Illustration by Drew Shannon
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I wear a pin the size of a beer cap on the lapel of my jean jacket that reads, “New Grandma.” The pin was a gift yet I wonder if sporting it will help me ease into a role I never considered.
I opted for motherhood over 40 years ago; grandmother-hood opted for me.
I put a pause on birth control in my late 20s as a conscious decision. To this day, I thank every trailblazing feminist who hammered it into my head that motherhood was a choice.
But becoming a grandmother? Like wind and rain, totally beyond my control. All one can do in life is dress for the weather.
I never gave grandparenting much thought. Never until my daughter and son-in-law announced their pregnancy. I downloaded an app onto my crowded cellphone to track the baby’s growth. Soon I was imagining myself as grandmother to a plum, a beefsteak tomato, a green cabbage, and finally a pumpkin that vanished at the stroke of 11:11 a.m. on a Sunday leaving in its wake a 9-pound, 7-ounce boy.
I’m 71 but with luck and daily trips to the gym, I might see my grandson graduate high school.
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I confess to feeling awestruck by my welcome into the society of grandparents. I finally get why my friends share photos, why they all believe their little one is the cutest. I now pay attention to whose grandchild is sleeping through the night, or teething, or walking. I wonder who might be ready to part with that highchair cluttering the kitchen.
As a teenager, my mother would threaten me with a witch’s curse: “One day I hope you have a daughter just like you.” It took that other society, motherhood, for me to understand that my mother did not wish to curse me so much as she wished to protect me. She hoped one day I would have a child so that I might know, in the marrow of my bones, how much I was loved, that she would do anything in her power to keep my sister and me safe.
Ours was not a family that hugged or kissed or said “I love you.” Cold wars, threats, calls to my father were the potions in her cupboard.
My mother died when my daughters, her only grandchildren, were 24 and 22 years old. Mom was more affectionate with them than she was with me or my sister. Perhaps because she finally had time and a one-bedroom apartment all to herself. I feel grateful that my children grew up knowing how it felt to be wrapped in her arms for a pillowy hug, that they recall the lily-of-the-valley scent of her perfume when they visit a shaded springtime garden.
What occurs to me now is that becoming a grandmother has expanded my heart, just as friends promised and I greeted with the skepticism of a late-to-the-table grandmother. Yet they are right. My silly heart fills like a mainsail as I hold my grandson, then billows again as I witness my daughter marvel at the crying, nursing, sleeping infant in her arms.
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Neither my daughter nor I speak of this change in the weather of our hearts. Perhaps like my mother and me, we never will. For how does one describe unconditional love to the object of that love? Perhaps by leaning on melodramatic tropes best suited for bumper stickers and lapel pins: “Will walk through fire”; “Will give my life”; “Will trade my happiness for my child’s sorrow.”
I hear my ever-practical mother scoff, followed by her list of the thankless work she undertook to keep my sister and me fed, dressed and educated. She took night classes after leaving my father; she worked full-time until retirement; she lived about an inch above the poverty line, thanks to a lousy divorce settlement and the inflation that entered the 1970s economy.
My daughters remember her as the grandma who loved to play – card games, board games, guessing games on road trips. She taught them how to whistle with two fingers, how to cut stars from cookie dough, dry flowers, make paper and, later, how to uncork a bottle of wine and eat nachos in bed. Her lapel pin could have read “Fun Grandma.”
Listening to my postpartum daughter as she coos and cradles her baby, watching the newly darkened depth I see in her blue eyes, I marvel at what my late mother, me and now my daughter have come to embrace – a wild love for something greater than our puny selves.
Katherine Lawrence lives in Saskatoon.