00-09

When I was 12 my family made a time capsule. It was 1999 and everything seemed to be coming to an end. The words y2k where on everybody’s lips. People were stocking up on canned food, flashlights and other random objects that made no sense to me. They also were talking about computer glitches, and how everything might end because it was going to be year ‘00.’ Everyone seemed really worried but I had a lot of other things on my mind. I was 12, computer crashing and world ending seemed impossible. Every day was going to be fallowed by another day where I still had to go to school and face that I had hardly any friends.

It was in that year of my life that my mom cut out a clipping from the Post Standard outlining how hard it is to be 12 years old. I read it though religiously hoping it gave some words of wisdom to how to make it past this hard year of life. But all it did was make me feel more stuck between being a kid and being a teen. It pretty much terrified me. I wasn’t taken seriously like my big brother who was 15, now he was at a good age I thought. I was still a kid in many respects but in other ways I was asked to act like an adult.

“Responsibility” was a word my mother liked to use, and she used it a lot. She gave me responsibility at home, with school, and most importantly the womanhood responsibility. That same year the article came out, she took me aside into my bedroom and gave me a gift. It wasn’t my birthday so I was pretty pumped to be getting a gift. I was set for major disappointed. The gift was a package of pads and a book about going though womanhood changes. She said I could always talk to her about this stuff, but what 12-year-old wants to admit how much her body is changing to her mother? I didn’t. I was ashamed, so I hid the book under my bed with out reading a page.

Its not like I didn’t know what was going to start happening once a month. I knew what was going to happen to me and I dreaded it. It was a sick kind of dread, the kind where you felt bad if it happened but felt worse if it didn’t. It didn’t come at 12, nor 13. I was 16 years old when I got my first period. So late, and every year I didn’t have it worried me more then the last. Not to mention the embarrassing fact that my grandmother used to ask me in broken English

“You bleeding yet?” Almost every time she could. Yea life as a 12 year old was hard. I was confused about my childhood and even more confused about where I wanted to be as an adult. I believe when people asked me what I wanted to do when I grow up I would say,

“A teacher who lives on a farm and paints and takes care of animals.” Ten years later I am not close to any one of those many goals and not sorry about it either. I wouldn’t go back to that year if someone offered to pay me to. I was one of the worst of my life. And now opening this time capsule brings back all those memories like they happened yesterday. I don’t want to forget either though. I think it’s important to remember that stuff. To see how you change.

I was raised just as much by my grandmother as I was my own mother. Sure my mom paid for my clothing, she was the one talking on the phone to teachers and taking me to the doctor and I never wish to downplay her role in my development. But my whole life my grandmother lived with me, and it took a profound effect on the way I live my life every day. It may even have decided my career path.

My grandmother was 67 when I was born, not a spring chicken or anything. Her husband died young, and her life was spent taking care of other people with out much help. I am her youngest grandchild of 10 and quiet frankly the last person she would care for, and one of the first to help take care of her when she needed it. She came to live with my Mother and Father soon after I was born. They could use the help, and frankly my grandmother didn’t want to be alone.

I, unlike most kids my age, came home to a grandmother every day off the bus she was waiting. Normally with snacks and a basketball if the weather was nice enough. She had a weird knack of making baskets and me and my brother thought it was hilarious.

“Shoot it again Nonna!! YOU MADE IT,” we would scream “Were you in the Italian NBA or something?!” She loved to spend time with us; I could see it on her face how happy she was just being with her grandkids. But she was not all her time was spent having fun, far from this fact. She was a lady who worked all her life and she didn’t stop when her body began to slow. She kept our house in amazing order, always doing the dishes and always making my bed for me. I never realized how much she did for us until she couldn’t do it anymore.

It was when she turned 80 that she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She probably had been having symptoms for years before but it was clear it was getting worse. My life got turned upside-down with this disease. Suddenly my grandmother was a terror alone in the house and could mess up the whole place in less then 20 mins. She would wash and rewash my clothing that needed to be dry cleaned till it was small enough for my teddy bears. It scared me so horridly to see her making these mistakes that she never would have made a year or two ago. I was loosing her, and nobody could tell me when exactly her body would fallow her mind.

I would sit with her for years, watching her mind leave me until 2007 when her body finally gave in as well.