On Thursday night, she was perfectly ok, and in a split of a second on Friday morning, we almost lost her.

 Teta has been mentioned in many posts.   Mostly, because of her controversial character; she is the matriarch, the sun that stands at the center of my family’s universe.  She is the kind of person that you can’t ignore; you must acknowledge her presence if you come across her.  And that I do.

Since my dad is the eldest son, she has moved to live in with us a few years ago.  At the beginning she shared my room. When I reached a point of either going crazy or committing a crime I moved out of my room into a state of homelessness.  I got my own room two years ago.

Teta is not chic in anyway… she is oblivious to the fact that other people live with her, and does as she wants without even wondering if what she does affects other people. She interferes in things that have nothing to do with her, and asks the most embarrassing questions in the most inappropriate times, as if it is the most normal thing in the world… and I can’t help but be amused by her incorrectness.

 But this is not all.

My grandmother is the ultimate queen of manipulation … she ALWAYS gets what she wants, I sometimes feel squashed under her constant demands and her unstoppable nagging.   If she wants something; it seems that it is the only thing in the world that really matters.  So usually the whole family ends up succumbing to her demands, if only to stop her. 

Among her tools are:  sulking, brooding, huffing, and taking the family in torturous guilt trips, dropping casual hints about the days, her sons and daughters were born and how painful that was! 

Yesterday, I stood outside her room at the hospital and watched her frail body.  A sense of love swept over me.   My tiny ferocious grandmother; she has always had the ability to shake her world and change it to shape it as she saw fit.  She has never allowed anyone to make her feel inferior because of her gender, even though she was not allowed to go to school because of her gender.  She has always spoken with so much confidence, reducing her illiteracy to a tiny insignificant obstacle. She has always been many things… but strength is the one constant attribute in her character.

 Hope you get better soon teta!