Wow! Slapdash typology 101! It's 4 AM and I'm writing without paying attention. Tomorrow I will come back to this and realize my usually high level of spelling and grammatical errors has merged and become some hybridized not-English.
Mother and Aunt - Enneagram 2s (direction of disintegration is toward 8):
--focus is often wrapped up in pleasing others, with the hope of love and validation returned.Grandmother - Enneagram 8:
As an 8 parent you can be too strong and definite. You sound out your commands and lack patience.For as long as I can remember, my mother has hated my grandmother. Loved her, I guess, but hated her. Hated her decisive reductionism, hated her indifferent criticism, hated the outright contempt for my mother's significant others. My grandmother once called my mother's significant other of six years an alcoholic. It wasn't true, exactly, but it sure struck close enough. My mother, sobbing horrendously the whole time - threw my grandmother's things into her car - suitcase half zipped - and very nearly made her begin the drive home to Edmonton that very night. Twelve hours driving in the dark. All of 9 years old, I was camped out eating ice cream in the living room, on the edge of my seat. I sure hoped I could still go back with her for the summer holiday's like it had been arranged I would. Grandma was 21 years old when she had her first child, I said to my Aunt yesterday. And in the 1940's - god - I can't
imagine-- hell,
I'm 21. Yes, but she was very selfish, my Aunt says. My Aunt and I are eating lunch at the aquarium. I watch the whales drifting massively over the bottom of their tank. My grandmother is losing her mind now, and she'll die soon. These things happen. Even still, I wonder how it is for them - my mother, my aunt. No one ever says what it was my grandmother
did.
Me - Enneagram 5
A 2 wants to please and expects repayment of appreciation and emotion, yet a 5 is typically private and skeptical of someone who gives too much, which can feel invasive to them. This couple is fraught with misinterpretations and disappointments. For as long as I can remember, my mother and I have been nothing more than carefully kind to each other. She told me when I was 16, in a fit of anger, to get out. In the morning you go, she said. I'll go now, I said. And I did go. I never really came back. This divergence has left us strangely relieved. I, relieved to no longer have someone trying to
mother me all the time, and she, relieved that she has not alienated me entirely, I think, the way her mother did her. I used to do all the wrong things - headstands on the couch, screaming my fear in the hall at night until my mother would lock my in my room to scream entirely alone. I never finished the last two bites of dinner, no matter what it was. Drove her crazy. I used to ask my mother, twice a day, three times: when's Daddy Day? When you're five years old, 'Friday' means nothing - someone needs to tell you, "Three sleeps" or else you're pretty sure it'll never come.
When's Daddy Day? When's Daddy Day? I think, with sadness yet without remorse, of how badly that question must have hurt her. Every. Single. Time.
5s and 8s often do well together. 5s admire 8s directness. This is refreshing for 5s, who spend too much time thinking before acting.For as long as I can remember my grandmother and I have been the only two relatives in our close family that we both seem to like. Like, though, is a ridiculous word. Now respect-- there, that's it. She tells me my skin's gotten bad - "those hormones, I had 'em too" - and offers to sew me a dress for back to school. She knows "the kids today wear all that fancy stuff from those stores in the mall" - she doesn't care. She wants to sew me a dress. She drags me - 14 years old and indifferent to everything - into a fabric store, where we haul through the rolls of fabric for hours. My grandmother is 4'9". I have to help her drag the floral prints down from a higher rack. At her small retirement flat she sticks me with straight pins and comments on the wide set of my waist, which I am grievously aware is out of proportion with my skinny limbs. I am 14 and secretly becoming anorexic and I tear myself away from her, getting stuck with another pin. I leave, trouncing, and come back with a donut from the shop down the road. She takes me by the arm and guides me back towards the sewing table. "I can't eat any of that shop food - allergic to the yeast they use." My grandmother was one of 17 children. She was molested by her uncle. For decades she has insisted she is allergic to everything. I'm scared all the time and I feel so ugly and I'm beginning to believe my only hope is to be thin. She continues her measurements. No one apologizes.