I signed up for a college online class on writing - free - from the University of Iowa, and the assignments are coming hot ant heavy, and I'm writing fiction, but this last assignment was to write about immigration - really just moving from one place (physically or psychologically) to another - perhaps to a place of awareness, greater understanding, more acceptance, or actually to a new place and all that implies. I've done that - several times, and I don't know whether to just pull out one of the pieces I wrote about moving or to tackle something heavier. Still debating. In the meantime, I wrote one article about being a grandma:
We had waited so long, and it didn’t seem like it was going
to happen, so I decided to adjust to the reality facing me. Driving to work one
morning, I just let the tears roll down my cheeks; I wasn’t going to be a
grandmother. It wasn’t the end of the world; I had two amazing grown kids and
they were happily married to people who loved them to death, so they would be
fine. So would I, I assured myself.
“But I would have been so good at it!” I wailed to my disinterested
windshield.
So, it was settled; move on. Count your blessings. So what
if most of the people you know have already had grandchildren? Some of them, I
might add, had great-grandchildren; such was the plight of a couple who marries
in their late twenties and has their last baby in their late thirties, eight
years after their first. As it was, we were asked at a PTA meeting when our
“baby” girl was in elementary school, “Oh, are you Corey’s grandparents?” The
woman had the good grace to apologize when we set her straight, but we had a
reminder that we were very late to the party. Lateness catches up with all of
us.
The older one, the boy child, made it perfectly clear from
day one, he was not having children. Sorry Mom, sorry Dad, no kids for this one.
Too selfish, too much wander lust. We had put pins in all the places he had
been all over the world; we believed him.
But our girl? She loved being in charge, loved playing
school, and then loved being a teacher and always seemed that she would be the
one to have children. It wasn’t that she was saying she wouldn’t, she was
pretty tight lipped about that stuff. But there was the miscarriage earlier in
her marriage, and I figured she didn’t want to put herself through the
emotional roller coaster again. Besides, they were in debt and kept talking
about wanting to owe no one. I’m familiar with the concept, but never managed
to accomplish that goal myself, and I was in my seventies at that point.
Seventy-five, to be exact.
So Christmas came and we went to spend it with our children
in north-central Florida since their coming to us was impossible; we were in a
one-bedroom apartment in a senior citizen community. We had fun, of course;
both of my kids and their spouses are uniquely delightful people, their friends
are nice, and we felt welcome in our daughter’s home. We even had our own
bedroom.
Fairly late on Christmas night we were settled down ready to
go to sleep when we heard a light tapping on the door. I got up and answered it
and my daughter and her husband were standing there with a gift bag.
“We forgot to give you this,” Doug said. Corey flipped on
the overhead light.
“It can wait until tomorrow,” I said, squinting into the now
lighted room, “You don’t have to do it now.”
“Mom.” I know that tone, very well, so I acquiesced.
I peered into the gift bag and pulled out a very, very tiny
onesie that was emblazoned with the words, “Our family makes cute babies.” Not
as quick on the uptake as I wish I was, I was confused for a second or two before
the synapses kicked in and I got it. We WERE going to be grandparents, after
all.
We scrambled. No way, after all the fussing I had done about
not being a grandma, was I going to not be nearby for every minute of it. And
she wanted us there. She made that very clear. As it was, she went into labor
when we had but a week to go to move lock, stock, and barrel after selling our
place, all our furniture and packing up our U-Haul. So we abandoned our nearly
finished project and took off to be there for his birth. They hadn’t wanted to
know the baby’s gender, so it was a surprise to everyone, and he was glorious
and perfect and my daughter was a trooper and looked like she was going to be the
most amazing mom with a very involved dad.
We rushed back to south Florida, gathered up our U-Haul,
said good-bye to our friends a second time, and moved into a place our son
rented for us to be close. Seven minutes from her house to our house.
So began my life as a grandmother.
Can I back up?
My mother and father lived near me, too, when I had my
first, and I went to her for...everything. When she would take our son, I
handed him over with relief. He’s yours, now. Do with him what you like; I
trust you to know what’s best. All I wanted was some time to myself, and all
she wanted was time with her grandson; it was a perfect fit. I had Doctor
Spock, dog-eared, and my mother. I wasn’t confident, actually, but I wasn’t
terribly anxious. If others had done it, so could I, right? Made sense to me.
It was before the Internet, you get that, right? My mother
knew everything, since she knew more than I did, and what she didn’t know, we
relied on Dr. Spock and the pediatrician to know. Somehow we made it more or less
intact. Cloth diapers and rubber pants, Tide detergent, slept on his tummy, took
a bottle with him to bed, slept when he was sleepy, ate when he was hungry, and
played on his own or with neighbor kids. He didn’t even go to regular
kindergarten.
No arranged play dates, no special activities sessions, no
parks with chopped up rubber tires as a bed, no sleep science, no organic food,
no child restraint car seats, no organic diapers, no sensitive skin detergent,
no sun block. Probably watched too much TV, unmonitored for age-appropriate
material. His sister, our new mother, fared not a whole lot better. Pampers
were available by then, but mostly everything else was the same, except my
mother got sick when I was pregnant with her, and by the time my little girl
was almost five years old, her grandmother died—cancer.
I never spent enough time telling my mother that no way
could I have done it without her and how scared I was to finish raising this
little girl without her. I hated it that she would not be there for her
grandson, the apple of her eye (I understand now) who was just 12 at the time
and would go on to do all kinds of amazing things that would have lit up her
eyes with joy. Maybe remembering how I felt when she died was part of my
sadness when I thought I would never be a grandmother, who knows?
Anyway, fast forward. Like I said, he is amazing, my
grandbaby, and at 22 months he loves his Nana and she is over the moon about
him.
So, I’m having a conversation with a friend.
“How’s it going with you and Corey?”
“Good...”
“Do I hear some hesitation in there?”
“Well, you know, everything is different now. I’m not the
authority ... on anything, actually. It’s as if I didn’t raise her brother and
her and keep them from certain death and dismemberment. Now I know nothing.”
“Seriously?”
“Well, it feels that way.”
I am a retired psycho-therapist. I listened to people
talking just like I was talking. My comments were feelings of inadequacy, of
powerlessness. I felt shoved aside, stupid. My feeling was valid, if
unsupported by facts.
That night I went to bed remembering a particular session I
had with a young woman going through some feelings of inadequacy herself. Her insecurity
had to do with her job. She felt unappreciated; she stepped up and filled in
where needed, she stayed late when someone was needed because she didn’t have
children at home and her co-workers did. No one seemed to notice. I had a sign
on my desk, “Start where the client is.” We all have a tendency to get a person
to where we want them to be—to help them see that there is a way to take action
that will help them to feel in control that will alleviate those feeling of
being overlooked and undervalued. We want to offer reasonable, but perfectly
meaningless, platitudes when what we have to do is validate the person’s
feelings in the moment and help them move forward when they are ready.
I imagined that my daughter was in a therapist’s office
telling the professional that her mother was snarky with her because she, the
baby’s mother, wanted things done a certain way, based on all the new science
available about parenting and sleep patterns and screen time and sugar and,
and, and. Oh, and KNOWING HER BABY. So, maybe she wanted to not hurt her
mother’s feelings; she depended on her after all, and her baby, now growing into
a little boy, loved his nana. And it was clear his nana would throw herself in
front of a speeding train to save this child. But Nana was prickly about “the
schedule,” looked askance at the rules about no screen time before naptime, got a bemused look on her face when she heard complaints that he only got nine
hours sleep last night and he needed to have twelve.
“I know she thinks it’s no big deal,” I can hear her saying;
“I know things were different for her, but I feel like I need to try to use all
the expert advice I can. People spend a lot of time working all this stuff out;
there’s science behind it, and she dismisses it.”
I’m imagining she’s saying these things, but I have a good
imagination.
Wish me luck.
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