Feminism

Women Who Inspire Me #11: My Grandmother

Posted on August 9, 2018

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a new instalment of my Women Who Inspire Me series. And I’ll be honest, this week, few people will know the subject because Women Who Inspire Me #11 is my paternal grandmother.

She was an amazing lady, and I’m so excited to get to share a tiny bit about her.

My Grandmother

My grandmother grew up in a coal mining community on the border of West Virginia and Ohio. She trained and worked as a nurse, before training as a paralegal. She worked her entire life (even though she was also a mother to two boys). Everyone who ever met her always mentioned how hard she worked.

Two of my favourite things about my grandmother was that she was fearless and curious. When she was working at a law firm in New York in her twenties she decided to fly to Cuba with a girlfriend (unaccompanied!) and without telling anyone else that she was going. She ended up befriending a Cuban man on her flight and after touring around Cuba, she and her friend visited his family at their family hacienda out in the countryside. (She fully admitted later in life that this was dangerous in retrospect since she knew nothing about his family or him and that no one else knew where she and her girlfriend were.)

She was engaged three times before she married my grandfather. She broke it off every time because she was a fickle woman and definitely knew her own mind. She was engaged to a (alleged!) member of the mafia for years and he would surprise her with flights to Las Vegas and custom fitted Chanel suits. She ended her engagement with him to marry my grandfather and didn’t settle down even with him.

He was in the military so they moved a lot, but she also was an avid traveler. My grandmother went to more countries than today’s travel bloggers could even dream of. She visited every continent except for Antartica and more individual countries than I could possibly count. Her house was filled with knick knacks that she’d picked up on her travels.

She was dedicated to the arts. I definitely got my love of theatre from her. Even when I was very young, starting at about age 3, she would take me to the theatre with her. I was expected to behave and I always did. Even at that young age, I loved the process of going out to the theatre; dressing up, going there, finding our seats, the lights lowering themselves, and the show beginning. For many, many years, our tradition was to go and see the “Nutcracker” together, and even now, I could probably hum the score to the entire ballet.

My grandmother subsisted on bread and coffee and she always had some browning away in her bread machine. She was an insatiable reader, which is another family trait. She was generous to a fault and would give her last penny away to someone she loved. She always wanted me to always be excited and curious about the world; even mundane seeming things could be magical. On afternoons that it was just she and I we would go out on “field trips”. Once she took me to a pickle factory to see how they were made, for example.

My grandmother passed away in a car accident in 2010 and I miss her every day. The pain of losing her doesn’t dissipate it just gets easier to bear. I’m so sad that she never met Sam or had the chance to visit me in England; her last ever gift to me was my plane ticket to come to England in the first place.

She was by no means perfect; the Kennedys could do no wrong in her eyes and if you ever needed to leave in a hurry, you could resign yourself to being late as she could talk to a brick wall. She defied stereotyping and forged her own path in life. If she wanted to do something, she’d do it. Her passion, interests, work-ethic and force of personality still inspire me.