your life. Notoriously, there's a lot of grandmothers looking for surrogate grandchildren, and specifically granddaughters. So, find your own Baba Yaga, learn from them, learn other ways to be and learn what a lifetime of being has brought them and learn to look at the world through their eyes.

[00:20:27] And, you know, be picky like don't, don't get the grandmother who's going to throw you in the oven and eat you, right? If you know Spirited Away, don't get Yubaba, you know, get Zeniba. Get the grandmother that will model kindness for you and model patience for you and model love for you. And they exist, you know, I've met so many of them and I still have some today. Like I keep finding new grandmothers to add to my list because I adore them and because I, I need them and because I'm not ready myself to be an elder. When my grandmother died, I thought, wow, I'm now the oldest woman on this side of the family and that was a sobering thought. And I thought I better hold on to my grandmas until I'm ready to be in the role myself. And until I have enough community around me that I know that I'll be okay in this role and I'm still building that. But I have trust that I have all the tools to get there.

[00:21:36] And so you will hear me again in two weeks. I'm not sure yet which guest will be with me because I have something in mind that I want to try to make happen and if I can, then that will be that. And if I can't, then that will be something else. So I can't announce it. That will be a surprise. And in the meantime, I'm just gonna list the names of all or many of my grandmothers.

[00:22:06] Just to bring them into the space.

[00:22:09] Mijulie, Elena, Jaly, Tante Jacqueline, Tanti Nic, Tante Frisquette, Miou Miou, Manine, Mary, Margaret, Lilias, Ann, Rose, Teresa, Renata, Arline, Bubbles and all the others that I've met since.

[00:22:31] May you find you own many grandmothers and carry them close to your heart.