Out of Breath and Into the Future: A Reflection on Grandmotherhood
There aren’t many how-to books for new grandmothers. I first noticed this when I wondered whether I should knock on the door and offer to hold my son’s newborn baby for a little while at night, to let him and his wife get some sleep. The bookish person that I am, I decided to look it up. I have found many answers about my life this way: that I might be an anxious avoidant, that offering an example from one’s own life to a grieving person is a form of gaslighting, and that standing outside the delivery room with forty helium balloons might be an example of a family with toxic enmeshment. When I did find a slim but colorful volume written for grandparents, I discovered that instead of offering to hold the little newborn angel in my arms, to sing to her, to whisper the glorifications of the Universe into her ear, it would be helpful if I offered to do the laundry. And if I offered to do the laundry, I should not fold the nursing bras. And if I left the nursing bras laying forlornly in the laundry basket, I should explain to my son, in a straight-forward manner which does not draw extra attention to the fact that his wife is not wearing a normal bra, that the only reason I left the aforementioned item there, was because I did not want to cross any boundaries. I also read that it would also be helpful if I brought a meal along, labeled with the ingredients and the date, measured into quantities that into account the size of their freezer. For example, a nine by eleven Pyrex dish of pasta for a young couple living in a two-bedroom apartment would not be appropriate at all, as they would not have a chest freezer and the freezer above the fridge could not be expected to fit more than a six by six. Just as I was wondering what a grandparent was to do if they only had a nine by eleven dish, the glowing and extremely neuroplastic-looking grandmother whose advice I was reading, admonished me never to try to split the lasagna at my son’s place because that would just be making more work for them, and then I will end up seeing my child frustrated with what I thought would be helpful.
I thought I was with the times until my children had children. Now I’ve realized that once that happens, the times can only move forward by finding a way to prove you wrong about everything. If I sound grouchy about it, I am, because I really find my grandchildren to be the most wonderful gifts in the world. And I want to find ways to just be with them. I want to be a part of their lives in meaningful ways.
“Be careful!” I holler as I run after my granddaughter who has just learned to walk and whose turning angles are successful in avoiding crashes about three percent of the time.
“We don’t say that to her.” My daughter, a speech pathologist, says to me as she sits at the kitchen table and sips her cappuccino.
I’m holding the squirming mass, waiting to find out the code of conduct from the woman who I laboured for in a squatting position for forty hours. But I’m open, I’m constantly learning, I have a growth mindset, I believe in learning the language of the future. The little legs have almost wriggled away and are pointing directly towards the hard ceramic tile. “Ah, ok, what do you say then?”
“We say, ‘Trust Your Body.’”
She’s just over eleven months old and the phrase sounds a little like I’m already schooling her about her sexuality. But I say this over and over until it becomes a habit, and I feel proud and young and kind of sexy, especially in front of my own friends who start screaming in unison when they see the holy terror headed for the staircase. I stand there, with my delicately embroidered cashmere shawl and rhinestone-studded slippers and say, “Aleena, darling, trust your body.” My friends think I’m taking it too far.
“Why the hell are your kids always setting their boundaries? Why can’t you set your own boundaries too? You finally have some freedom and now you can’t come to Morocco with all of us because Aleena doesn’t like her new babysitter? That’s ridiculous.” I know that my kind-hearted, lifelong friend, Yasmeen, will change her mind about my decision once she herself becomes a grandmother, but I remember, just in time, that saying this to her is a no-no, in case her daughter decides not to have children. This, by the way, is chapter four and five of the book.
What I haven’t actually figured out is whether I will ever be able to talk about my experience being a mother with my own children ever again. I have discovered that, for the time being, I am to act as if everything I am witnessing is something I have never seen before in my entire life. Diaper rash? Yes, let’s go to the Emergency Department and wait there for nine hours and pay thirty-six dollars for parking to hear that the Shopper’s Drug Mart in Sherwood Park carries both Zincofax and Desitin and both are safe for newborns. My role: feed the meter and run for coffee. Or how about: not sure if he’s getting enough milk? Yes, let’s buy a hospital-grade electric pump and why not, let’s hire a personal coach from the more entrepreneurial members of the Le Leche League. Whatever happens, I know that the worst thing I can do is to make suggestions based on my experience.
It's not even that I want to get involved in the day-to-day stuff. It’s hard enough being a new parent without constantly hearing how someone else raised their children. When you’re in it, you just think about keep those babes alive. Dangers seem to increase with every generation: microplastics, climate change and online groomers. I’m finally done with worrying about all of that and I would never again be tempted to read another Lancet article for the child who got eighteen cavities when he wasn’t even allowed a drop of sugar for the first four years of his life, damn it, not even apple juice.
I guess I just wish that I could share some of my memories with my children about their childhood. I can still feel their skin on my skin, their wrinkled softness against my softening heart. I still wake up, listening for one or another to call out in the middle of the night. Even as I shake free of their needs, I feel, viscerally and unceasingly, the silkiness of the tiny hands that once clung to me for safety, for warmth and for life itself.
Mothers, I feel, are the most unnurtured slice of humanity. What do we really do to prepare mothers for giving birth, other than prescribe prenatal vitamins and demonstrate pathetically unhelpful breathing practices. Just imagine the eruption of an earthquake between your legs and someone, usually on their sixth hour of a call shift, tells you remember to breathe. The whole point of the birthing process is that you will never ever catch your breath again. It’s the world’s most consistent conspiracy. Breathe.
Still, at least that relatively short labour is somewhat respectfully acknowledged in popular culture, among close friends and in medical textbooks. The dilation of the spiritual cervix that is required to let go of that slippery creature thirteen, fourteen or, in some rare cases, twenty years later is completely unsupported. In fact, not only does it not get discussed, but there is an impatience, a kind of silent but forceful accusation that mothers who have trouble letting go are dragging our feet on evolution itself.
There was, I believe, a time when it wasn’t this dismissive, when grandmothers and great-grandmothers became the prophets, sages and seers of their time, to whom newborns were brought for blessings and to take a quick peek at that angry-looking backside. Even within my own childhood memories, I carry scenes of grown men, on their way to do their morning rounds for their industrial equipment at factories that they most definitely had to pull their bootstraps up very high to start, stopping first at their mom’s house to get their daily dose of prayers, advice and sometimes a quivering scolding. Shriveled, thin and mighty, the matriarch would announce, with porridge overflowing from a toothless mouth, that she didn’t like the look of that last electrician they hired, he was a bad apple, and that misfortune would follow if nothing was done about it. Puzzled but deferential, Big Boss Son would call the new electrician, give him a nice exit package and send him on his way, confident that the simple act of listening to mom could only bring grace and prosperity to the nation.
Thank you, Mother India, you say. I admit that South Asians tend to carry these legends farther than is probably helpful, but the flip side of it, that is, the way things are here, is a state of late motherhood that is neither denied nor affirmed but just left on the branches to wither away slowly and preferably out of sight. I say out of sight, because if I decided to strive wildly to fight this stage of my life by arduously replicating, both inside and outside of my skin, a state that will artificially, by hook or by crook, replicate my ovulating days, I will be admired as a successful woman who made her fifties the new thirties, or some other ludicrous phrase of madness like that. But if I go around talking about the changes in my life with a decent degree of accuracy and detail, there is a sense of embarrassment, like witnessing nature gone sour, that makes me feel like the most gracious thing I can do is stand on the sidelines of life and cheer, but not too loudly (chapter seven, in case you are interested).
Perhaps it is my ego that needs to be tamed. I admit that I was once the center of my children’s lives and no longer am. I was once the pivot on which the merry-go-round spun, the hinge on which the doors to life-affirming sustenance opened and closed. The buck stopped here for years, day in and day out, whether I slept or not, whether I was dying of fever or not, whether I had even an ounce of energy left in me or not. It was a tireless, thankless state. And it’s over. The thing about being a hero is that you don’t know what to do when you’re not. The high is so high that anything less than pushing a body out of your body is bound to leave a new grandmother, like me, almost wishing that the grandchildren emerged from my own womb. Almost.
“Mom, I need to put myself first.” What amazes me is that I’m never supposed to say that, ever.
“Just love them, don’t analyze it so much,” says my husband. But he’s got years of experience. His memories sound like this: Ameer’s birth was so hard; it was Ramadan and I had to start my fast eating hospital food. Abdullah’s birth changed everything; that’s when I lost the watch your mother gave me. It’s not that he wasn’t an extraordinarily committed father. It’s just that in the process he remained a whole person.
It may not be fashionable to admit that my personhood was affected by having kids and then once again by having grandkids. It would be completely inaccurate to say that I lost myself. Rather I found a transcendence bigger than myself. I like to think of myself as a conduit for the Universe to open up. Creativity cannot leave your own membranes intact, right? Maybe the difference between how I’m experiencing this and the generations of grandmothers in the past is that they weren’t so concerned about being publicly acknowledged. Their love and life spans simply didn’t have room for obsessing over defining their role in their adult children’s lives, especially in relation to those chubby-legged godsends,
I’d like the Grandma Textbook Volume VII to have is an addition chapter called “The Lifechanging Things You will Finally Realize as A Grandparent””
1. Your time with your child as a little person cannot be brought back, or more importantly cannot be re-written through your grandchildren.
2. Parenting young children in any generation, but especially this one, is just exhausting. You just can’t expect an exhausted person to notice yet another person’s needs, especially when that person is the human being who they have always counted on to understand.
3. You can have your own journey down memory lane by yourself, or with your co-parent, in fact those memories will erupt spontaneously, things you hadn’t thought about for years. They will remind you that you had your own rich journey and you can enjoy those memories as much as you want.
4. Observation is not necessarily critique. Remember when you felt that your every faltering and amateur mommy move was being watched by your mother-in-law. Maybe those eyes were delighted, surprised, moved, or humbled by seeing you wipe up yet another puddle of accidental pee-pee in the marble foyer of their house.
5. The cycle of life requires water to flow downstream to the ocean. The love you have for your child now needs to flow to the next generation. If the current switches to focus on you, the whole ecosystem gets dammed up.
For me, it’s been two layers of transcendence: the first in letting go of my child and the second in being overwhelmed by a love so powerful and yet at a distance. It’s love purified from any sense of ownership, expectation or need. It’s love watching love.
