The Memoir: A Dozen Shih Tzus, or Me?

If you’ve been patient enough to read my writing this far, you’ll have noticed that there is always Just-One-More-Thing-I-Remembered-I-Should-Tell-You, for context, of course, before I get to the Actual-Thing-I-Promised-To-Write-Next.

So. Last time, in The Memoir: The Lesser of Two Evils, I mentioned The Fall, which maybe six people on this planet know about, and I promise we’ll get there. But first I have to tell you about my grandmother.

I know what you’re thinking: Oh Suki, you’re so slow-burn it hurts.

It is what it is.

Back in January, while I was in Paris, I became estranged from my entire family, but I’d already left my grandmother months before. She is single-handedly the most emotionally abusive person I have ever met, and the person who loved me the most. Both of those are true, and I have never once found the seam where one ends.

Here is what I’ve learned: sometimes they love you more than they’ve loved anything else in their life, and it still won’t be the right love. I have been loved by a lot of people. It’s just that most of it arrived in a language I don’t speak.

There’s a friend I decided to love recently from a distance after our first rupture. For weeks I kept seeing the same thing in meditation: rays of light coming off their heart, and inside the light, little pieces of razor-blade. The light still reaches you. It just simultaneously opens you on the way in.

These days I’m less interested in intent, less interested in the mess, less interested in the specific cruelty of the specific words. I just sit here wishing everyone could be loved. Could be healed. So that love could survive the translation. There is nothing to reason with when a chronically dysregulated person is weaponizing your traumas; your soul, and then throwing something at you, however badly my neurodivergent brain wants to make it make sense. The sense is not in there. I’ve checked. I’ve gone mad checking.

But I digress, as always, and I promised you the past. I promised you puppies.

You should get some. That’s the only actionable advice in this chapter.

By now you know my mother was abusive and elusive, in that order. My father I haven’t gotten to yet. But the main character of my childhood is my grandmother.

I have shivers going down my spine writing this, because she is very old now, and I don’t know if she’s still alive. Maybe that’s why my gut walked me to this chapter. Maybe she’s already gone. I’m not sure grief is the first thing I’d feel. She was not quite physically abusive to me. She was just dangerous enough that I don’t have the courage to find out how she’s doing.

I spent thirty years appeasing her. Paying her. Calling her. Anticipating her. Untangling her victimhood from the life she’d lived, so there’d be less of it left over to hold against the room.

But most importantly: before me, she had a dozen Shih Tzus.

Why is that important?

Well.

The moment I was born, she got rid of them. All twelve.

I was not allergic. Nobody asked her to. She did it herself, and then spent the next three decades making sure I understood what it had cost her.

Those sweet, sweet Shih Tzus. Their perfect hair, which she braided. Twelve small heads, braided.

And then me. Adorable, apparently, and in the salon chair before I could walk, getting my hair fried and pulled and set into a hundred different shapes until one of them was the one she wanted. I wasn’t a child in that chair. I was the next coat.

And I would never, ever live up to those dogs.

They didn’t talk back.

For a long time, neither did I.