Prepping for Grandmotherhood : Anticipating--and experiencing--a loved one’s childhood is all the sweeter when it can be done once removed.
I am ready to assume the role of grandmother. All I have to do is wait for my daughter to decide she is ready to become a mother. I am not rushing her, by any means; she has been married less than a year, a time of major adjustment and change for her and her newly minted husband. But when they announce, I will start the college fund and pay closer attention to catalogues for children’s things.
I will have to invent a way to be a grandmother. I have no models to draw from, since all four of my grandparents were dead by the time I started elementary school. I have been witness to the relationship that my daughter has enjoyed with my mother for more than a quarter of a century, but as the mother/daughter between, I don’t have the best seat in the house for assessing their dynamic.
When I was a young single parent, I was deeply grateful that my parents were on the planet, youthful and healthy enough to play important roles in Kelley’s life. From the time we left Philadelphia when Kelley was 4, not a summer went by that they did not welcome her back into their home and their hearts. In the years when I could not afford to send her, my parents paid her fare. Some might say that Kelley spent her summers being spoiled rotten. Maybe, but mostly she was loved without limit. When she left, my parents missed her deeply. As each summer approached, her visit was happily anticipated. She was welcomed warmly and relinquished to me reluctantly. Whatever Kelley thought about me as a parent, she knew that her grandparents loved her.
As a parent, I taught Kelley fiscal responsibility when we were too poor to have done otherwise. I am proud of her present maturity and professionalism, traits I believe she learned in the course of being the only child of a single parent. Knowing that I was her primary role model, I took seriously the job of instilling values that would serve her for a lifetime. She grew up assuming that her continued education was a matter of fact, with the only open question being what college she would attend. When I went to college when she was 8, there was a life lesson there for Kelley, but it was learned at the sacrifice of some of my time and a great deal of my energy. Even her pet cats provided opportunities to teach: about hygiene during their lifetimes and about grief when one of them died.
But with all the parenting effort, I don’t remember simply enjoying knowing my child. There were too many responsibilities to always be appreciative of her sunny demeanor and her developing sense of self. I never gave a gift that was merely entertaining if I could incorporate some learning function into the same expenditure.
Every mistake I recognized making haunts me, and much of the good about her got chalked up too often to fate or the alignment of the stars when she was born. She remembers being a primarily happy child, feeling loved and heard and valued. But I have insufficient memories of my participation in the childish parts of childhood. I see her childhood as captured in photos of her sixth-grade commencement: Kelley smiling with a flower in her hair, her head resting on my shoulder, and me with a furrow between my brow.
The word on grandparenting is that its principal attribute is that you get to fully enjoy your grandchildren and then return them to their parents at the end of the weekend, the holiday or the summer. I am anticipating more than an easy interaction and diminished responsibility for a little person. I want to become a grandparent because I have hugs in me, left over from Kelley’s transition into early adolescence, when her need for hugs diminished. She and I are back to hugging as adults, and I enjoy that. But I crave the fierce and sticky hugs that smell of outdoors on a tiny overheated body.
I intend to introduce my grandchildren to cold pizza as a breakfast food, to teach them the Temptation Walk and all the words to “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.” I want to experience--fully this time--the complete trust of a child who believes that I know just about everything important there is to know. Or at least how to make toast turn out exactly right.
