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by houseboat_Archive
I have a lot of respect for my Grandmother.
She was a nurse during WWII and got married to a South African man she met at some point while he was posted in England, and ended up moving out there in about 1948. She's never spoken to me about it, but I gather from my Mum that she was very lonely, horrified by the racism, and generally homesick.
Her husband, my Grandfather, I guess, was an alcoholic, and lost his medical license under odd circumstances; he was performing abortions, which were illegal at that point, and a girl died either in my grandparents' home, or after visiting their home for the procedure. He ended up in prison, and spent time in and out of jail in Johannesburg, drinking himself to death. He was an abusive man, numerous affairs, violent, you know.
While all this was going on, she gave birth to my Mother and my Uncle. Some time after my Grandfather's release from his first prison sentence, she decided she'd had enough, got the kids, drove across the country, and got passage home. She got divorced in 1953, and raised her kids on her own. She never heard from my Grandfather again, but got a letter from a neighbour informing her of his death in the mid 60s.
She took up work as a nurse again, put my Mum through college, and supported my Uncle during his long periods of manic depression, looking after him. Maybe that should be 'putting up with him' - she isn't a strong woman, your matriarch type. She buries her head in the sand, keeps out of things. The kind of behaviour you'd expect from a woman who'd been abused by her husband many, many miles from home, and who'd never had things work out well.
But that being said, in 1971, after her parents died, she used the little money she was left to go to America for a month, travelling across the country by Greyhound and seeing the sights. Ten years later she would take a trip to the USSR with her local woman's group. Their trip was cut short when the invasion of Afghanistan began, but when she speaks about it she seems pretty excited.
She has also, in her spare time, studied every major religious text. She can quote the Bible, the Koran and the Baghavad Gita at enormous length. She nearly died a couple of years ago from swelling of the brain after an infection, but she pulled through. After she came out she couldn't figure out crosswords anymore (she did various crosswords every single day), but she seems to have picked up again and does them with increasing regularity.
So salut to my Grandmother. It's pretty cool to come through so many times, eventually.
Sorry if that was longwinded. I just started thinking. The stories in this thread are extraordinary.