All I did all my childhood was visit grandparents. When my mother was alive, she spent a lot of time with me while my father worked, and when she was gone, my father still did not find time for me. But he found a new wife very quickly, and my mother for me. Samantha was a beautiful twenty-year-old who needed a place to live and Daddy’s money, and didn’t like kids at all, because she was still a kid herself at the time. She told me to call her “Auntie” in front of people she knew, and to lie to strangers that we were sisters. I don’t know what she told my father about me, but he always looked at me with a frown, finding reasons to scold me and threatening to take me away to the village to my grandmother. He so often frightened me with this, not realizing that I myself would gladly go there.
My grandmother was a wonderful and very funny woman. I learned so many funny rhymes and ditties from her, which even at thirty is pleasant to remember and to tell my children or to hum. She also loved me very much. She always had time for me, just like my mother, and summer was her best time. So in fifth grade, I asked my grandmother to convince my father to give me to her.
– How are you going to get to your school from here? – Grandma wondered. – We’ll have to transfer you to our village school. Would that suit you?
I was willing to do anything to avoid living with Samantha.
So we did. Dad happily left me to live with my grandmother, but he only sent us money so that we had enough for everything. He and my grandmother argued over the phone a lot, and she scolded him for not thinking about me at all, saying that Samantha would set him up one day, but Dad didn’t believe it. Meanwhile, I had grown up, went to technical school, and moved back to the city. I got a job, and with it opportunities, I was able to take my beloved grandmother from the village to a nice rented apartment. She was the first to hear about my young man and the only relative at the modest wedding, because neither Dad nor Samantha could come. They were both so surprised when I called. Samantha didn’t even recognize me from my voice. And my dad just modestly congratulated me and said he had things to do.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I had always known that Daddy had just traded me in for a woman, but as a little girl I didn’t understand it. Now I do, but I’m not angry. All thanks to my grandmother, who took on her fragile shoulders my upbringing and raised me instead of my parents, never making me feel deprived of anything.
I hope all children who grow up in similar circumstances have or will have someone like my grandmother. Sometimes it’s so much better that way than in a family where no one needs you.
