Pretty Ugly

Bet you think this is about my little violent, Violet—but you’re wrong. This is about the original: my Grandma Vie.

She was a career waitress with a bluntness about her. When I’m questioning my own word vomit, I like to think she’d be proud of who I became. She served at a restaurant called The Normandy, while I currently work at a local supper club inside the building that was once called The Normandy back in 1948.

When my siblings and I were little, if my dad told us not to stir up our ice cream she would come up behind us and start whipping the spoon so fast around the bowl, until she could hold it upside down and the ice cream would stay put. She’d look at my dad and say, “We aren’t stirring it up, we’re mixing it” – or something sassier.

I always felt like she and I were on the same wavelength. There’s nothing quite like being loved exactly as you are—especially when you’re an awkward little girl with bad bangs, puffy headbands, and too-big teeth.

She moved to California later on, and we’d talk on the phone now and then. Then she passed. I grieved her the way a selfish thirteen-year-old knows how—sad and full of regret that I hadn’t asked more, said more, done more. That kind of grief has a long shelf life.

I always knew that if I ever had a daughter, somehow, some way, her name would carry a piece of my grandma.

While I was pregnant, our little girl seemed determined to escape womb-jail every night—flipping and kicking like a tiny maniac. We started calling her Violent Violet. When I told my dad, he laughed and said he’d once known a Violent Violet, too.

I don’t doubt it. I bet Grandma Vie could whoop when necessary. But through my eyes, she was the epitome of a soft place to land.

And now I get to raise a Violet of my own—equal parts wild and warm. Just like the original.