I have always had a love-hate relationship with my grandmother.

I do love her, but I absolutely cannot stand to be around her for more than a day. I have been practicing letting go of my ego, but I think anyone other than a Zen master would probably have some reaction at being criticized nonstop. I am not always proud of my reactions, which can be pretty sarcastic and caustic. Now that we’re going on five days, it’s getting pretty gnarly. The truth is that while I’d like to think I’ve accepted the reality of how it is between us, it still brings up enormous sadness in me. I guess the suffering is in the fact that I long for a relationship with her that is not fraught with constant tension and mutual misery-making. Of course, I don’t expect to change my grandmother. I just keep thinking that maybe I will change. I always thought that maybe if I practiced enough, that maybe I could be different around her, thus provoking a different dynamic. But everything I think I’ve ever learned from my practice just goes out the window when I am in her presence. It’s sort of shocking and scary, but also illuminating because I see just how much anger and rage I still carry within, which is not always so apparent to me on a day-to-day basis.

I guess it’s like Ram Dass says, “If you ever think you’re enlightened, spend a week with your parents.”

To be fair, there have been some tolerable and maybe even borderline nice moments with her this week. It hasn’t been entirely hellish, and tonight I did have to acknowledge that it could be much worse. Maybe I am being too hard on myself; maybe it would be ten times scarier if I didn’t have a practice. While there have been lots of unskillful moments that I am not proud of, there have also been many times that I have taken a deep breath and kept my mouth shut. Or said what I wanted to say in a voice that she could not hear, which is not very hard considering that she is mostly deaf at this point. There’s not much need to mutter things under your breath.

Ugh. I can’t cry about it, so I just laugh. It’s sad, it feels awful, blah blah blah, but the truth is that it is just like this and that’s that. I just don’t have a warm and fuzzy relationship with the woman who raised me and maybe someday it will change, but for now this is what we’ve got. And I know from experience that when she departs this earth–if it is before me–all this stuff that I am so annoyed and angry about will just disappear and what I will mostly remember will be the things I loved about her, of which there are many.

Here’s to surviving the next two days!