Sable Monroe

Before I Learned to Dethrone My Mother, My Grandmother Put Me on a Pedestal

I’ve been thinking about the way I protect myself.

I have this ability to mentally dethrone people.

Someone can matter enormously to me. I can love them, respect them, admire them, even give their opinion considerable weight. But if they cross certain lines with me, particularly if I feel degraded, intimidated, or deliberately harmed, something changes.

The pedestal disappears.

Sometimes violently.

Suddenly I can see every flaw. Every contradiction. Every weakness I previously overlooked because I loved them.

I used to think I simply developed that ability because I needed it.

But recently I realized something.

You cannot dethrone somebody unless you have somewhere else to stand.

And my grandmother gave me somewhere to stand.

My Mother Wasn’t the Only Person Telling Me Who I Was

My maternal grandmother thought I was wonderful.

I mean wonderful.

In Grandma’s eyes, I was smart. I was pretty. I was special. I was a princess.

I could practically do no wrong.

Was that an objectively balanced assessment of my childhood self?

Probably not.

Do I care?

Absolutely the fuck not.

Every child should have at least one person who looks at them like somebody hung the moon specifically for their arrival.

Grandma was mine.

And there’s an irony here that makes me laugh now.

This wasn’t some unrelated adult contradicting my mother’s assessment of me.

This was my mother’s mother.

As a child, Grandma outranked everybody.

If my mother was telling me one thing about myself and the woman who created my mother was telling me something else, well…

Sorry, Mom.

Management has spoken.

Grandma Had Credibility

There was another reason I believed her.

Grandma’s world made more sense to me.

Her house was quieter.

It felt safer.

There were resources.

I didn’t worry about whether there would be food.

Breakfast happened early in the morning. Dinner could be on the table around five or five-thirty in the evening.

There was order.

Predictability.

Things happened when they were supposed to happen.

And children notice competence even when they don’t have a word for it.

I certainly wasn’t sitting there conducting a psychological evaluation of the adults around me.

I was a child.

But I could observe.

One environment felt chaotic.

Another felt stable.

One adult made me feel diminished.

Another made me feel precious.

So when those two adults offered competing versions of who I was, why wouldn’t I choose the version offered by the person whose world felt safer?

Grandma said I was smart.

I believed her.

Grandma said I was pretty.

I believed her.

Grandma treated me like I was valuable.

I believed that too.

Most importantly, I liked her version of me better.

So I kept it.

That’s Where the Ego Came From

I’ve joked before that my ego has probably saved me from some terrible situations.

I’m not joking anymore.

I think it actually has.

There have been moments in my adult life when somebody tried to intimidate, humiliate, or diminish me, and instead of automatically thinking,

Maybe they’re right about me,

something else happened.

I looked at them and thought:

Who the fuck are you?

That’s a very different psychological response.

My self-esteem doesn’t always make me gracious.

Sometimes it makes me arrogant.

Sometimes arrogance has made it extraordinarily easy for me to walk away from people.

I’m okay with that.

Because when someone is trying to make me smaller, there is already a part of me that fundamentally rejects the premise.

You can’t convince me I’m worthless when somebody important got to me first.

Grandma got there first.

I Needed That to Dethrone My Mother

My mother had enormous psychological power simply because she was my mother.

Children don’t begin life evaluating their parents like other adults.

Mom is Mom.

Her opinions matter.

Her approval matters.

Her rejection matters.

Her version of you can become your version of yourself.

Except mine had competition.

My mother could tell me something was wrong with me.

Grandma had already told me something was right with me.

My mother could make me feel unwanted.

I already knew what it felt like to be delighted in.

My mother could behave as though I wasn’t particularly valuable.

I had already lived somewhere where I was treated like I was.

That gave me something incredibly important:

contradictory evidence.

Eventually, I could look at my mother’s assessment of me and think:

Maybe you’re wrong.

And once I could entertain the possibility that she was wrong about me, I could eventually entertain a much more dangerous possibility.

Maybe she wasn’t qualified to define me at all.

That’s when the throne started wobbling.

My Grandmother Gave Me the First Draft

I’ve talked about having an internal mother.

She’s the protective part of me.

When the softer side of me feels threatened, this other side can become fierce.

Sometimes feral.

She doesn’t merely say:

Let’s get away from this person.

She says:

Who hurt my baby?

And lately I’ve wondered whether I really created her entirely by myself.

Maybe I didn’t.

Maybe Grandma wrote the first draft.

Grandma taught me:

My baby is precious.

Life eventually taught me:

Then somebody needs to protect her.

And I finished the sentence:

Fine. I’ll do it myself.

That’s the internal mother I carry now.

She’s considerably meaner than Grandma was.

She has some… additional features.

Grandma supplied the pedestal.

I apparently added security.

Maybe That’s What She Left Me

My grandmother died years ago.

But I’ve been thinking lately about what people leave behind besides houses, photographs, recipes, jewelry, and whatever else we normally call inheritance.

Sometimes they leave a voice.

And if you’re lucky, that voice survives long enough to become your own.

I don’t need Grandma standing beside me anymore to tell me I’m smart.

I know.

I don’t need her to tell me I’m pretty.

I have mirrors.

I don’t need her to call me a princess.

At 49, that might be getting a little ridiculous anyway.

Although I’ll still accept it.

But I think she gave me something much more valuable than compliments.

She gave me an alternative story about myself before I was old enough to write one on my own.

My mother had her version of me.

Grandma had hers.

And eventually I got to choose.

I chose Grandma’s.

Then I took that version of myself into adulthood, modified it, complicated it, occasionally made it insufferable, and built an entire internal defense system around protecting it.

Maybe that’s why I’m so good at dethroning people now.

The throne was never theirs in the first place.

My grandmother had already given it to me.