My Mother’s Mother: Who Is The Victim Again?
My mother’s mother, Elsie Jayne Taylor Naylor, was an interesting woman, who also had a remarkable faith in God. She passed that down to all of us who came after her, including my mother.
She was also a remarkably practical woman in many more ways than I knew when she was alive. If you had known her, you might have been tempted to dismiss her as a simple country woman who didn’t know much about the world.
One would have been mistaken, to make that assessment.
One of my favorite stories about my Grandmother and her three girls,
involved times that nearly any parent would be familiar with. Most likely in every family, there comes a day, maybe many, in which the child comes home, angry and outraged, over some hurt inflicted by a fellow classmate. I’m sure that sometimes, perhaps often, the child in question really was wronged.
Apparently, at these moments, when one of her daughters came home, angry and complaining over something a classmate or neighborhood child had “done to her,” my Grandmother would listen to her daughter carefully and completely, while the child “spoke her piece.” Then my Grandmother would look her daughter in the eye, and ask the question of questions:
“Yes, but what did MY little girl do?”
The obvious implication there, that my mother, at least, understood
instantly, was that when someone treats us badly, very often we have
contributed to this, in some way. The idea too, I believe, was that we are not to think of ourselves as being victims, but as participants in a
situation, and rather than surrounding ourselves with hurt and resentment, a more productive use of our time and energy would be to
examine ourselves and what WE brought to the situation.
I think my grandmother knew that, and tried to teach it to us all. I wish you could have known her, and that everyone could have a grandmother and mother as wonderful as mine.
I was well into adulthood before I understood fully how lucky I am.
Someday I hope to be a mom, and to have the opportunity to share the
wealth of wisdom I learned from these two strong women, and so many
other interesting people in our family.
