I’m Glad My Near 100-Years-Old Grandma Is an Unlikeable Woman
There aren’t as many of us out in the open as there should be
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I’m sitting in the communal area of a retirement home, waiting to see someone I expect to be in as bad a shape as the few elderly people around me: my paternal grandmother.
The home she’s staying in isn’t half bad, at least. It’s located in a historic and well-preserved manor in a small town in southwestern Poland, originally built in the early Middle Ages to serve as a bishops’ residence. But it’s still a strange place; the only noise comes from one of the residents humming to themselves, and the air has a distinct staleness to it, mixed with the scent of hospital food.
My family decided to place my grandma here a year and a half ago after she had a series of abdominal surgeries the doctors described as ‘necessary but extremely high-risk.’ She survived them, but the recovery was neither easy nor quick, and she could no longer live on her own.
As the rain outside the glass entrance intensifies, I see my grandma come out of one of the side doors, pushing herself in a wheelchair with a faint smile. She looks good. Better than good, actually. And probably better than she has in quite a while.
I kiss her hello and give her the small gift I brought: chocolate-filled croissants, soft and small enough for her to eat. My mother also got a freshly baked rhubarb cake. After a brief while, my grandmother reaches for the cake, then for the croissants.
She has always loved sweet things.
Although she isn’t exactly sweet herself.
I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about likeability and women.
Even as a little girl, I was acutely aware that I wasn’t playing the Good Girl part quite how I was supposed to. I was always too much, too intense, too loud-mouthed, too stubborn, too bossy. And my attempts to tone it all down, as my parents and teachers instructed, didn’t work well.
I just didn’t see the point in changing myself. Why shouldn’t I speak my mind and set boundaries where I felt they were needed? Why should I make myself smaller to help others seem bigger? Why should I smile at countless men telling me to do so if they creep me out? And, most importantly, why aren’t boys told the same things, too?
When I became a teenager, this set of rules I still struggled to grasp expanded to include what not to do and say around members of the opposite gender, particularly my peers. My mother often brought up a whole litany of things that would apparently ‘scare them off’ — such as wearing heels (I’m tall) and appearing too knowledgeable (god forbid I make it seem like I have a brain — that’s for boys only.)
I probably gave her quite a headache by wearing six-inch heels to my prom. But she was right — my date, despite being a tall guy, was furious with me. How dare I choose to wear shoes I liked over making sure his ego won’t be hurt because I appeared slightly taller than him on the night of my prom, not his?
‘When a girl is unlikeable, a girl is a problem,’ writes Roxane Gay in her 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist. And I was a problem.
Many girls and women I knew back then, and many others I got to know over the years, often seemed equally frustrated with this never-ending chore of pleasing people but did it anyway.
After all, it’s an idea imprinted on us practically from birth: above anything else, women ought to think of others first. Be nice. Be likeable.
These expectations of ‘feminine agreeableness’ were probably even more intense when my grandmother was little.
She was born in 1926 in Ukraine. ‘My birth certificate was issued in Ukraine, then all my documents were issued by the Soviet Union and then, in the end, Poland,’ she recalls after mentioning there’s one Ukrainian nurse here in the retirement home.
And then she reaches for another piece of cake.
I don’t know as much about my grandma’s or my other grandparents’ upbringing as I’d like to; my parents always warned me not to ask too many questions because it could upset them. On my mother’s side, my grandparents grew up outside of Oświęcim, also known as Auschwitz, where Nazi Germany built the largest of all their concentration camps. On my father’s side, his parents came from the Eastern Borderlands, a term given to the multi-ethnic area east of Poland.
All of them were adolescents when Germany invaded Poland, starting the Second World War. My paternal grandma was just 13 years old. Shortly after the news of the invasion broke, her father died, and she had to flee. Just like the rest of my grandparents and many others, she settled in my hometown, Wrocław, once it was over.
Whatever she went through on the way there, and in the decades of the Soviet regime that followed, couldn’t have been easy.
But it’s also no wonder she turned out the way she did. The world and circumstances that shaped her demanded boldness, courage and self-sufficiency, not likeability or niceness. Still, I can’t say I knew many other women — in and outside my family — who were like her growing up. She was the only one I frequently heard others describe as ‘difficult,’ ‘unpleasant’ and ‘unlikeable.’
When my grandmother is done eating, she wipes her hands with an eggshell-white embroidered handkerchief and then looks up at my father and says his missing front tooth makes him look stupid.
Sometimes the pressure to succumb to the many spoken and unspoken rules that come with the territory of being a woman used to get to me, and every now and then, it still does. After all, there’s a cost to being ‘unlikeable,’ which becomes particularly obvious when you join the adult world.
It’s tempting to conform, to mould yourself into whatever shape or form society demands, and then pretend you don’t mind being anybody but yourself for the sake of other people’s — mostly men’s, though — comfort or preference. What does being likeable and nice and good and compliant actually get us? Is there any ‘benefit’ besides not being ostracised or treated as a cautionary tale by others?
In the Catholic faith, which I grew up with but no longer practice (I’m an atheist), the reward for complying with complementarian gender roles is, conveniently enough, collected after you die. You’re supposed to be in perpetual submission to men and god and find the experience rewarding enough on its own.
But there’s a cost to playing by the rules, too. It’s women who still have, on average, less time to spend on leisure and hobbies than men due to carrying out significantly more domestic, care and emotional labour on top of paid employment. Women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence at the hands of men than vice versa, and yet some still believe it’s justified. We are also six times more likely to be separated or divorced soon after a diagnosis of cancer or other serious disease than men. And in old age, it’s women who report being significantly more frequently lonely in comparison to men.
We do it all for others; we bend and twist ourselves at society’s command, often with a forced smile on our faces. But do others do it all for us, too? It doesn’t seem like it.
The truth is, being a Good Girl rarely — if ever — works in our favour.
‘Next week, I’m having my hair styled,’ my grandma tells me, gently touching the ends of her hair, which still has some blond streaks.
Although her schedule now, at nearly 100 years old, isn’t as busy as it used to be, she’s hardly staying still. She does physiotherapy, walks around the manor when the weather allows, has bi-weekly hairdresser appointments, and has been teaching the Ukrainian nurse’s son some Polish. Before her surgeries over a year ago, she was even more active.
After retiring — she used to be a biology professor — and not long after her husband’s, my grandfather’s, death, she enrolled in third-age university, started learning English and German, bought a computer and learned how to use it, and frequently took fitness classes and went on holidays. Despite my parents and doctors urging her to take it slow or lean into more ‘appropriate’ granny activities, she didn’t. Instead, she would cuss out anyone who tried to force her into giving up the things that bring her joy. (The latter also included sugar, which, clearly, she hasn’t given up yet, either.)
Ever since I can remember, she has lived on her own terms and did her best to enjoy life to the fullest. If she wanted to say something, she said it. If she didn’t want to do something, she didn’t. People are usually quite surprised when I tell them she never cooked because she didn’t like to. A grandma who never cooks might seem like an oxymoron, but they do exist.
She was also never one to go out of her way to accommodate and continuously take care of others. Somehow, she once managed to convince one of my cousins, who had classes at a university near her apartment, to come over during his breaks and cook and clean for her.
I can see why others would label her as ‘difficult,’ ‘unlikeable’ or ‘self-centred.’ Still, I can’t help but wonder: would she really be considered any of these things if she were a man?
It still seems like the likability threshold for women is much, much higher than for men. Men make whole careers out of being unpleasant — like Gordon Ramsey — and their roughness, directedness and selfishness are often seen as just a part of their character, not a flaw.
But if a woman merely dares to take a teeny tiny step out of bounds deemed as acceptable for her gender, there must be something utterly wrong with her. She’s disobedient. Uncontrollable. Wild. Someone better call animal control to put her back in her cage, pronto.
My mother always makes a particular kind of grimace whenever her mother-in-law, my grandma, says something inappropriate, and she’s making it again. I got momentarily lost in thought, and I’m not sure what it was this time. The rain seems to be stopping now, though. We’ll probably be on our way back soon.
But as the sky is clearing up, it becomes clear to me that she was never really ‘unlikeable.’ That’s usually just a code word for bold, boundary-breaking women who aren’t afraid to be unapologetically themselves.
And I’m awfully glad my grandma showed me that being one is fine. Well, more than fine. It’s necessary for a life well-lived to be the youest you possible.
Even if that means being perceived as complicated, messy, difficult or unlikeable at times.
‘Women are just dying to be themselves,’ the actress Ilana Glazer recently said, commenting on the portrayal of women in the movie Babes.
Yes, we are.
And it’s time we stopped apologising for it and started living fully.
My Nan, scary as fuck. She could never be described as likeable, but she was a formidable presence and she got shit done. She took crap from nobody. And when, as was often, some fool refused her request, usually a postal worker back in the day when you had to collect your pension from a UK post office, she would slip into a Persian dialect before launching into the state of Manhood and the failure of the British class system. She would get her way...always.
My mom’s mom was unlikable, thank you for this perspective. Maybe I can overlook her insults to me by rejoicing that she passed them out to people who deserved them?
When she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I told her I wanted to be a lawyer. She gasped and told me that that was a man’s job. My grandpa was a lawyer, but SHE was a doctor of public health. I’m still upset I wasn’t quick enough to ask her why she could have a man’s job but I couldn’t. In fairness to myself I was only about seven years old, but still.