Saturday, June 3, 2017

I see I haven't entered a blog post this year, and it's almost half over! 

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.
Then I realize: I need to meet my daughter where she is. I need to join her in this parenting thing. I need to get online and read what she reads; it will be a way we can connect and stop being at odds. Just because I may think some of it is overdone and silly, and honestly I may still think that, but I owe her the effort. Who knows, I may learn something.
Wish me luck.