Grandparenthood
A guy standing in line at the airport Chick-fil-A had on a white t-shirt that simply said in black block letters across the front, “Jesus.” If you ask me, the period made the shirt. We were on our way back from a fundraising event in North Carolina where a ten-year survivor of stage four metastatic breast cancer had made us laugh and think and feel. And then give. Hurricane Ida had just slammed New Orleans (on the anniversary, no less, of Katrina), and we were dodging her afterbirth through Atlanta as we hustled to get home. The terminal TVs displayed the devastation in Louisiana and the political upheaval overseas while people swirled like maggots avoiding contact and wearing masks.
“Jesus.”
Like an attorney’s closing argument that asks all the questions he already has the answers to, that t -shirt tied it all up in a bow. Five letters and a period. “Jesus.” It sounds so simple when you put it like that.
Half a year ago my son and his wife brought home a tiny wad of perfection balled up in the middle of an armored cradle we affectionately call a car seat. Both sets of grandparents and one very invested aunt had all submitted projections on how much the baby darling would weigh when she arrived, the closest in proximation winning the prize of holding her first. I don’t play slots and I don’t bet on horses and I rarely get the good hand when someone passes out the cards, but somehow I got lucky on this one and won the coveted prize. As I struggled to unstrap her (a task I should have taken a class for) I couldn’t help but think she looked like a caterpillar missing her cocoon, and that I had gotten lucky at precisely the right moment in time.
Some things are big and some things are Julia Roberts in ‘Pretty Woman’ huge, but the day you hold your first grandchild for the first time might be in a league of its own. It’s a cousin to double rainbows and sneaky sunrises that spill out of the sky like a tie dye ribbon out of a rabbit’s hat. Heaven sent stuff that you can’t capture in words or pictures no matter how hard you might try. “How Great is our God” would not stop playing on a loop inside my head.
Some things are big and some things are Julia Roberts in ‘Pretty Woman’ huge, but the day you hold your first grandchild for the first time might be in a league of its own.
Everybody always says grandkids are the best. “If I had known they’d be this good, I would have had them first”—we’ve heard that one more times than we can count. It’s all funny and at least more than sort of true, as best I can tell. I’m in the early stages of this gig, so I still have a lot to learn, but I have already discovered that the view is vastly different from the backseat of the car.
Parents sit in the driver’s seat. They have to. It’s their job to get their kids where they need to be. And I’m not referring to soccer practice or dance lessons. Parents’ eyes are supposed to be on the road. They don’t have the luxury of studying auxiliary things.
Grandparents, however, we get to look around. We get to gawk at the flowers in the median and monitor the roadside construction. It’s more than ok if we read billboards and turn around to look at souped up cars we pass on the road. We don’t have to worry about changing lanes or going the speed limit or navigating construction. We just get to ride and soak up all we see.
Those first couple of weeks, my son would carry Austyn around on his forearm like a football, her pallet the acreage between his wrist and elbow, his hand the headboard anchoring her in place. Those days went fast. And the weeks went faster. I’m still mad about the pictures she changed too fast for us to snap. Austyn’s parents do the hard stuff—the bottles, the diapers, the letting her cry herself to sleep. I do all that, too, --except maybe the cry herself to sleep part—but I’ve also spent entire days just staring at her as she breathes. That’s a luxury only grandparents can afford.
Grandparenthood comes along right where it’s supposed to in the continuum. I used to say that life felt backward—we work when our children are little and we’re constantly in chaos with too much to say grace over and never enough hours in the day to do it. And then we get older and our children leave home to begin lives of their own and we quit our jobs and there’s nobody to look after and nothing to do. I’ve always thought that was so upside down. But I get it now. Grandparentland is a place you have to live your way to. No one would be any good at it if it had come first.
When I was younger, even if I’d had the time, I wouldn’t have used it well. I would have been a backseat driver instead of a grateful companion riding along enjoying the view. I was too focused on building too many things-- my home, my family, my life, myself. I was the quintessential goal setter, the list maker, the driver with my hands at 10 and 2. And I felt responsible for so much. Even for enjoying my kids (which I did well, in retrospect, if I do say so myself). We spent time lingering in the hammock making pictures out of clouds and traipsing through the ‘forest’ (aka treed edge of the yard stuffed with undergrowth, the place we did not mow) which we named the Hundred Acre Wood. We even nailed a Winnie the Pooh sign to a tree. But when they’re yours, the ones that come squirting out of your body, you’re always a little bit worried that you might just screw them up. So, a lot of what you do is laced with purpose.
By the time you get to Grandparenthood, you realize you’re not as powerful as you might have once thought. The pressure to do it right bled out of that balloon a long, long time ago. And you recognize that right is relative and raising kids is something you do on a case by case basis, and that in the end there’s a lot of luck involved with those who turn out well. In grandparenthood, time isn’t tethered and doing it right never crosses your mind. You just hope you do it well, as you let love pull you wherever it is it wants you to go.
At almost six months, our angel has a tooth, an almost crawl, and a personality like her Auntie’s, the kind that never makes you wonder where you stand. She has a giggle, prompted mostly by her dogs, that once you hear, you crave like chocolate when you’re on a diet. It is invasive and addictive and it can alter the way the blood moves through your veins. I snuggle this wonder child often, I kiss her even more, and I have an entire scrapbook on my phone of pictures of her hands.
“Jesus.”
I know no other way to fathom the pudgy fingers cupped around my shoulder as we rock or dance in the kitchen to her daddy’s favorite country songs.
We walk underneath the canopy of trees in my backyard a lot, this Heaven sent baby babbler and me, her chubby hand on my shoulder, her big, blue eyes drinking in the dancing leaves as they’re tickled by the wind. And I covet her awe. I want to can it in mason jars with screw top lids and give it away on the street corner like the rural farmers do their leftover tomatoes and their corn. If all the world could see as she does, we would live in a different sort of place. Babies cut the cataracts off your eyes.
God knew what he was doing when he made these tiny creatures. But he really hit a homerun when he let our kids have kids.
A large chunk of grandparent joy comes from watching your tow headed toddler become someone’s dad. Observing it is like going down a giant hill on a slip and slide. It’s impossible to be anywhere else in your mind as it is happening and as soon as it’s over, you want to do it again. When Austyn laughs, she looks like her daddy, when she gets excited, she looks like her mom, and when she’s not at all about what’s happening her bottom lip flips down and she looks exactly like the picture of her Auntie Chan that hangs outside the bedroom in the hall. The pieces of so much we love are decoupaged into this little human who, in the end, is nobody but herself. Grandparent glasses allow us to see the pieces and the whole, the possibility without the probability and the space that’s needed in the middle for doing somersaults along the way.
Grandparenthood lets you relive all the highlights of your own parental journey like a shuffling rolodex of ‘Friends’ episodes—the one where he went camping, the one when he got a dog, the one where he wore goggles and floaties, the one where he got stitches on his face—leaving you to marvel at how in the world that little curly haired boy got to here. Here, where he makes bottles and changes diapers and knows all the words to the songs on “Go Dog Go”. When Austyn falls asleep on her daddy’s chest, I feel like I just won the Super Bowl but I’m not spent and my back doesn’t hurt.
“Jesus.”
The world is a complicated place. I guess it’s always been this way though as of late it feels more twisted and less secure. There is just so much we do not understand. My man in the nugget line wore a good suggestion. He kept it simple, a thing most of us are not inclined to do.
There’s no explaining why the cancer warrior bucked the odds. Science says she shouldn’t have, and yet I hugged her twice this weekend. I can vouch for her. She’s real. And I will never understand how a baby comes to be, regardless of all they teach us about it in school. Some things are too big for explanation. Grandparenthood is one of those.
“Jesus.”
I gotta get me one of those shirts.
Sherri Coale
P.S. One of my favorite authors on one of my favorite subjects....
