I have a new granddaughter. Her name is Daisy. She is not my first grandchild – we have five on my husband’s side and I adore them all. But Daisy is the first child born to one of my two daughters. She is the first grandchild who was still a tiny baby the first time I held her. And this is the first time I have looked for signs of my family in a grandchild.
I’m not going to bore you with a long description of my love-at-first-sight reaction to this baby. (I will save that for conversations with other grandmothers.) Although, I must say, I didn’t know I would feel exactly the same love for this baby that I felt when I first held each of my daughters. A fierce love. An I’ll-do-anything-to-protect-you love. When I first held Daisy, and every time I hold her, my heart--like the Grinch’s heart--grows to three times its size.
I was 38 when Daisy’s mom--my Mara--was born. When she was a teenager, Mara would sometimes state wistfully that she wished she had younger parents. I would patiently explain that if I had had a baby ten years earlier, that baby would not have been her. There would have been no Mara, or there would have been a different Mara.
Each baby is the product of a cosmic lottery. If my mother and father hadn’t gone to the same youth hostel on a particular weekend, they would not have met, and I would never have come into being. And even given their meeting, a very particular sperm, out of millions of sperm, had to join with a very particular egg for a baby of theirs to have turned out to be me. And so it goes, back through time -- If each of my ancestors had not created the very embryos they created at the very moment they created them, neither my parents nor I would have have entered this life.
And so it appears that the odds of any particular being winning the lottery and entering the world are vanishingly small. If, for instance, the ruptured ovarian cyst that nearly sent me into sepsis at age 24 had killed me or rendered me sterile, the daughters I call Anne and Mara would not exist. And if I had met a different man, I might have had children, but not my Anne and Mara.
And if Mara hadn’t reconnected with a college boyfriend, married him, and gotten pregnant just when she did, there would be no Daisy--not this Daisy anyway. What a chain of chance it took for this baby to be born, for this Daisy to join the chain.
Of course, I would have loved a baby conceived five minutes later, but now that this baby is manifest, it is she I love--she, who in all of her particularity, has won my heart.
I am so grateful that she is here, so grateful to have lived long enough to be a grandmother to both Daisy and the bonus grandchildren brought into my life by my husband. For them, and for children everywhere who have run the generational gauntlet to arrive in this world, I offer a version of the Buddhist Loving Kindness meditation:
May you have an open heart.
May you be free from suffering.
May you be happy.
May you be at peace.
May it be so.
**Yes, I stole the title for this post from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and, yes, she wrote her sonnet for her true love Robert, but, honestly, I believe it is equally, perhaps better-suited to a parent’s or grandparent’s love.
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
