Reply #8: Wow. Thanks. I came to this group after you first posted that.

[hunter]

I'm glad you posted it again.

A further complication, maybe related to this thread is the genetic component of these things.

In my own family we are riddled with mental health problems, and there is a strong tendency for those who are functional to believe it is because they are somehow "stronger" than those who are not as functional. But the harder truth is that the various mental illnesses are simply stronger in those who are not as functional.

I also know that one of the reasons my grandma could make my mom so upset was that my mom and grandma both had very similar obstacles to overcome within their own heads, simply because those obstacles were genetic.

The hell of it is that my mom and dad get along so well together because they come from similar backgrounds of crazy people -- within both their families extreme sorts of weirdness and eccentricity were accepted as normal. I had three grandparents whose grasp of reality was rather tenuous by the time I got to know them.

I look at my own kids and it's a wonder to me that they get to grow up in a family where their grandparents are fairly normal, and not prone to drift off in conversation along unknowable tangents.

My mom's mom could tell you in great detail about every animal she ever knew, her horses, her dogs, her cats, their personalities and their quirks, when they were born and when and how they died, but she rarely talked about people, and then it was mostly to express her current irritations with them.

My dad's dad was a brilliant man, an engineer very interested in religion and politics, but he really didn't have any friends, and he didn't see anything terribly innappropriate about trying to discuss electronic and optical theory with little kids. I think I started catching on to some of what he was saying when I was eight or nine, but my siblings didn't have the idiotic kind of patience I did, and sometimes my grandfather would get frustrated with them and say they were "no good."

Sigh.