Becoming Grandmother
Of course I’d like to think I’m too young to be a Grandmother. But then I catch a glimpse of me holding the baby with my silver hair and solar lentigines and I realize … I AM THAT old! Thinking back (with an online age calculator on hand) I realized that I am in fact older than any of my own grandparents when I was born (their first grandchild). My Dad’s parents were 51 and 48, while my mother’s parents were only 43 and 38. But then again Mom’s mother died at 50 and her father died at 53 — the age that I am now, though I’ll be 54 in a few weeks time, so yay for me I outlived my maternal grandparents! I am clearly ahead of the game.
Even my own Dad was 45 and Mom was 44, when Patricia Jane was born and made them card carrying members of the Grandparent club. I’m a full decade older! No wonder Mom looks so much younger in Tricia’s baby album. 🙂
Of course we think things will look different when we thought about being grandparents. Maybe we imagined a better retirement plan, better health (or health care), somehow I imagined I’d have some kind of wit or wisdom by this age that clearly never fell from the sky when the stork was carrying my grandson.
Because ultimately, I’m just me. Broken bits that sometimes catch the light in just the right way to cast a shimmery smile for a moment in an otherwise empty space. The mental stories that marked my adult drama are still pretty much the same soap operatic cries of the menapausal-me-mind. My fears are still thriving, as my physical body speeds up to decline. I certainly don’t have anything to offer by way of senior savvy or sapience. Save the recipes that for the most part still exist only in my impromptu intuition. (Making a mental note that I should write some of those family culinary traditions down.)
Regardless of my previous expectations, or indeed what others may believe I should do, or be by means of agency, I am simply just this — a grandma in the making. There is no expectation that I will ever reach a state of completion, much like the 9 rows of crochet that exist as the beginning of a baby blanket but will not ever see the fruition of a bed cover though perhaps one day it will make an eccentric scarf, or a bath mat or a precarious net for a plethora of stuffed animal friends. Because we make do with what we have and take pride in knowing that we’ve made the best out of the bits we were given and we will leave behind a legacy that will live on beyond the limitations of the mental noise that told us anything other than we were perfect in our presentation and grand in our parenting.
