Chicken Soup for the Grandma's Soul (2 page)

After helping cram purchases into every nook and cranny of her car, I reminded my friend of a lunch date with our high school girlfriends at a hot new restaurant that featured elegant dining in an atmosphere that catered to people like me—tourists with hard-earned time and money to spend, who wanted to be pampered in a childfree environment.

I squeezed into the passenger side of the car, holding a huge teddy bear on my lap, thankful that soon I'd be in a world of my peers where conversation would veer toward spas, salons and shopping.

But I was sadly, pathetically mistaken. No sooner did we get to the restaurant than my friend took out her wallet and proceeded to spread pictures of her grandson over the gleaming table, expecting us to ooh and aah over the bald-headed tyke with the toothless smile. Every woman did. Including the waitress.

But not me.

What's the matter?
I thought, depressed.
Am I the only
woman on the planet who dislikes baby talk?
It wasn't that I didn't like babies. I did. I'd borne and raised one myself. Lisa had turned into a lovely young woman. Intelligent, kind, ambitious. We had a good relationship based on respect, love and mutual interests. But I had never been what one could call maternal. And what's more, my friend never had been either, I thought, glaring at her over a glass of wine. I couldn't understand what had happened to her.

We'd been teenage mothers together. We'd married and grown up with our daughters together. Together as single mothers we'd struggled in a world where we tried to fit work and relationships and parenting all in one. We'd been the best of friends.

What had happened to bring us apart?

I could only think of one thing. One word. Actually, two words. Grand. Mother.

What was so grand about that?
I thought irately.

Months later, my daughter called. “Mom, guess what?”

I was filing my nails with one hand and juggling the phone with the other, trying not to smear my facial pack.

“I'm going to have a baby!”

The phone slid down my face as visions of gray hair and sweatpants filled my mind, and the sounds of squawking at all hours of the day and night filled my ears. I tasted weariness as I imagined trundling after an infant who needed smelly diapers changed while testing formula to feed a hungry, wailing new soul.

New soul.

I burst into tears.

“Are you glad? Or are you mad?” Lisa shouted into the phone. With trembling fingers I juggled the receiver and said through a throat suddenly gone dry, “I'm not sure.” Silently I tried out the unfamiliar label. Grandma. “When's the due date?” I whispered hoarsely.

“Christmas day!”

Christmas in Seattle.

I flew over on the twenty-third. Lisa met me at the airport. Beaming. Huge. I remembered how that felt. Remembered how . . . how wonderful it was! How joyful! How expectant! For the second time since I heard the news I burst into tears.

On December twenty-sixth Bronwyn entered the world and stole my breath, my heart, my soul. My entire identity. “Let Grandma hold her!” I shouted, almost knocking my poor son-in-law off his feet as I snatched my granddaughter out of his arms. I looked down into her precious, angelic face and . . . burst into tears.

Over the next few days I fought like a dragon to hold her, feed her, change her. I shopped in the local supermarket with my hair pulled into an untidy ponytail, dark smudges under my eyes from day-old mascara, sleepless nights and sentimental weeping.

As I sat in the market's deli, rocking Bronwyn in my arms and trying not to get spit-up on my jogging suit, I reflected on my new heart, new eyes, new senses. And I knew that up until the day she'd come into the world, I had been blind. The miracle of her birth had wrought a miracle in me, one I could not get enough of. Babies. I planned to call my friend to see if she'd be available to go shopping next time I was in town. There were some baby stores I was eager to visit. I hoped she'd bring photos.

I couldn't wait to show her mine.

Janet Hall Wigler

By Any Other Name

W
hat is in a name? That which we call a rose,
by any other name would smell as sweet.

William Shakespeare

Contemplating my impending role as grandparent, I spent countless hours and multiple conversations debating what my new grandchild should call me. After all, this was a big decision: a sacred moniker—set in stone—to be used by countless future grandchildren.

I mused over the merits and disadvantages of various names, rolling them around my tongue, tasting them, savoring them—trying them on for size.
Grandmother?
Too formal.
Grandma?
Mundane.
Nana?
Nah.

From the quirky
Punkin'
to the colloquial
Gran,
the whimsical
Oma
to the formal
Grandma-ma
(with an elegant accent on the last syllable), I experimented with them all.

“Give it up,” said my more experienced girlfriends. “That first grandbaby will call you what she will. And, anyway, the actual name won't matter. Why, you'll be so thrilled, it won't matter
what
she calls you. Trust us,” they nodded in agreement. “You won't care.”

Well, grandbaby Avery turned one and my daughter put her on the phone so I could hear her chatter across the two thousand miles separating us. I knew this verbose babe's burgeoning repertoire now included words like drink, ball, banana, hi and even the names of several animals. With any luck . . .

“Hello, sweet pea,” I gushed. “Happy birthday!”

“Avery, say ‘hi' to Grammy,” my daughter coaxed at the other end. “Say ‘hi.'”

And then it happened. It really happened. A precious, breathy little voice pulled together two words from her vocabulary and cooed into the phone, “Hi, dog.”

My daughter giggled, then erupted into a full laugh— and baby Avery repeated her new achievement with enthusiasm, delighted that it appeared to make her mommy so happy.

“Hi dog, hi dog, hi dog.”

Huh, I laughed, my girlfriends were wrong. I care. I care
a lot.

Carol McAdoo Rehme

A Grandmother Is Born

O
f all the joys that lighted the suffering earth,
what joy is welcomed like a newborn child?

Caroline Norton

It's the phone call I've been awaiting for nine long months, yet when it comes, it's still a shock.

“This is it,” our son-in-law says with a certain catch in his voice. “Jill's in labor.”

And so the adventure begins. On the ride to the hospital, my husband and I cannot speak. For a man and woman who are about to become grandparents for the first time, it's all been said. All the fervent prayers for a healthy, whole baby already have been issued up to a higher power.

So we ride in silence, the silence of apprehension, excitement and joy waiting to explode.

At the birthing suite, all is surreal. While the rest of the inhabitants of planet Earth go about their business and pleasure on this brilliantly sunny afternoon, the entire world, for me, is enclosed within the walls of this waiting area.

My husband tries to read.

I pace in an unlikely caricature of those fathers-in-waiting from the Neanderthal days when mothers labored alone. Suddenly, I understand how those fathers must have felt.

Every now and then the midwife appears with a “bulletin.” Those bulletins take on the breathless significance of a pronouncement about the future of world peace.

An hour passes. Two. Three. “Soon,” our son-in-law tells us breathlessly in his one and only break from being onsite labor coach.

And at 3:42 on an ordinary afternoon, standing at the door of a modern birthing suite, I hear a cry. A baby's cry.

My heart stops.

Nothing in the world could have prepared me for this moment. Nothing will ever be the same for me in this glorious universe.

Today, I am somebody's grandmother!

Hannah—all seven pounds, thirteen ounces of her—has burst into the world.

I meet her moments later and fall madly, desperately, hopelessly in love. Nestled in my daughter's arm is this child of my child, a perfect pink and white miniature. I weep and laugh and thank God for allowing us this moment, this gift, this day.

Time is suspended. It is the deepest, most profound privilege to watch these new parents as they cuddle their baby daughter and explore her incredibly sweet face, her silky skin, her downy head.

Our son-in-law's parents are as speechless as we are. Hannah is the “we” of their son and our daughter, made tangible. In this room, on this day, we all know that this infant is our link to immortality. And this gritty, urban hospital suddenly feels holy.

It is another spectacular moment when I watch Hannah's great-grandmother—my own mother—meet her. I bear joyous witness to the awesome, incredible continuity of life's longing for itself.

Later, her new aunts and uncles greet Hannah, laugh joyously at her perfection, and touch her tiny, tiny hand.

We are dumbstruck, overwhelmed subjects of this tiny empress, and she seems to revel in the attention on this first day of her life.

This being, after all, the age of technology, the moments are dutifully recorded on video camera. Someday, we will watch—and laugh at our foolishness.

But for this day, it is totally acceptable to worship at the bedside of Hannah and to marvel at the new life that begins with the love of a man and a woman.

Despite all we enlightened moderns know of the biology of life—despite all the excesses of this Information Age— the wonder is the same. The awe remains undiminished.

A baby is born. The universal family of man—and our family—grows once again.

It is as old as time and as new as tomorrow's dawn.

The dance of life goes on. The circle grows.

And a dazed, overwhelmed new grandmother tiptoes out of a room where a miracle has happened, wondering how she ever got to be so lucky.

Sally Friedman

The Longest Week

A
sweet new blossom of humanity, fresh fallen
from God's own home, to flower the earth.

Gerald Massey

It was a wintry Saturday morning and I was still asleep when the phone rang, but the urgency in Matthew's voice startled me awake.

“Esmaralda's water broke,” my oldest son told me. “We think she's in labor.”

I felt my heart sink. As a longtime childbirth educator and breastfeeding counselor, I knew all too well the potential risks and challenges of a baby born two months early.

We spent the next hours walking the halls of the hospital as Esmaralda's contractions grew ever stronger. Finally, the midwife knelt in front of her, Matthew sat behind her supporting her back, and Esmaralda's mother and I took our places, one on either side, holding her legs. In just a few pushes, the baby emerged—pink and healthy, a beautiful boy.

Beautiful, yes, but oh-so-incredibly tiny. Sebastian Rhys Pitman weighed just four pounds, six ounces.

Esmaralda's face glowed with joy as she held him against her. But within minutes, his breathing began to falter. We could see him struggling to take in each breath, and newborn Sebastian was moved to the nursery and placed in an incubator.

I was a grandma! But although I'd been there to rejoice in his arrival, I had barely seen, let alone touched, my new grandson, and my heart ached with worry.

By midnight we had even more to worry about. His breathing had continued to deteriorate, and eventually the pediatrician decided Sebastian needed to be transferred to a larger hospital where he could be placed on a respirator. An ambulance arrived to take him away, and a team of health-care professionals put tubes down his nose and throat and hooked him up to monitors for the trip. It scared us all to see this tiny, scrawny baby with so much of his little body covered by tubes and wires.

There wasn't room for my son in the ambulance, so I drove him to the hospital, an hour away. Matthew's a foot taller than me, but he leaned his head against my shoulder and wept as we drove through the dark and snowy night.

We were fortunate there was a Ronald McDonald House next to this larger hospital, offering a place to stay for parents whose children had been admitted. It became Matthew and Esmaralda's home for the next few weeks as Sebastian struggled to stay alive. They spent most of their time sitting alongside his incubator, talking and singing to him so he would know he was not alone.

The nurses encouraged his parents to participate in Sebastian's care from the beginning. He was too frail to tolerate much handling and needed to be on the respirator to keep him breathing, but when his diapers needed changing or when he needed to come out of the incubator for a few minutes, Esmaralda and Matthew were the ones who changed and held him.