As readers of this blog know, I was very close to my maternal grandmother, my Nannie Winnie. I always believed she thought I was pretty special as well—after all, I was her oldest grandchild. I knew she loved all my siblings, and I didn’t think I was any higher in her estimation than they were, but she always made a big deal over me whenever we got together. She would eagerly hug me and kiss my cheek, and even when I was a teenager and not supposed to like such overt affection, I secretly did.
One thing I have always felt bad about is that I didn’t make an effort to see Nanny Winnie in her last few years. She had Alzheimer’s and got to the point when she didn’t know who I was. One Christmas when I visited my parents (2001, I think it was), I had the choice between staying at their home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and seeing my sister and her young daughters or going to Richland, Washington, where my grandmother’s nursing home was. I chose to see my sister and nieces rather than Nanny Winnie. As it turns out, this was my last trip to see my parents before Nanny Winnie died in March 2003, at the age of 95.
Backtracking to the purpose of this post . . .
My son was born in February 1982, and I took him to visit my parents in April of that year. My parents had met their first grandchild already—my mother came out to help for two weeks when my son was born, and my father visited for the last weekend she was here.
In fact, the night my father arrived for that visit was the first time my husband and I were alone with our son. My mother had helped a lot with the middle-of-the-night part of having a new baby. I might have been the only one capable of feeding him, but she could rock him and soothe him back to sleep, and she did.
So that first night, my husband and I went to bed and listened to our baby cry. “Should we go get him?” my husband whispered.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back. “Maybe he’ll go to sleep.”
He cried.
We waited.
He cried.
After a while, he did in fact go to sleep. And it only took a few more nights of that before he learned to settle himself. He slept through the night (well, from 10:00pm until about 5:00am) at six weeks old. I thought that was pretty good.
Back to my trip in April 1982 . . .
Nanny Winnie and my son, with my parents’ dog Heidi, April 1982
I took the baby on a flight from Kansas City to Seattle. I’d been told to get the bulkhead seat, because airlines of that era had little bassinets that fit in front of the bulkhead seats, so that’s where I stowed my son—right in front of me, easy to reach, yet I didn’t have to hold him for the entire flight. I knew to give him something to drink while we took off and landed to keep his ears from hurting. He cried some, but we had a relatively pleasant flight.
We landed, and my parents drove us to their house. At that time they lived in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. Nanny Winnie, who also lived in the Seattle area then, came over the day after I arrived. I grinned when I saw her, ready to greet her and get my big hug from her.
Nanny Winnie and my son, April 1982
Nanny Winnie walked right past me without a greeting, saying, “Where’s that baby?” She had eyes only for my son.
Her oldest granddaughter had been supplanted by her oldest great-grandchild. I learned my place.
On March 15 of this year, Nanny Winnie would have been 112. She’s been gone now for seventeen years, and I’ve missed her every day.
When have you been upstaged by a younger relative?
