I Wish My Needs Had Killed Grandma
On Codependence, Self-Abandonment, Breaking family cycles.
I sit here and write because I’m not at peace. Last night, I took some time before dinner and did some gentle yoga. I worked on belly breathing and let myself exist in my body for like one f*cking second. But then my wife finished dinner and rang the bell to call me down. I instantly felt that old monkey on my back and rushed down the stairs.
UGH, why is it whenever I find some peace, my first instinct is to give it away?
Maybe I’d be less miserable if I didn’t know that the answer was that I’m a victim of abuse…
She was still raw from a boundary I’d tried—clumsily—to set earlier in the week. I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I couldn’t set a boundary with myself right then and there. I reassured her, bent over backwards trying to ensure she didn’t feel blamed. I couldn’t save the tiny bit of peace I’d eked out for myself.
I couldn’t let her sit with her own discomfort.
I couldn’t sit with my own comfort.
Afterward, I massaged her shoulders, cuddled her until she left for the movies with friends. Alone, I realized I’d abandoned myself all over again. I numbed out—junk food, video games, scrolling—anything to muffle the ache.
This is the cycle: every time I claw out a scrap of peace for myself, I hand it over like a guilty bribe. I hate how quickly I fold. I hate how needy we both can get. I hate how I rush to reassure her, apologize for things I didn’t do, offer comfort she didn’t even ask for. Her discomfort turns me into Pavlov’s dog, tail between my legs, begging for scraps of approval.
God, how I hate that dinner bell sometimes.
I want to scream, Why is your peace worth more than mine? Why do we both end up tiptoeing, biting down on what we want to say just to keep the temperature in the room bearable?
There’s a feedback loop that I get stuck in, especially when anyone I’m close to is struggling. When my wife started having vertigo and was fainting, I dropped everything. I tried to be everything to her. Nurse, therapist, emotional seeing-eye dog. I don’t resent her for needing care—that’s part of the beauty of having a partner. I resent how automatic it is for me to stop existing the second someone I love is suffering.
Like that bell rings and a switch flips—abandon yourself now, it’s what good people do. I cling to that caretaker role until I forget what it’s like to need anything for myself. I give and give and get mad that nobody’s coming to rescue me from my own martyrdom.
Growing up with my aunt, it was made crystal clear that having needs was a problem, especially if those needs were emotionally inconvenient. Any time I had needs, my aunt would basically tell me they were killing my grandmother. Since my grandmother was a narcissist, I’m POSITIVE that’s how it felt when her family had needs—especially, God forbid, queer needs. So, we suppressed them to soothe her ego at all costs.
I’m sure that’s why everybody besides my aunt realizes that she’s a 71 year old bull-dyke. She was the golden child, and main advocate for my grandmother. My aunt is so deep in the closet, she’s past the Christmas presents, through the false wall, and she’s discovered a new volume of Anne Frank’s diary. I mean, come on, she’s not fooling anybody… Every day, she dresses like she was the first woman fly-fisher to be featured on the cover of the Sierra Club magazine. She has more vests than I have pairs of shoes—no, strike that, she has more vests than I have individual shoes. The only relationship she ever held onto was with her “platonic female roommate,” who she fosters kittens with.
If it’s not obvious by now, queerness and denial run in the family. I’m a trans lesbian who came out at 30—which in retrospect is about as shocking as discovering my aunt’s “roommate” wasn’t just there to foster kittens.
The cognitive dissonance is a little funny, but mostly just sad. It’s sad the way that avoidance, secrecy, and denial shaped what each of us believed was possible for ourselves. If queerness had to be hidden, what else were we supposed to keep buried?
The only way I escaped these dynamics was when my grandmother finally did us all a favor and returned to hell to be with her husband, The Devil. Suddenly, my aunt’s leverage went up in smoke…
Through the chimney of the crematorium.
My aunt couldn’t use Nana Narcissist as leverage, and she could no more easily admit to me that she wanted me in her life than she could admit to the world that she ate pussy.
So I was “free.”
But I’ve learned that freedom isn’t just changing your zip code or blocking your family’s numbers. Real freedom is internal, and it’s slippery. Bob the Drag Queen wrote, “The biggest struggle in earning your freedom is feeling like you deserve it.” That line struck me. Bob’s a Black trans icon—someone who’s thrived in a world built to grind them down. When I read those words, I felt the gravity of them—how so many of us are trapped in cages built by someone else, then handed a key and told we have to figure out how to use the lock on our own.
I see now how much trans liberation work owes to Black liberation—how every time I feel like I have to apologize for wanting peace, for taking up space, I’m re-enacting a script written by people who benefit from my smallness.
So, I’m here, married to a woman I love more than anyone else on earth. Still doing that same dance. I find a little peace, and my instinct is to hand it over—to tune into her pain, to anticipate her discomfort, to abandon myself so I don’t “kill grandma” and feel the threat of her distance. It’s such a deep wound that sometimes I only notice I’ve given everything away when I’m empty again.
It shows up any time there’s intimacy or vulnerability in my relationships. I long to be wanted. To be cared for. Delighted in. Only to find myself reaching, guiding, or pushing. I’m never quite sure how to receive the care I long for.
It’s not like I can blame my friends—or even my wife, though she doesn’t always make it easy on me. I see the shadows left behind by the people who raised her, the old scripts she learned just to survive. She carries the weight of years spent centering someone else’s comfort too, always smoothing things over or making herself smaller to avoid the fallout. In our own ways, we’re both products of women who never learned how to feed themselves emotionally, so they left everyone around them hungry.
I want to believe it’s possible to keep some peace for myself and receive mutually, without guilt. I want to believe that I deserve for my own pleasure and longing to matter.
Freedom is something you have to keep fighting for. For me, freedom is noticing when I give myself away, and pausing long enough to ask if I can stay with myself. Even on days when it’s hard, I want to keep trying.
So, tonight, maybe I won’t rush down the stairs. Maybe I’ll take another breath, hold onto the little pocket of peace I made for myself, and trust that I deserve it. Maybe I’ll allow myself to wish that my needs really were what finally did kill grandma.