Page 36 of Not My Problem

“What are you saying?”

A flash of pain crossed her face. “I’m saying that I love you Gretchen, but I can’t be with you if this is how it’s going to be. I need to be an equal partner in this relationship, not another project you take on.”

She gave me a searching look before she continued, “I know that you learned at an early age that your value was to be as useful as possible to the people around you. But I learned at an early age how to be resilient and take care of things myself. We can’t have it both ways.”

“But…”

“When you’re ready to be a girlfriend instead of a care taker, give me a call. Until then, I think it’s best for us to spend some time apart.”

“I… I don’t understand.”

A mix of emotions was rushing through me: confusion, hurt, and anger. I grabbed onto the last one with both hands.

“Fine, if that’s how you feel, have a nice life.”

Then I stormed off.

Zoe

“You miss her, don’t you?”

I looked up from my bowl of cereal to find my grandmother studying me.

“Yeah, I do.” No sense lying about it.

“Have you heard anything from her?”

I shook my head. “Not a peep.”

It had been two weeks since our fight on Grandma’s porch and Gretchen had made no effort to reach out to me. I’d almost gone over there a dozen times but stopped myself. Our relationship didn’t have a chance of working out if she couldn’t recognize the power imbalance between us, and she needed to come to that realization herself.

Not that it was all her fault. In the beginning, I relished the feeling of someone taking care of me for a change. I’d grown up mostly taking care of myself and my unstable mother. But after a while Gretchen’s caretaking became stifling. Infantilizing. It had been bothering me for a while, even before she called my boss and tried to interfere with my job.

The money thing in particular was aggravating. I’d been picking up quite a few shifts at the shelter and making decent money, especially given that I was living at Jan’s house for free. Yet every time we went somewhere Gretchen made a big deal about paying. I make more money, it’s only fair, she’d say. A few days before the incident at the shelter I’d grabbed a restaurant check before she could get it and paid the bill. Not only had she seemed annoyed about it, later that night I caught her sticking forty bucks into my bag to make up for it.

Grandma slid into the chair across from me, pulling me out of my thoughts. “Maybe you should go over there.”

I shook my head.

“You know it’s funny,” Grandma continued. “This almost reminds me of when your grandfather and I first got married. You know he was a district attorney, so he encountered a lot of nasty things at work.”

“I bet.”

“He’d come home obviously upset about things he’d seen at work and when I tried to talk to him, he’d tell me I didn’t need to worry about it. He practically patted me on the head and told me to be quiet like a good girl.”

“What happened?”

“I told him that a relationship needed two way communication and that spouses shouldn’t have secrets. I told him I understood that due to confidentiality he couldn’t give me the details of his cases, but as his wife, I wanted to hear about his feelings,” she said. “Your grandfather thought feelings was a bad word. He’d been raised to be the strong silent type, the caretaker for us silly women who couldn’t handle terrible things. But eventually I broke him down, and our relationship became stronger when he stopped trying to protect me from things and started talking to me as an equal.”

“Maybe it was never meant to work out,” I said. “I kind of latched onto Gretchen early on. I was sleeping in her house, eating her food, watching her television, and she seemed good with it, but it reinforced that I’m younger and more immature and helpless.”

Grandma laughed. “You’re the farthest thing from helpless there is, baby girl. You remind me of your mother, you know. She was strong and smart and independent like you.”

“I think she lost a lot of that along the way,” I said softly, remembering all the times she’d latched on to whatever guy she thought was going to be ‘the one’ and make her life better.

“Addiction is a horrible disease,” she acknowledged. “Ever since you contacted me I’ve wondered could I have done more? When the private investigator found her, what if I’d gone to Chicago, knocked on her door, demanded to talk? Maybe I could have helped her get into treatment. If I’d done more than send a couple of letters I didn’t even know if she received, I wouldn’t have lost all those years with her. And with you. But addiction or not, I’m sure your mother loved you, even if she couldn’t always show it.”

I thought back to the times when Mom was sober. The times we’d go to the movies for the matinee and once we watched the movie we paid for we’d sneak into other theaters to see more movies. The times she’d get a good paycheck and we’d go thrifting together, trying on clothes for each other like we were at some fancy boutique instead of the local Goodwill. The way she’d buy me Hostess cupcakes for my birthday and stick a candle in it while she sang the Happy Birthday song.