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.

       

STILL SHE PERSISTED: A Paean to My Younger Self

A while back, during a conversation with a ten-year-old granddaughter, I mentioned that my earliest job had been as a secretary, that I had, in fact, gone to secretarial school after high school.  

My granddaughter turned a puzzled face to me, and asked, "What's a secretary?" 

This word was completely unfamiliar to a girl who (at that moment, anyway) aspired to be an architect.  I explained that a secretary would now be called an assistant. 

Across this stretch of years, it is hard to bring that secretary, that girl-- for girl I was, into clear focus, but I will try.   

In September of 1967, 17-years-old and fresh out of high school, my best friend and I got on a bus near our suburban New Jersey homes and headed into Manhattan for our first day at The Latin American Institute,** a secretarial school located on Madison Avenue, where we would learn to type and take shorthand (taquígrafia) in English and Spanish.  

We would take that bus every weekday for a year, immersing ourselves in Spanish and learning how to behave in an office.  (Of course, we would make coffee for our bosses.  And, of course, they would all be men.) Looking back, I am astounded by how very young we were.  (Needless to say, we believed ourselves to be entirely grown up.) No one accompanied us into the city that first day.  There were no helicopter parents back then. It was just, "Have a good day," as we walked out our doors.  I vividly remember stopping an ancient businessman (he was probably 40) as we left The Port Authority Bus Terminal, and asking him, "Which way is uptown?"  

Oh, yes, we were young.  And we swam in the water that surrounded us.  What else did we know?  This will be a stretch for those of you who grew up believing the sky was the limit, who grew up taking for granted that you could get a credit card or a loan in your own name, that you could aspire to be a politician or a doctor.  But try to imagine what life was like for a young girl just a few decades ago.  Imagine a childhood in the 1950s when every voice around you screamed boys are important--girls not so much.  Sure, your daddy might have doted on you, told you that you were pretty, but imagine a world where “pretty” was your only passport to a good life, a world where the Miss America Pageant was a highlight of the year and where the local store displayed a row of photos of young women in tight curls and pointy bras, accompanied by the invitation to "vote for Miss Rheingold.”   (For those of you too young to remember, Rheingold was a beer.)

 

Imagine a world where girls wore dresses to school--were, in fact, forbidden to wear pants, where pre-schoolers wore ruffled dresses that discouraged rough and tumble play.  A world of stiff party dresses and patent leather shoes.  If it was cold out, we wore leggings (not the ones you are thinking of – these were bulky affairs that matched our winter coats) under our dresses.  

Imagine internalizing the message that girls grow up and get married and have babies and stay at home.  That was, after all, what most of our moms were doing. Imagine the message that you might have a job in the interim between leaving school and getting married, or maybe, if your husband were really enlightened, you would keep working until you had a child. Imagine that in this decade a college degree for a woman was sometimes called an MRS. degree.  Imagine, further, that well into the ‘60s, at least one women’s college taught classes in deportment – how to pour tea and step gracefully in and out of a sports car. Imagine that the only jobs suggested to you by society are store clerk, bank teller, secretary, nurse, or teacher. (There’s nothing wrong with any of these jobs--I have friends who have happily made careers of them; what is wrong is that so many jobs were considered to be for men only, that it would not occur to you that you could be, say, a research scientist, a doctor, an accountant, a college professor.  And, of course, men were not expected to be, say, nurses or secretaries.)

 

Yes, there were little girls like RBG, but I didn’t know them. And, yes, I did have female friends who went off to college, and I expect that there were girls who were encouraged to seek a "nontraditional" job, but this was not my experience.  My immigrant parents, playing against type, did not encourage me to go to college.  The idea was never discussed in my house.  And so, off to secretarial school I went.

I did not excel.  I did not want to be there.  I liked the Spanish immersion, but my typing and shorthand skills were mediocre.  I was envious of my boyfriend, who was attending college.

 

After a year at secretarial school, I continued to take that bus to a job at an advertising agency, where I warded off attentions from my much-older boss. (Remember, please, I was still only 18 when I started that job.)  I was not happy and I was not good at my job. This was the era of manual typewriters and multiple pieces of carbon paper between the multiple copies of whatever one was typing.  It was so easy to make a mistake and have to rip all those pages out of the typewriter and begin anew.  Ugh. 

When I wasn't busy being frustrated by my ineptness, I was bored. After a year at my job, and after reading every book assigned to my college-attending boyfriend, I figured out that if I lived at home, I could afford to go to the nearest state college.  I'm not sure where I got the gumption to make this happen.  At this point in my life, I did not have much confidence in my intelligence. 

But, oh, I loved being a student.  I loved being an English major.  I had terrific professors.  I never had a TA.  I was hungry and I soaked it all up.  Living at home was challenging, but my time on campus was magical.   I had left the job for which I was not suited and headed off to college just in time for the beginning of feminism's second wave.  I loved my expanding world, a world that I hadn't, until then, realized had been so very circumscribed by our culture's limited expectations for women.  

Now that I was in the right place for me, I excelled.  I read and read and wrote and wrote.  I discovered that I was intelligent, that I was a good writer.  I began to imagine new career possibilities.  After college, I worked for a year as a journalist, then went on to law school--something that would never have occurred to my younger self as an option. (And may I add that I never stopped appreciating the secretary/assistants with whom I worked.  They were so much better at their job than I had been. It hadn't been the right job for me, but these assistants were whip-smart and kept the offices where I worked from falling into chaos.)

From my perspective in retirement, I am not sure that I would choose the law again. It was the first previously male-dominated career that came to my attention. There are other career paths that look more attractive to me now that I can see the full range of possibilities. I am, nonetheless, proud to be one of the women who stepped into roles forbidden to us in our childhood. I am happy to have a much fuller life than that allowed to my mother. I am delighted that my daughters grew up without the restraints I felt as a girl.

So, today I look back in gratitude on the girl and young woman I once was. Everything I am today began with her. I stand on her skinny shoulders. I am grateful for her courage.       

She would be surprised by this praise. It was decades in the coming.  May I never forget. And may all young people of every gender have the opportunity to do the work that is just right for them.  


Photo by Daniel McCullough on Unsplash

** Diligent Google searches have turned up no trace of this school.  I have no idea when it it ceased to be. 

(This is my story. I acknowledge that there are many who have faced far greater and graver challenges.  I will leave it to them to tell their stories.)