In a world that seems to move faster every day, my grandma´s house stands as a stubborn holdout. It is a place where the floorboards don’t just creek, they greet you. But the true heart of this house isn’t the architecture, it’s the women who have spent decades turning four walls into a haven. My grandma is the ¨Head of State¨ for my family, a role she plays with a mix of quiet authority and a constant supply of sweet potato pie.
I recently went over to my grandma´s and sat at her kitchen table, which somehow felt warmer than usual, maybe because it was a minute since I was there. While we were talking, I asked her something I had wondered for a long time: How does she deal with the constant noise and endless flow of family members coming in and out? Doesn´t she ever want some peace? She laughed immediately. She always laughs. ¨Peace ?¨ she said, ¨I never had peace¨. She says that she grew up in a house packed with siblings and people everywhere all the time, and she actually liked it. To her, that busy, loud environment was comfortable. I’m not going to lie, this response low-key caught me off guard. I always assumed she was secretly overwhelmed by how loud my family usually is, but hearing her say that the noise was her comfort was a revelation. It changed how I viewed her; she wasn’t just ¨putting up¨with us and that was super reassuring.
As we kept talking, our conversation shifted into her childhood, which she never really talked much about with me. I had to ask her what it was like growing up with such a big family. She spoke about the challenges of being a middle child in a massive family with lots of siblings. She described the scramble for attention and the lack of privacy, but her eyes softened when she talked about the other side of that. ¨We were a big family.¨ she said, ¨But we were never distant.¨ She emphasized the word never. She recalled that no matter what she was going through, having the big family that she had, she always had a shoulder to cry on, which made her appreciate them so much. To me, I feel like being a middle child taught her how to bridge between people, a skill she clearly brought with her to become such a strong head of my family. Now when I see her navigating a crowded room or intervening in an argument between my cousins, I don’t see someone who is tired. I see a middle child who found her calling, who always ensures that no one ever feels alone, just like how she was never alone.
I have always paid great attention to my grandma, and for the longest time, I wanted to be just like her. She is always the peacemaker, she is always the one everyone goes to for help. I had to ask her how she manages all of that ¨How did you become the person everyone goes to when things go wrong and how do you manage all of that?¨ She says she never asked for this job and honestly sometimes she wishes someone else could do it for her. I laugh, she laughs. She says she just wants everyone to get along, and with her being the head of our family, she feels like it’s her duty to make sure that happens.
Hearing my grandma talk during this interview changed the way I saw her as the ¨Head Of State.¨ She wasn´t just managing the noise of our family, she was cherishing it. To her, every loud laugh from the living room was a reminder of the closeness she had feared losing when she left her own childhood home.
