(grand)Motherhood 2.0

All of a sudden, I am one: a grandmother.

Well, perhaps not “all of a sudden.” It involved one of my children intertwining lives with an extraordinary partner, and then these two extraordinary people deciding to make another human. And then there were those forty-some-odd weeks during which two cells grew into Henry.

So what is a grandmother these days? Who am I as a grandmother?

I think of my own grandparents. On my father’s side was Anna, an immigrant, poor, illiterate. Her husband died before my parents met. He was, I think, a day laborer. No one talked about him as I was growing up. Much later my uncle told me he was a wife-beater. Anna had suffered from crippling arthritis since she was 16. Her hands were claw-like and her knees were heavily bandaged. She lived in a dark apartment in an old building in a marginal neighborhood that today is busting at the seams with kombucha-drinking visual artists.

I have no memory of her ever visiting our house. We visited her, a once-a-month (or less) chore considered by all an unpleasant experience. She was cranky and nasty, undoubtedly due to constant pain, the trauma of her marriage, the dreariness of her life. None of which I realized at the time. To me she was an old old lady (she would then have been about my age) who lived in a dank, smelly apartment and made terrible food we were forced to eat. I remember her night table crammed with prescription medicine bottles. I was petrified when she touched me with those claw-hands.

My maternal grandparents were a sweet pair, my loquacious Nanny and my quiet, dreamy grandpa. They were not a big part of my life, not even really a small part of my life. This was for two reasons: One, my father hated them (as he hated all of my mother’s family) and two, they moved to the Promised Land (aka California) when I was seven. I remember one, and only one, time when I was solely in their care. They were at my house–my parents were off somewhere, perhaps making my brother—and my grandmother bought me a package of Hostess snowballs. Those were the round little cakes covered in marshmallow and coconut. And pink. My mother would never have let them into the house. I remember sitting at the kitchen table, peeling off the marshmallow covering, rolling it into a ball in my palms and then bouncing it off the wall. My grandmother laughed. At that moment, I could not have loved her more. But then they moved 3,000 miles away. And we visited once.

I know those ironic images of grandmas. We all do: iron-gray hair in tight curls, alternately baking cookies and knitting scarves, kindly, crinkly-eyed, bosomy women. In aprons. Not my grandmas. And, needless to say, not me.

There is also today (and for at least the past generation that includes my own parents as grandparents) a vast population of distant and disconnected grandparents whose kids moved across the country or across the ocean. Visits are infrequent and are “occasions.” Or it may be that their own lives—divorces, remarriages, stepkids and step grandkids, second careers—stretch them too thin to be involved/ in the moment grandparents. Again, not me.

So I know what I am not.

What am I? I don’t know yet.

But I do know I will be there, part of everyday life, familiar, open-armed, open-hearted, a hugger, an on-the-floor-playing partner, a doer, a laugher, a listener. And there might be cookies.

Grandmotherhood 2.0, bring it.