For now, I'm keeping things so-so with my mom. All I need is to deal with a high stress situation with my mother, which would upset my grandmother. My maternal grandmother is my only living grandparent, and growing up, she & my grandfather were like 2nd parents to us (though I have suspicions my grandfather may have been bipolar and a genetic source of pre-disposition for me). My grandmother still lives on her own, in her mid-80s though my mom takes her grocery shopping, to the bank, doctors' appts., etc. None of my mom's sisters had kids, so my sisters & I are her only grandchildren.

She has slowed down quite a bit this last year or so, but she still does pretty good. She even still keeps chickens and goes to collect the eggs in the morning, waters a lot of her plants (when I was young, she gardened & grew plants in droves, it seemed like she'd get plants that died on everyone else to grow for her), cares for her little house dog, rescues every stray cat she finds (they stay outdoors, but she feeds them, gives them water).

So, I don't want a high tension situation with my mom that would bleed onto my grandmother. She has had a hard life and deserves as much happiness as possible. My grandmother is the strongest person I know. She grew up dirt poor; her parents were sharecroppers. They spoke English, but just spoke Czech at home and sent my grandmother to school not knowing a word of English. Not to mention the Czech and English pronunciations of her name (Georgia) sound very different. She said she wouldn't even realize the teacher was yelling at her or talking to her. She only got an 8th grade education because she had to go back to the fields and help her parents (usually with picking & farming cotton).

She got married young, and she & my grandfather were still sharecroppers for over half of his working years. She had 5 kids, but 2 of them, the 2 oldest, one her only son both drowned after getting caught up in a river current while swimming when they were something like 17 and 19. In those days, no one wanted to even help pay for the funerals of 2 kids of sharecroppers (even if the sharecroppers were white). My grandparents had no money. Finally, the Presbyterian church in town took pity on them and covered the funeral; I believe they regularly attended a Catholic church before that and afterwards never set foot in the town Catholic church again. And then my grandfather started drinking a lot (most of his siblings had issues with alcohol). Finally, it was my grandmother who put her foot down, and it really must have been something because after that, my grandfather went cold-turkey off the alcohol.

I love my grandmother too much to make her have to deal with stuff like this at her age now.