The word can conjure up cookies, quilts, hot chocolate by the fireplace, hugs cuddling you into warm softness. Not for me. In my world, a grandmother has long red fingernails and drinks bourbon in cut crystal. Or she has a pixie haircut and a collection of masks from Africa. Or she subscribes to Sports Illustrated and lets you drive her golf cart.

From the age of nine, when my parents divorced and my mother began her slide into alcoholism and, eventually, a new family, I was desperate for female role models. You’d think having three grandmothers might have filled the void, but these women were not the nurturing types. They were, in the words of my father, “something else.”

Grammy A was my father’s mother. I first came to know her as a divorcee (husband number one) and widow (husband number two) living in a condo across the street from Lake Michigan on the North Shore of Chicago. Her living room was stuffed with antiques from generations past, when her family was truly well-off. In her bedroom hung a giant portrait of our father as a chubby, curly-haired baby, painted the year he won a baby beauty contest. He was still the unchallenged object of her affection.

As I remember her, Grammy A didn’t do much besides watch soap operas, smoke Dorals, and start drinking Old Grandad bourbon as soon as the clock struck five. Her main topics of conversation were her memories of our father’s childhood, the characters on her shows, and tour cousins, Stephanie and Tracy. These two lucky girls, daughters of my father’s sister and her stockbroker husband, lived nearby Grammy A, their closets stuffed with new clothes. My brother and sister and I, on the other hand, were dressed in items from the sales rack at Sears.

Grammy A and I appeared to have nothing in common, so I spent most of our visits in her guest room with my books. I only learned after her death that she’d loved poetry as a girl, and that she’d volunteered for the Junior League and the Garden Club in the early days of her first marriage, a nod to the nonprofit sector where I’d eventually spend my career. The Grammy A I knew sat with her ankles crossed and judged us, her country mouse grandchildren, as criminally unkempt and ill-mannered.

“David,” she’d say, “Why is Becky’s hair always so messy? Hasn’t someone taught her how to use a hairbrush?” Even though our father had custody of us, the “someone” was our mother, whom Grammy A hated, even years after her departure from the family.

The only person Grammy A hated more than our mother was Marian: our father’s stepmother and grandmother number two. We called her Mimi. She had been a ballerina in her youth, dancing for the Ballet Russe in Paris in the 1930s. She didn’t marry until she was in her forties, after starting a studio to teach ballroom dancing to Chicago’s upper middle-class children. It was there she met our grandfather, a handsome divorcee and vice president at Northern Trust who had brought his son in to learn how to foxtrot.

By the time I got to know Mimi, she and our grandfather had retired south to a sprawling house on a hill in Tryon, North Carolina. On every surface, on every wall, were souvenirs and framed photographs from their travels. They’d visited numerous African countries, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Bali. Mimi loved masks and carvings and telling people the stories of their origins. Or I should say, she loved telling these stories to her friends. She didn’t like children much. Especially me.

When I plumped out in puberty, she launched her crusade. She gave my father money to send me to ballet lessons, which I hated. Daddy instead used the money to secure my always-coveted horseback riding lessons, until Mimi found out and stopped sending it. When we visited her, she’d take my cereal bowl away mid-breakfast to limit my caloric intake. I can still feel the cut of her eyes as she looked at me with disgust. We were always paraded out in front of their friends, and I’d overhear Mimi making excuses for me. “Oh, Dave is just too indulgent with these children,” she’d say. “It’s to make up for their mother being gone.”

I hated how she talked about our mother as if she were dead. It wasn’t much different a half hour up the road in Hendersonville, North Carolina where our mother’s parents had retired from their home in Massachusetts. The plan that resulted in two sets of grandparents retiring so close to one another (though not too close) had been to maximize the number of visits from our family. The divorce threatened to put an end to this, but Grammy and Grampy R still loved our father even after they cut off contact with their daughter when she headed off in a hippie bus with a younger man. We’d always spend a day with them when we were in Tryon.

Grammy R loved to play golf and tennis, and would later joke that the best day of her life was when ESPN became a cable channel. She was one of the original subscribers to Sports Illustrated and never met a sport she didn’t like to watch and comment on. Having grown up in western Massachusetts, the Boston Red Sox were her love, but she also rooted for all the other Boston sports teams. Since I was a tomboy who would rather play football with my brother than dolls with my little sister, I always liked Grammy R. As my relationships with the two other grandmothers withered under the weight of their dislike and disapproval, my connection with Grammy R blossomed.

After Grampy R died, she ignored his vendetta against our mother, who had settled down on a ranch in Colorado with her now-husband and two more children. We started visiting them in the summers, and eventually, Grammy did too. We started calling her Gramma Betty (after our stepfather’s plan to have us all call her ‘Grandmother Elizabeth’ failed). She taught us how to play five different kinds of poker, and she asked us, with real interest, about our lives. There was certainly no cookie-baking, but she loved watching us play frisbee and swim and ride the ranch horses even though her “old bones” wouldn’t let her participate. She shared photos from her youth, including pictures of her as the center of the Connecticut College basketball team, and as Marc Anthony in an all-girls version of Antony and Cleopatra.

When I went off to college, we started writing letters (this was pre-email). I’d tell her about my classes. She only asked me once if I had any interest in pledging her old sorority (Tri-Delt) but seemed perfectly accepting when I shared that it wasn’t my thing. She was supportive when I changed my major from pre-law to creative writing, and even when I left a scholarship behind in Illinois to follow a boy to San Francisco. I still wondered about the years when she hadn’t spoken to my mother, since now the two of them talked nearly every day. How could this curious, funny, loving woman have cut off contact with her only daughter? What had her relationship with my grandfather been like, that he could exercise such control over her? I only wished she’d lived long enough for me to ask. When I was twenty-five, she was eating an Eskimo pie, dripped chocolate on her pants, lifted a leg to wipe it off, and fell over onto a broken hip, from which she never recovered. My first real experience with grief was her death. 

By my late twenties, all three of them were gone. Though I had never grown close to Grammy A or Mimi, I learned to care less about their disapproval as I grew up, and to find interest in their histories. Neither of them had lived exactly as women of their times were expected to. Grammy A had discarded a cheating husband and built a life for herself in the 1950s when it wasn’t at all fashionable. Mimi had forged her way as a single, successful businesswoman before marrying my grandfather, and she did plenty of traveling on her own before their journeys together. After her death, we discovered a train schedule from Peru among her papers, from long before she met my grandfather, and a photo of her in Hawaii with a longboard, muscular and svelte in her bathing suit flanked by admiring men.

I realize now that my own young ego was so wounded by their treatment that my curiosity about them couldn’t grow until they were no longer alive to hurt me. Before then, I spent our time together guarded against the next cutting remark about my body, my hair, or my clothes. I lived with a ticking bomb of self-hatred, always ready to be triggered by their judgement. Now I’ve grown past this, have diffused that bomb and removed it, through therapy and time, and through the process of becoming a mother myself. 

If I’m ever a grandmother—time will tell—I’ll definitely bake cookies. I’ll also share with the little ones a few stories of their great-great grandmothers—the socialite, the dancer, and the sports fanatic.

Today, I see each of them as a role model of sorts and, in some cases, a model of what not to do. Grammy A taught me to love my son fiercely, but to let him develop his own life. My hunger for travel and life experience echoes Mimi’s, and as I still work in my fifties to craft my writing as an art, I realize how painful it would be to be blessed with a talent that couldn’t last over time. From Gramma Betty, I learned to choose a husband who wouldn’t try to contain my spirit, and to give grace and withhold judgment in my relationships. Each of my grandmothers cut her own complicated path, and while I didn’t follow any of them, they helped me learn to forge my own.