Grandparenting

“All parents are an embarrassment to their kids. Often, grandparents are the relief. Kids don't have to resist you.” – Anne Lamott

My only child is becoming a father in a few weeks. His stepfather has eight grandchildren. When we married, they were traumatized teenagers who had little use for a substitute mother, their own mother close to death from drugs and drinking. She’s still alive. Despite a certain lack of understanding what it means to be an adult; my husband is an adored grandfather. I, on the other hand, suggested they call me, “Whose that lady?” when he asked what name I would choose as their step grandmother. Yes, I wish them happy lives and support his relationship with them, but I saw myself as an adult friend, a resource in case of crisis.

photo by Daiga Ellaby

My grandparents were nothing like the version I had seen in movies and television and read about in books like Heidi. In that novel, the grandfather who is initially gruff softens and soon he and Heidi are consuming vast amounts of melted cheese and frolicking with the goats in the Swiss Alps. I wanted to be an orphan like Heidi and sleep in a feather bed, but I was stuck in New Jersey with a single set of intact grandparents and, until my father’s mother died in a car crash, one grandmother. There was no melted cheese, rather an Irish former nurse who called me fat and made me take endless naps. She told us we were going to hell because of my parents’ decision to eschew all religions while her Catholicism imbued her entire world. She had been a nurse in WWI, a member of Florence Nightingale’s unit, experienced mustard gas and bombing and supposedly went around converting fatally injured soldiers to Catholicism. She was courageous but never cuddly. When we stayed with our maternal grandparents, she made us attend Mass with napkins pinned to our heads, washing my dirty face with spit and whispering that it was not my fault I was a doomed sinner.

My grandfather made no impression except he walked so slowly a child could not be blamed for screaming in frustration having been told to accompany him from the car to the front door and he chewed all his food according to the rules of a diet nazi named Horace Fletcher who was called the “Great Masticator.” My grandmother was mean to my mother and when we hauled her out of the nursing home for Thanksgiving dinner, a meal my mother would have spent weeks planning and days preparing, she would invariably make a cruel remark about the food. This caused my mother to cry and retreat upstairs while we drove this tiny yet sadistic person back to the nursing home.

My father’s mother was much nicer, but she flipped her car over when I was eleven and died. His father was the mystery, an alcoholic who disappeared during the depression, someone I never met but when he was ever mentioned my father’s face would reflect a sadness I could not bear. His first novel told about this lost father, but he never spoke of him. When asked I told people my grandfather had died in an alleyway. Having grown up in the country, I wasn’t sure what an alleyway was, but it sounded interesting.

My parents were good grandparents within the scope of their aging and their self-absorption. Before my father’s depression rendered him comatose, he was, according to my son, the funniest person in the world. They showed him unconditional love and while my mother made some questionable decisions like having him fertilize her roses at four years old and inhale grapes, she delighted in his company.

I want to be an excellent grandmother to this little girl. Do I understand what that actually means? I’m not sure. I think melted cheese, Swiss chocolate, and feather beds are good things along with constant positive affirmations and unconditional, non-judgmental support of her parents. I’m still bewildered by the fact I raised such an incredible human as my son without taking credit except I never gave up even when he was dancing on a razor’s edge. I would like to be sanctuary and a source of embarrassing stories about her father when she is old enough to appreciate them. I would like to model aging as a privilege and not become sad and mean. I would like to be the sort of grandmother who when my name is mentioned her face lights up. 

– Molly Moynahan