kittydesade: (sweet pea)
Gaeilge )

Oof. Sometimes I forget that emotional stress leaves me exhausted and needing more sleep as much as physical stress, and I should allow for that. Not much done this morning, but at least I'm kind of muscling through, and now the weekend's almost here. And then I can rest.

Still no real plans as far as the main cause of all the upset, but I've got some good advice and some good thinking to do. And I've got stuff I can do in the meantime, like, um, all that writing I need to finish up. Catch up on TV shows, I'm all caught up on Haven now and A;FDGHDF;AGJHDF;AGJKDFHAG;KJDFAGHD'FGIAG. I want to knock the two main boys' heads together. And then give them lots of hugs. Also, the Rev's a psycho. I mean, we knew that from his first appearance, but damn. Psy-cho. So, watching. Rewatching. I've hit the weird headspace where everything's sort of floaty and I'm coasting along on routine and things I know I should do but have to put all my focus to doing. Languages. Exercise. More focused exercise may happen tonight, this morning was sort of drifty.

So was the conversation on the way in about my mother's family, which I share with you now, as it is mostly more distant and more along the lines of 'oh, interesting' than 'augh my formative experiences based on WHAT?' Mother's mother's father, I think it was, is from the Ukraine? (or Lithuania), and was hid under a butcher's shop in a group of about fifteen kids while the pogrom went through. In the end, after everyone was shuttled onto ships over to America, only three to five kids survived. Mother's mother's mother married young, but then her husband died of tuberculosis and she moved back home only to discover that her father died and her brother had taken over as head of household, whereupon she was so incensed by this that she went after him with a kitchen knife. Wacky fun. And this explains quite a bit about my mother's mother's female relatives, really, considering that when I was very very little and they were still alive they all struck me as very, very scary and very angry people. I only saw them maybe twice, maybe a few times more? But Grandmaman took me to visit them in the nursing home/hospice/thing and we wheeled her around in a chair and she scared the crap out of me. I don't remember if it was mother's mother's mother, or mother's mother's mother's sister who spent most of someone's wedding ranting that the family was trying to kill her. I have such a wacky family sometimes. But again, this is more distant past stuff. I put it here to remember it. I think I've even mentioned this before, I know I've mentioned pogrom stuff.

(Hah, okay, looking back on some of these tags, yes, I did.)

And since the universe is not in the habit of handing out breaks, I get to deal with more personal shit today. No, nobody's hurt or sick or dying or anything in my immediate sphere, but there is emotional upset from the boy for perfectly understandable reasons, I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to tell and how much I'm not. We'll leave it at, emotionally rough stuff is going on at work that is no one's fault and just tragic and hard. A couple of days where nothing significant happens and we all get to sit around and watch TV would not go amiss, world. Just saying.
kittydesade: (priestess)
Huh.

I'm not sure how to react to the story (stories) I've just heard other than that. As always, learning about my family history from my aunt takes me a bit of time to digest.

The subject started with a woman who came into the store today about my age (apparently) and with three kids, digressed through no way am I giving my Mom any grandchildren anytime soon, and somehow managed to wind up into family history. I learned, several months ago actually, that my great grandmother, my mother's mother's mother, was a (Russian? I believe) Jew, or married to one. Or perhaps it was my mother's mother's father... yes, it was my mother's mother's father, I think (will confirm with Aunt) who was a Russian Jew who was hidden under a butcher's? floor, someone's floor, and smuggled to the United States.

My mother's mother's mother, whatever her country of origin, was also apparently subject to the influence of the pogroms. She either came over to this country or was born to immigrants, of that I'm fairly certain. It's my mother's father's mother's family, at the very least, that's been in this country for some time. And from what Aunt E tells me, she wasn't a very pleasant woman. I remember visiting her when I was very very young and she was in the nursing home, and she scared the living daylights out of me. I remember my grandmother and I pushing her around in a wheelchair. Aunt E says she died young, which, for our family, probably means in her sixties. The nursing home staff said there wasn't anything significantly wrong with her, she was just unpleasant and hated her life and everyone around her, and possibly she simply didn't want to live any longer. My possibly, not the staff's.

She said that when Great Grandma D had Grandma, that she went into some sort of post-partum depression (or what we would call post-partum depression now) and shut herself in her room for a week, and Great Great Aunt? C had to take care of the baby. And then when Great Grandma D came out of her fit she accused Great Aunt C of trying to steal her husband and her baby and my Grandma didn't see her aunts for 8 or 9 years. They had them over for dinner, Great Grandpa D and my Great Grandmum, and she refused to cook for her sisters. So Great Grandpa D went and got some things from the delicatessen and Great Grandma D made a great show of cutting a single blintz or something into thirds and serving it to them.

From what Aunt E says Great Grandma D was just a woman who never liked life, the world, or the people in it very much at all. Which fits with the only other story I have of her, which if I remember right was at my uncle's wedding (the first one, not the second one), where she accused everyone of trying to kill her. Just a generally unpleasant woman.

The other thing Aunt E said, and I didn't manage to catch enough of it in my memory to figure out whose sentiment this was, was that my mother's mother's parents' generation, siblings and so on (and I'm guessing this was either mother's mother's father or mother's mother's mother's siblings) were just utterly baffled as to why anyone would feel that way about them, want to do such things to them. The pogroms, I mean.

I should remember more of this more often.

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December 2023

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