On Grandmothers, Mental Illness, and Peanut Butter Sandwiches 

by Micaela Walley

On the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, I woke up with my pants on backwards. A flurry of well wishes lit up my phone screen as I squinted at the time: 4:30 AM. I needed to pee, and set out to cross our darkened bedroom, stumbling on one of my boyfriend’s stray slippers, and eventually made my way to the bathroom. I was greeted by a forward-facing tag sticking straight out of my snowflake pajama pants. Funny, I thought. On the day I was born, my grandmother put my first diaper on backwards. This is a memory that has been mentioned to me dozens of times by family members who witnessed it. Little did they know that I would make it twenty-five whole years since that day, maintaining that inability to dress myself properly. 

***

My grandmother is dying, and I’ve known this for a while. The women in my family live forever, and she is nearing the end of hers. At eighty-five, dementia has left her in a permanent state of confusion. She is legally blind and has lost most of her hearing as well. When she speaks, it is slurred and stuttered. I know she would want me to call her so that she could wish me a happy birthday. She is unable to operate her own phone—she knows how to answer it but cannot see clearly enough to dial any numbers. I consider calling her—I really do—but I just can’t bring myself to do it. 

***

When I was born, the doctors told my parents that there was a chance I would have significant deficits. It was immediately clear that something was wrong with my eyes and the way they moved. One would often get stuck, making me appear cross-eyed. They thought I had some disorder that would prevent me from seeing and hearing and, eventually, learning. It turned out I just had a paralyzed muscle in my left eye. They did a small surgery to relieve some of the pressure on the muscle. It didn’t entirely fix it, but it gave me enough mobility to appear “normal”—however, there are still certain directions that I simply cannot look.

***

At five years old, I developed my first mental illness: trichotillomania, a hair-pulling disorder that causes me to have intense, unwavering impulses to pull out my own hair. It is complicated, both in experiencing and in explaining to other people—the word itself being entirely too long for a five-year-old to say. The disorder caused me to pull out my eyelashes almost every day until they were all gone. It’s unknown if the disorder is genetic or not, but I only know two other people in my life who also have it: my mother, and my grandmother. 

***

It is suggested by some that most cases of trichotillomania are caused as a trauma response, similar to how certain birds will pluck their own feathers as a response to high stress situations. There are hardly any verified facts to give about the disorder because of how under-researched it is. This isn’t because it is rare. In fact, there are over 200,000 reported cases of trichotillomania each year. The problem is that the disorder’s main symptom is the deep-rooted shame that its sufferers experience as a result. It has never been the act of hair-pulling that has bothered me about the disorder, but the fear of others finding out that I do it. It isn’t like other mental illnesses, which are hidden in the depths of your mind. I wear my mental illness on my face—and when people look at me, they are looking directly at it. 

***

Our shared hair pulling disorder was never discussed. I saw my grandmother pull at her eyebrows while crocheting a blanket. I saw my mother pull at her eyelashes during long rides, one hand remaining on the steering wheel. And then I saw myself, face to face with the mirror, making my eyelids bleed from too much tweezing. I suppose most people would at least mention this to their loved ones, but we never did. Our shared shame for what we did to ourselves in private became a code of honor—like, when we are together, we maintain the unspoken rule of pretending we are entirely “normal.”

***

We are not entirely “normal.” Along with this niche mental illness, we also all three suffer from depression and anxiety. My grandmother was once married to a man who walked around their home using a cane with which he routinely beat her. Often, neighbors were called because they heard screaming coming from their home. She never talks about this time in her life, but my aunts and uncles have mentioned pieces of it to me over the years. Despite the abuse, her own mother encouraged her to stay married for appearances. But something internal compelled her to go against tradition. She divorced that man, married my grandfather, and birthed my mother, who would eventually birth me. 

***

At a certain point, we stopped telling my grandmother things—assuming her mental and physical illnesses had rendered her too weary to handle our daily dramas. Her understanding of my life stopped around the eighth grade. She has only a basic knowledge of where I went to college, what I studied, and my small career accomplishments. She knows that I moved very far away and that she hasn’t seen me in a while. This makes phone conversations especially difficult because she doesn’t know what to ask me about, or how to hold a conversation with me anymore. Often, she brings up a small memory—like when I was very little, and would take baths with her, sliding down her large chest with my bare butt like a child might slide into a swimming pool. I can only imagine, now, the kind of love necessary of someone to allow a child to do something like that. 

***

To be fair, I don’t know much about my grandmother either. As my mother struggled out of her original marriage and into her next one, we moved into my grandmother’s home for a little while. I spent most of my youth running around, wreaking havoc on my grandmother’s peace of mind while my mother was at work. My grandmother rarely said no to me—I was allowed full access to her kitchen, encouraged to make my own snacks even if that turned into peanut butter sandwiches with sprinkles on top. I rode my bike in her hallway and bedroom because she was too afraid of letting me go outside. We would play a game called “nap pads,” which involved me bringing out every towel and rag that she owned, lining them up on the floor like sleeping bags, and tucking all of my stuffed animals in for a nap. She would then turn off all the lights in her home and we would both sit in silence as they slept. 

***

I have plenty of memories with my grandmother in them, but few actually of her—no key piece of advice to cling to, no inside joke that we shared. I never got the chance to get to know her as a person beyond experiencing the depths of her love as a grandmother. She was, and remains, a small yet steady presence in my life. As a child of divorce, with a socially debilitating mental illness, I relied heavily on her to be a source of happiness and comfort whenever I needed it. I know that if I called her right now, despite all of her ailments, she would find a way to pick up the phone. Even with our distanced relationship, it is hard for me to imagine a world—a reality, very soon—without that option being available to me.

*** 

I am highly aware of my own age and how fast these first twenty-five years have felt. When I am eighty-five, I know I will wish for answers to thousands of questions from her. However, we currently live around fifteen hours away from each other. I’ve recently started a new job and am working on my master’s degree. I’m thinking about starting my own family. We both know, I think, that I am exactly where I need to be right now. However, whenever we do speak, I am stifled into silence by her only question— “When will I see you next?”—because the answer is simple: She probably won’t. 

***

A few years before I would stop telling my grandmother things, I called her after school to complain about my mom. She was the only one who understood my mother as well as I did. My mother was harsh when it came to my schoolwork and insisted on my success as a student, largely because of her loss of similar opportunities due to marrying young and having me. I cried to my grandmother, confessing that I’d done a poor job on a math test that day. She comforted me as a grandmother does, and her compassion gave me the courage I needed in order to show my mom my test grade. It didn’t matter what my mother said to me, what punishment was ahead. In the back of my mind, I knew my grandmother saw my side of things, that someone on this planet knew I wasn’t entirely a waste of space for not understanding pre-algebra. 

***

My grandmother was hard on my mom, and my mom was hard on me. I think I am hard on my younger sister. We have this passed down—the generational hardness that makes us hold the ones we love most to extremely high standards. I was perhaps one of the only people who saw the soft side of my grandmother, unveiling what the soft side of myself could look like if I, too, were to reveal it. Despite her hardened parts, she holds within herself a relentless will to love and be loved. I think this may be within me as well.  

***

So much of my life has felt a little off, a little pants-on-backwards. When we moved out of my grandmother’s home, I remember feeling displaced—as if no longer belonging in my grandmother’s home had left me with no other place to go. So much would happen between now and then, shifting my personhood and challenging me to build a life for myself beyond putting sprinkles on sandwiches. I guess I eventually figured it out, but I’m still not entirely certain. If my family history holds true, I have my own small forever to spend figuring it out. I cannot pick up the phone and call my grandmother, but this is not because I don’t want to speak to her. It is because I don’t want to have to say goodbye. 

Micaela Walley is an MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore. Her work can be found in Huffpost, Hobart, and Longleaf Review, among other places. She currently lives in Hanover, Maryland with her best friend—Chunky, the cat.