Now that I’m a grandmother, I find myself thinking of my mother more frequently. Though I know comparisons are irrelevant, I reminisce about what my mother did as a grandmother when my kids were babies.
She lived about as far away from us then as I live from my granddaughter now. She, too, had to make do with visits every few months. She was a lot younger than I am now, but she still had a son at home and couldn’t leave home easily, just as I am not free to travel on a whim. When my kids were babies, we had to plan visits—either me bringing the baby to her or she visiting me. The visits happened, but they weren’t as frequent as either of us wanted.
She stayed with my family for a couple of weeks after each of my children was born, and was a huge help both times. Cooking. Cleaning. Baby-tending. Although I had to feed the babies, she was up with them a lot during the night. It was a rude awakening for my husband and me when she left.
She toilet trained my son. She taught him how to make an angel food cake. She helped with my daughter’s birthday parties.
I look forward to figuring out my role in my granddaughter’s life, though I will not be figuring it out in a vacuum. She and her parents will have something to say about it. I don’t know what grandmotherly responsibilities will become mine, though I am fairly confident that cake baking will not be one of them.
My mother lived long enough to see both my children graduate from high school and college and my daughter to graduate from law school. I first noticed the start of my mother’s dementia in 2007 when we were together for my daughter’s college graduation. We were in downtown Washington, D.C., headed for a Smithsonian museum, and my mother panicked as we crossed a busy street. I took her hand to help her cross, much as she had taken my hand when I was a child, and my children’s hands when they were small.
Three years later, when my daughter graduated from law school, my mother had been diagnosed with dementia, probably Alzheimer’s. Yet she was the one who saw the sign that the famous New Orleans trolley was not running that day, and laughed at the rest of us non-demented folk.
Because I am almost twenty years older than my mother was in her early grandmothering years, I don’t know whether I will see my granddaughter’s graduations. But I will be there for as many of her milestones as I can. And I will also remember my mother as a grandmother at her grandchildren’s milestones.
My mother would have been 91 this week. She passed away almost ten years ago. But I still have my memories of her, and they still guide me today as I seek to define my role as a grandmother.
What do you remember about your relatives who have passed on?
