My jaw's been broken/my heart is wrapped in ice
Hey, remember when I posted about my grandma finding out something that none of us told her? And joked that if she had us bugged, we'd be screwed?
Well, she did. And we are.
My grandmother has been intercepting a portion of my mother's e-mail and reading it. She's been doing this for almost exactly seven months now, as far as we can tell. My mom knew that her e-mail was screwed up, because people would mention e-mails they'd sent her and she wouldn't have gotten them, but we found out yesterday morning that they weren't just disappearing into cyberspace -- they were being pulled off the server by my grandmother, almost always in the wee hours of the morning.
She found out about the first thing that I mentioned, as well as several other pieces of news that family members had but hadn't made completely public yet. And she clearly found out about the mini-quilt that I made her as a surprise. She acted surprised. Mom and I went through all the e-mail I'd sent to her, and figured out which ones had never made it there; we looked at what they said and put several things together.
I've known for three years about how fundamentally dishonest -- no, how fundamentally maliciously mendacious -- she is. She's a liar, and has been as long as my mother and aunt have known her. She lies for the pleasure of lying, and sneaks around in order to gain information and power, and in order to try to turn others against each other and thus toward her.
She's violated my mother's privacy before. So much so that to speak of "my mother's privacy" barely means anything. But this is the first time, as far as I know, that she's violated mine. She intercepted at least seven messages from me to my mom.
I've always been sympathetic to my mom's situation with regards to her. I've tried to imagine what it feels like, but the difference between imagining and knowing is like the difference between imagining what cotton candy tastes like and actually tasting it. Now I can empathize, to a small degree.
Because of my grandmother (and grandfather), my mom raised all her kids with the utmost respect of our privacy, and our right to have our own lives. So in a lot of ways, I'm really lucky to have gotten this far in life without feeling violated in this way, and I owe that to my mom.
I'm also starting to understand better the extent to which my grandmother lies. She doesn't tell lies -- she acts them out, expresses emotion around them, shapes her whole daily experience around them. She gasped when I showed her the quilt, when she'd already heard several things about it, including the design I was using. She knows about several things we've been keeping from her, acting like she doesn't, and baiting us, trying to get us to slip up. She'll say things that she knows aren't true in hopes that we'll correct her with the real information. She has actually repeated things that my mom said in e-mails to me, saying that Mom had said them to her. While it was uncanny at the time, it is now sad and grotesque.
Instead of changing the password of my mom's e-mail account, or confronting her, or passive-agressively confronting her through an e-mail we know she'll intercept, we are embarking on what we've termed a "disinformation campaign." She wants to read our e-mails? She's welcome to, although we're not to blame if much of them turn out to be fiction.
It's already in motion. She's already intercepted a creative e-mail. She thinks we're clueless. And when I talked to her on the phone tonight, I think I got a taste of what her existence is like. She thinks she knows so many things I don't. She thinks she's toying with me, controlling me, spying on me. She thinks that she can be chipper and pleasant and that I am none the wiser.
Hey, remember when I posted about my grandma finding out something that none of us told her? And joked that if she had us bugged, we'd be screwed?
Well, she did. And we are.
My grandmother has been intercepting a portion of my mother's e-mail and reading it. She's been doing this for almost exactly seven months now, as far as we can tell. My mom knew that her e-mail was screwed up, because people would mention e-mails they'd sent her and she wouldn't have gotten them, but we found out yesterday morning that they weren't just disappearing into cyberspace -- they were being pulled off the server by my grandmother, almost always in the wee hours of the morning.
She found out about the first thing that I mentioned, as well as several other pieces of news that family members had but hadn't made completely public yet. And she clearly found out about the mini-quilt that I made her as a surprise. She acted surprised. Mom and I went through all the e-mail I'd sent to her, and figured out which ones had never made it there; we looked at what they said and put several things together.
I've known for three years about how fundamentally dishonest -- no, how fundamentally maliciously mendacious -- she is. She's a liar, and has been as long as my mother and aunt have known her. She lies for the pleasure of lying, and sneaks around in order to gain information and power, and in order to try to turn others against each other and thus toward her.
She's violated my mother's privacy before. So much so that to speak of "my mother's privacy" barely means anything. But this is the first time, as far as I know, that she's violated mine. She intercepted at least seven messages from me to my mom.
I've always been sympathetic to my mom's situation with regards to her. I've tried to imagine what it feels like, but the difference between imagining and knowing is like the difference between imagining what cotton candy tastes like and actually tasting it. Now I can empathize, to a small degree.
Because of my grandmother (and grandfather), my mom raised all her kids with the utmost respect of our privacy, and our right to have our own lives. So in a lot of ways, I'm really lucky to have gotten this far in life without feeling violated in this way, and I owe that to my mom.
I'm also starting to understand better the extent to which my grandmother lies. She doesn't tell lies -- she acts them out, expresses emotion around them, shapes her whole daily experience around them. She gasped when I showed her the quilt, when she'd already heard several things about it, including the design I was using. She knows about several things we've been keeping from her, acting like she doesn't, and baiting us, trying to get us to slip up. She'll say things that she knows aren't true in hopes that we'll correct her with the real information. She has actually repeated things that my mom said in e-mails to me, saying that Mom had said them to her. While it was uncanny at the time, it is now sad and grotesque.
Instead of changing the password of my mom's e-mail account, or confronting her, or passive-agressively confronting her through an e-mail we know she'll intercept, we are embarking on what we've termed a "disinformation campaign." She wants to read our e-mails? She's welcome to, although we're not to blame if much of them turn out to be fiction.
It's already in motion. She's already intercepted a creative e-mail. She thinks we're clueless. And when I talked to her on the phone tonight, I think I got a taste of what her existence is like. She thinks she knows so many things I don't. She thinks she's toying with me, controlling me, spying on me. She thinks that she can be chipper and pleasant and that I am none the wiser.
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