The Manipulation Generation

Something I've noticed about women of a certain age, is that they tend to be manipulative.  There are women in my generation who do the same thing, but they get fewer and farther between.  It seems to depend more on income bracket with my generation.  Let me explain where this is coming from.

My grandmother on my mother's side was my first example of womanhood, seeing as she was part of the pair that raised me - if you can call it that.  She was abusive and manipulative, and I hated her with every fibre of my being by the time I turned thirteen.  I had good reason, and my feelings for her did not improve with time or distance.  They just faded to the point where she was no longer of any importance at all to me.  I spoke to her once after I moved away for the last time when I was fourteen, and it wasn't by choice.

I thought my grandmother was a nutcase, and that she was unique with respect to her massive manipulative tendencies.  It turned out I was wrong.  As I got older I realized there were a lot of ways in which I was like her, but in some very key ways I was completely different and I wondered why.  After some reflection I realized that my grandmother was born in the wrong time for women, for a woman with her personality.  She was independent and intelligent, but at the time she was brought up those were not qualities that were highly prized in women.

It's only been in the last ten years or so that I realized where her life went wrong.  She was a very bitter person.  I should give an example or two to illustrate her personality a little more clearly.  I remember one instance very clearly.  She got angry with me and started to hop up and down on the spot, basically having a temper tantrum.  Suddenly she clutched her chest and started crying about her heart.  Now, the only person that made that woman hop up and down when she supposedly shouldn't be exerting herself like that, was her.  She was the one having the hissy fit, not me.  Somehow, though, she blamed me for her current implied state of desperate heart failure.  In reality, however, there wasn't anything wrong with her at the time.  She used false claims of a bad heart condition to manipulate everyone around her.

This isn't just my own opinion of her.  All three of her daughters would tell you the same thing.  She did it to them when they were growing up, and she did it to me when I was stuck under her roof, too.  When she finally did develop a heart condition that required corrective surgery, nobody believed her anymore.  My aunt had to ask the surgeon if it was really true.  That should tell you how bad she was for that.  She wasn't the boy who cried wolf, but she was the woman who cried heart attack.  She would tell anyone who was stuck in close confines with her all about every medical condition she said she had.  She was obviously crying out for attention, and felt this was the only way she could get it.

She also had a tendency to live vicariously through me.  When my mother and her sisters were young, women still weren't able to really do anything, but when I was a child little girls were starting to compete more in sports.  At the age of four my grandparents signed me up for serious figure skating (in case you're wondering that's actually a typical starting age for that sport).  I had the build and the talent for it, it turns out, and I started winning medals and trophies.  My grandmother bragged constantly about their little skater, and she would use my name to get attention for herself.  As for me, I would very much have preferred not being in the local paper every week.  I hated the constant attention, and my grandmother kept putting the spotlight on so people would think she was so great for struggling so hard to pay for skating lessons and all that.  She told everyone how expensive it was, and how hard it was to afford it on their fixed income.  I guess she thought it made her look like some sort of martyr.  For people who actually knew her, though, she was tiresome in the extreme.

Those are only a couple of examples to give you a better idea of the kind of person she was.  The real issue has to do with her generation, though.  I've since run into quite a few women of her generation who were very much like her, but maybe not as dishonest.  When I had to live at my former mother-in-law's house it was really brought home to me, so to speak.  I'd had a few issues with her in the past, and they were things my ex and I had fought over because he felt the sun rose and set with his mother.  Be that as it may, I didn't feel the same and I could see the signs of the little ways she would bend him to her will.  For one thing she cried over every single thing that did not go her way.  It got worse as dementia started setting in, and I'm sure she's even worse now.  My ex doesn't even talk about it anymore.  He can't stand to be in the same room with her these days, and I understand why.

The thing is, women of that generation were raised without a voice.  They were taught that the man ruled the house, and so women adapted to that.  Instead of just saying, "I'm going out with my friends tonight.  You'll have to make dinner for the kids," they would start to pout.  When asked what was wrong the usual response was, "Nothing."  They'd keep denying a problem so their husbands were forced to keep asking.  When they finally answered it would be with copious amounts of tears and gobs of guilt thrown in for good measure.  It was the only way they felt they would get their own way, and in a way they were right.  They had no choice but to be sneaky if they ever wanted to have anything or do anything.

I honestly don't think men understood what was really going on, because my ex doesn't understand it to this day.  I tried to explain it to him, but he has no idea what it was like for women back then.  Hell, he found my direct approach confusing and more than a little threatening I think.  After a few years he started to realize it was never a reflection of his masculinity, but a reflection that times had changed.  He'd been raised by a manipulator, and any other type of female was an enigma to him.  He was in shock when he found out I could swap out a hard drive.  I don't know if his mother even changed a light bulb by herself before her divorce.  Even then she had her one son living with her to do all those things.  It wasn't until after she met me that she even bought herself a tool kit for basic stuff around the house.

I was thrilled to see her take a more assertive approach in life, but as she aged and dementia seeped in, she slipped back into her old ways...only worse.  She would make asinine comments like saying that men couldn't cook, and she thought it was sick or perverted when she saw a man carrying a baby around in one of those carrier packs.  As far as she was concerned her son absolutely could not cook, even though he can cook just fine.  I'd bought him pans and things one Christmas because he'd developed an interest in it, and she said it was a stupid gift to give a man, again saying that men couldn't cook.  I kept saying to her that some of the best chefs in the world were men, to which she would nod and agree, and then the next day she was back to saying men couldn't cook.  It was really weird.

Of course, I have to wonder if it might have been because she felt unnecessary if a man didn't need her to cook for him.  She'd only ever had one real job in her life, and that was being a housewife.  Her husband left her, as did her older son.  My ex is there with her (he's only ever really lived with her, other than when he lived with me), but if he doesn't need someone to cook for him she feels useless I suppose.  The saddest thing about her generation is that these women weren't really allowed their own achievements or their own lives.  They aged, and a lot of them feel as though they didn't accomplish anything.  Once their kids were grown they no longer had a purpose.  Some women took the opportunity to go out into the work force, and some went back to school, but the ones who'd been completely convinced they had no use in the world beyond the domestic were left far behind.