THE SECOND TIME AROUND: Further Thoughts on Being a Grandmother

(for my granddaughters Daisy Belle, Charlotte May, and Frances Rose)

     There are those who'll bet love comes but once and yet

     I'm very glad we met the second time around.

                                            -  Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen (popularized by Frank Sinatra)

A few months ago, I wrote about the joy of meeting my first granddaughter.  And now, I have two more -- twins born to my daughter Anne.  The joy remains, but that's not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about the unanticipated difference between parenting and grand-parenting.  

As I have written before, raising my two daughters was one of the best experiences of my life.  It was also one of the hardest.  Of course, the early years get buried under the accretion of the years that follow; memories fade as we watch our children grow into adults.  It is only now, as I watch my daughters tend to their daughters, that I remember just how hard it was. 

Now, I remember sleep-deprived me tending to a baby, while trying to manage the many chores that keep a household running--grocery shopping, preparing meals, paying bills, running the vacuum cleaner, etc.  And then going back to work part time -- leaving the house with baby spit-up on my clothes.  And a couple of years later, there was a second daughter -- so, all of the above, with a toddler to wrangle. My daughters' dad was a hands-on parent, so I certainly didn't do all of this alone.  And, still, it was hard.  

Wonderful, joyous, and hard.

But, now, I get to experience the first year all over again with my granddaughters.  And I get to pay attention in a way I wasn't able to the first time around.  Yes, I remember how excited I was when my daughters first engaged with the world around them; when they first rolled over, then sat up, and crawled; when they first walked and talked. But, I was also trying to attend to in all those other things I listed above. 

When I am with my granddaughters, I am simply present.  I am not trying to make a meal or pay bills. I can give these babies my full attention.  I am really noticing each new milestone.  And I don't think I'm alone in this experience.  Friends have told me they feel like they are also noticing more than they did the first time around, that they are enjoying having the time to savor the unfolding of these new beings. 

And here's another thing.  I am way more confident than I was with my first-born.  Certainly, my second daughter got the benefit of my experience with her sister, and this is even more true with my granddaughters.  If a granddaughter cries, and then keeps crying after I have tended to her needs, I don't assume I am doing something wrong; I just figure she needs to be held until her little nervous system calms down.  If one twin cries while I am tending to the other, I know that she will be okay until I get to her. 

There are downsides, of course.  I do get tired.  Sometimes, I get very tired.  I don't have the energy I had when my girls were babies, and lifting an 18-pound, eight-month-old is very hard on my back. The good news is I get to go home and rest, while the parents carry on, bleary-eyed. 

All-in-all, this grand-parenting is a very good gig.   

                                                 

HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: Some Thoughts Inspired by a New Granddaughter **

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.

       

LUCK BE A LADY

I came across this today.  I wrote it for my daughters, although I can’t remember when.  I only remember that I was expressing the wish shared by all parents to keep my children safe.     

(For those of you not up on your mid-century musicals, Nathan Detroit is a character from the musical Guys and Dolls.  He is a gambler who runs the “oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York.”) 

            It feels like a toss of the dice.  If I were Nathan Detroit could I get it right?  Listen girls, I’d load the dice if I could.  Problem is, I don’t know which are the magic numbers that would keep you free from pain.  What if I chose wrong, screwed up – loaded the dice, stacked the deck, and the rules changed, somebody sent in a ringer? Hell, I’d gamble away my youth – what’s left of it – sell  my soul to the devil (all the while desperately mixing my metaphors), but what do I ask for?  That you walk fearlessly in the world?  That you experience everything except the one pain that is too much for you to bear – whatever that might be?  That whatever your heartaches turn out to be, I am not their cause?  That whatever your heartaches turn out to be, they will not do you in?

            I’m looking for a sign.  A tip.  A card with a folded-back corner. A rabbit’s foot to tuck inside your backpacks.  I need the entire cast of Guys and Dolls – Marlon Brando included – to sashay across our lives, singing Luck Be a Lady Tonight.  Look girls, I’d keep you safe if I could.  If only someone would rig the roulette wheel and give me the keys to your hearts. 

Photo by Riho Kroll on Unsplash

ON DAUGHTERS GROWING UP

My daughters are 26 and 28.  I love them beyond measure.  And I love knowing them as adults and seeing what they are making of their lives.  Giving them life and starting them on their paths is the best thing I have ever done. 

Here’s the rub, though – the thing I want to write about now, the thing nothing prepared me for:  I did not know how much I would miss their younger selves.  Of course, I knew they would grow up.  I just couldn't anticipate what it would feel like to lose forever the babies, the toddlers, the little girls they had been.   

A couple of months ago I was walking through a park on a weekday.  The park was filled with young mothers and their children.  I sat down for a few minutes and watched them.  They wore their youth so lightly.  They would live in this world of young motherhood forever.  (You can’t see the end of it when you are in the middle.)  I envied them that tunnel vision, the feeling that this is your life—days filled with children, with you, the mom (and the other parent, of course) at the center, loving, caring for, feeling both amazed and exhausted by, your children.   

And, then, it is over. 

Slowly, at first, as they reach puberty and begin the turn outward, and then – following a rush of senior-year activities – they are gone.  They leave home to go to college or whatever the next step is for them.  They come home.  But by the time  they finish college (if all goes as it ought) they don’t live with you anymore. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t live my life in a state of mourning.  I don’t think about this all of the time.  But, sometimes I see a young woman with two little girls and my heart cracks a bit, thinking of my little girls. Where have they gone?  They have turned into amazing young women.  But where are those babies, those toddlers, those little girls? 

It is different for our children.  They have always known us as adults.  Granted, we get older, but we are essentially the same people they have always known, only older and creakier.  Sadly, they don’t remember the baby-and-toddler years when we were the center of their universe, nor do they remember much about the little-girl years.  Their memories likely begin with the years when it became important to separate from us.  

But we remember it all.  I think that is probably why parents of adult children drive their kids nuts with stories about their childhoods.  They want to relive those moments that their children have forgotten.

Today, my oldest and her boyfriend got on a plane back to London, where they live, so I am feeling the sadness of that distance as well.

I am so grateful for Skype.  And for the photos of my daughters in all of their growing up incarnations—I will try not to foist these on them too often. 

Most of all, I am grateful for the experience of being a mom, with all of its bittersweetness.  I would not trade it for anything.