So much of being a mother is doing things: feeding diapering reading chasing chastising lullabying lifting loving. But an important part of being a grandmother is that thing that mothers often find most challenging: hanging back. As my children got older it was terribly difficult for me not to rush into the breach. They would come home with a tale of a contretemps on the playground, a reprimand in the library. I remember the day my daughter was talking about some piece of conspicuous unfairness, and when she saw my face she said, in her fiercest fashion, “Mom, don’t…call…anyone.”
I didn’t. But I wanted to.
Maybe this is why so much of being a grandparent feels like auditioning. The role of Mama and Daddy is self-evident. Grandparents? Not so much. Who are you and why are you here sometimes but not all the time? Where do you fit into my day-to-day? It feels like those are the thoughts of the little person and perhaps that explains why some of us try so hard. Maybe that’s why some grandparents buy the things that are verboten, allow the TV time the parents won’t. I certainly don’t remember doing so much mugging and rolling around with my own kids, but I didn’t have to show them that I was somehow significant. One day I even did a headstand for Arthur. He looked unpersuaded. I convinced myself that maybe when he was older he would be impressed, but then I pictured some rangy teenager sitting in a diner and saying to his buds, “My nana did a headstand in the living room last night.”
“Dude,” they would say. “Ah, dude.” And not in a good way.
Of course, some of the auditioning, if not most, takes place not with the child but with the parents. If they have childhood grievances, this is the perfect forum in which to play them out like a game of charades. I read not long ago about a woman who gave her mother a three-page single-spaced memo before letting her babysit. Her mother! Who had at least one child that we know of—the woman handing her the memo!
Swallow hard, Grandma, and smile. It’s all about spending time with the grandchild. No matter what the cost.
The thing is, from the moment it begins you want to do something. “Let me help,” you say. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, the people who really get to make all the decisions will let you do so, push the stroller for an hour while they get the dishes done, do the dishes while they go for the walk. It’s their call. The torch is passed to a new generation, as well as the bouncy seat, and the breast pump, and the baby wipes. And, for most of the time, the child.
SMALL MOMENTS
It’s 2:07 A.M. on the digital-clock face. Out on the street it sounds as though two people are arguing, although the specifics are muffled because the windows are closed. It’s stuffy in here, but better stuffy than drafty where someone else’s infant child is concerned. Window open. Window closed. Window open. Closed again. This baby will not catch cold on Nana’s watch!
His mother is a floor below, getting a good night’s sleep. She could use it. Her husband is traveling on business, her son still nurses every few hours, and the day before, as she bent to lift him, she torqued something in her back. It’s an occupational hazard they never mention to new mothers, that you need to soften your knees when you pick the baby up or you will suddenly feel a fire at the small of your back, the nerve down one leg or the other screaming. The stitches, the nipples, the lower back: it’s as though all your body is sacrificed to the greater good after you’ve had a baby. I have taken over for the night and headed upstairs to the guest bedroom, which now has a crib as well as a bed.
The greater good makes a faint mewling sound from the embrace of a kind of soft cradle on a little metal stand. Plug it in and it rocks back and forth and plays a variety of sounds. You can choose whale calls, lullabies. I’m using white noise. It helps me sleep, too, although I am once again in the land of mom sleep, remembered from years before, when a snort in the next room can take you from out-of-it to wide awake in an instant.
2:09, and he’s up. Ah ah ah. I lift him from the cradle in the old familiar hold, one hand under the head, the other under the butt. He is still in that stage of his development when he seems as formless as the swaddle in which he is wrapped, like bag-o-human. A huge head on an unreliable stem of neck, fist as likely to poke him in the eye as to catch hold of anything it flails toward. This must be nature’s design. He is so pathetic and helpless that we have no choice but to dance attendance on him, even with sciatica. Not to mention that a baby wailing is one of the most unnerving sounds imaginable. You read over and over again that when people do bad things to their small children, it’s to stop them from crying.
I have a bottle of breast milk expressed by his mother earlier in the evening. I’ve angled him so he is mainly in the dark, but the streetlights faintly pick out the pulse in his jaw as he sucks. He is warm and somehow companionable; it feels as though we are the only two people awake in the big city. The burp, the rocking, and then I put him back down. He is not pleased. I pick him up and rock him for a few more minutes. Still unhappy, he starts to complain more loudly. I know his mother has developed mom sleep, too, and I do not want to wake her. I take him from the cradle and put him next to me in the bed. On his belly he splays like a frog, arms and legs bent into angles, head turned to the side, mouth ajar and slack like an old man sleeping.
And he is indeed sleeping.
I am doing everything wrong here. He is not supposed to do what is called co-sleeping—that is, be in the same bed as the adults. Like everything else now about being a mother, there is endless argument online about this, about its dangers, its advantages. Not for the first time, I am glad that my babies predate the Internet. I had Dr. Spock and Dr. Brazelton and my own best instincts, powered less by science than by a combination of exhaustion and convenience. Sometimes I joined in with the symphony of flat-out lies on the playground, but at least I didn’t have to comb through a constant barrage of judgment about the plastic in bottles and the toxins in detergents at the end of every advice article online.
He is also not supposed to be sleeping on his stomach. I cycled through prevailing medical opinion on sleep positions as a young mother. I was supposed to put the first on his stomach so that if he spit up he wouldn’t aspirate it into his lungs. (I love it when you hear things like this. The doctor is saying very calmly, “Aspirate into his lungs” and you’re nodding and thinking, Aspirate? Into his lungs?) Number two was supposed to be on his side. Have you ever tried to get a baby to sleep on his side? The package is not designed that way. By the third there was some debate, side or back. It seemed someone, somewhere, had decided the lung-aspiration danger no longer applied. I settled the matter with my youngest by choosing the position in which she was most likely to settle down. I had three children under the age of five. Pragmatism was my middle name. If she’d wanted to sleep upside down like a bat, I would have put a bar on the ceiling above the crib. Whatever gets you through the night.
But I am with someone else’s baby, even if I like to think of him as somehow partly mine, and I cannot have that attitude. Because now the consensus is strong, not to say draconian: back-sleeping to guard against sudden infant death syndrome. Well, hell, throw the D word around to new parents and you can just about guarantee compliance.
This has even given rise to a new phenomenon, called tummy time, because all these back-sleeping babies are getting flat heads. So now a couple of times a day we are supposed to put Arthur on his stomach so he will learn to lift his head and shoulders, kind of like Pilates, except that unlike Pilates the lift is quite easy but the touchdown is pretty graceless: He’s up, then he flops. Up, flops. When he flops he sometimes settles in, making it quite clear: this baby is most comfortable lying on his stomach. But he is not permitted to sleep there. It’s been all I can do not to say to his parents, “Leave him alone. He’s comfortable as is.”
The faint light from the city street makes a stripe across his back. Definitely breathing. I synchronize my breath to his as we struggle through the night in Nanaville.
I want to leave this baby on his stomach so he will sleep soundly. I’m certain he will be fine. But I can’t take a chance. So I lie in bed awake and carefully watch him breathe for three hours. This is the closest I’ve come to pulling an all-nighter since college. At 5:11 he starts to stir, a ribbon of silver snail-trail drool shining in the faint gray daylight from the street. I give him a second bottle. This time, after a minute or two of grousing, he settles into the rocking cradle and falls asleep on his back. And so do I. I hope his mother, on the floor below, is sleeping soundly, as well.
Lessons learned:
Sometimes what feels like a favor winds up being a blessing.
Sleeplessness is more survivable in small doses.
White noise is wonderful. I put it on now every time I am sleeping in a hotel room, and whenever I do, like Proust with his madeleine, I go back to that moment, Nana and Arthur, side by side. Then I fall asleep, happy.
BEYOND WORDS
The first sentence we learned was “I love you.”
Wo ai ni. Wo ai ni, sunzi. I love you, grandson.
I don’t like doing things I don’t think I’m good at, which sometimes makes me wonder how I ever learned to do anything at all. I have long thought that I was bad at foreign languages; perhaps, as a writer, I hold my native tongue close and refuse to accept other comers. Once I had satisfied the college language requirement, I added that to the list of things I would never have to do again, which is a list that is now blessedly long. No more standardized tests. For that matter, no more pap tests. I’m done with résumés and job interviews.
And yet here I was, learning a foreign language that, as one of my friends noted helpfully, is about as tough as they come. Our first grandchild is half Chinese. His parents originally hired a Mandarin-speaking sitter, an ayi who kept careful notes, as beautiful as scrimshaw, about Arthur’s day, pictograms interspersed with military time for naps and the occasional Englishism: “pupu” was my favorite, since I could understand what it meant.
The first time I came to relieve the ayi I said, “Ni hao,” at the door, exhausting my entire repertoire with a hello except for the moment when she left, when I said, “Xiexie.” Thank you. From that moment on, when I tried out my baby Chinese—did he eat applesauce? Does he like yogurt?—the ayi would wrinkle her brow and say, “Shenme?” which means “what?” but translates as “I know you are trying to speak Mandarin but I can’t understand a word you are saying.”
Arthur’s parents both speak Mandarin: our daughter-in-law as her birthright, our son by dint of long study, considerable determination, and several years of living and working in China. At the wedding his father-in-law, who is a professor of classical Chinese, made much of the fact that our son had asked for his daughter’s hand with ancient language and rite. “How romantic,” I said when Quin told me what he planned. “Honestly, it’s more like a transfer of property,” he’d replied.
His in-laws say his Chinese is very good. How would I know? All I know is that I find learning this language so difficult—shaping the muscles of my mouth to make sounds I’m quite sure I’ve never made before—that in this, as in so many things, I am in awe both of my eldest child and by what my love for my grandson will lead me to do.
“You are doing very well!” said the lovely young woman who came once a week to sit at the dining room table and teach Arthur’s grandparents her native tongue. She made our efforts easier by being so nice and so obviously touched by our impulse. At our first lesson—“Dui. Bu dui. Hao. Bu hao”—she asked why we wanted to learn Chinese. She said that she had had many students who were young Chinese Americans whose parents felt their language skills were so deficient that they would have difficulty communicating with their native grandparents. But she had never had grandparents who wanted to learn to communicate with their grandson. She was kind enough to build all of our lessons around our likely interactions with Arthur: Do you want to go to the park? Do you like milk? Thus did we find ourselves one evening launching into a full-throated rendition of “If you’re happy and you know it, pai pai shou.” Clap clap.
We don’t have to do this. Our grandson, his parents, his other grandparents, almost everyone around him: we all speak English. If Yeye and Nainai spoke only English to Arthur, he would grow up understanding the two of us just fine. Ditto for the grandparents who are native Mandarin speakers, Laolao and Laoye. We all four speak quite sophisticated English, rich, polysyllabic on occasion. Our son once told us, on the way home from the airport when he was visiting from China, that one of the things he found most challenging was not having access to that complex vocabulary, what might be called Graduate Level Mandarin, although it was most gratifying when a cab driver in Beijing told us our son’s command of slang was excellent.
But becoming a touchstone for those people who extend my line consists of many parts, and learning some Mandarin feels like one of them. The reason why is simple, and undeniable. At least one set of my grandchildren will be bilingual, and I can already hear my grandson say, in a quizzical voice, “Nana, why can’t you speak Chinese?” And it’s not that I am competitive about this, as I am in so many other things. It’s that I want to be in his world as much as I can without crowding him, or his parents. It’s the linguistic equivalent of getting down on the floor to play with him at his own level. Chinese will not be the only way to do this, certainly. Someday, if I live long enough, I will want to know what he’s studying in college and discuss it with him. I will want to make pot roast for a crowd of his friends and eggs Benedict for his significant other. I will want to buy him something silly that he really wants for his birthday, and I will want to buy him a pair of theater tickets if I’ve seen something I really like and suspect he might like it, too.
And when he looks at the old Labrador and says “hei gougou” instead of “black dog,” I want to understand. I want him to think his grandparents took the trouble to be where he is.
Because I’m learning that being a grandmother is not about the things you have to do. It’s about the things you want to do. The fact is that motherhood is mainly about requirements. Very, very little of it is optional if you’re doing it with even a modicum of care. There’s no sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee and the remote control, saying to yourself, I don’t really have to feed that baby. I don’t have to change his dirty diaper. I don’t have to keep an eye on the toddler when she’s around the cat or take her to the pediatrician when she’s a hot little bundle of bright red pulling at her ear and sobbing. Motherhood is mainly a roundelay of Thou shalt, shalt, shalt.
Nana, unless she has become de facto Mom for some sad reason, is pretty much purely about desire. I’ve fed the baby, changed the diaper, crawled around on the floor while he went straight for the electrical outlet or the dog’s tail. But I’ve done that because I offered and my offer was accepted. Most grandparents are tethered but not tied, connected but not compelled, except by choice.
Inevitably I will fall down on the job. Already I am keenly aware of some of my nana shortcomings. I have kind of a dirty mouth. It wasn’t always so. I don’t believe I swore, or what would now be called swearing, until I was in college. They were different times, of course. I distinctly remember an evening on which a casserole dish cracked as my mother was moving it from oven to counter and she lost the veal parmigiana, splat, all over the kitchen floor. When she yelled, “Goddamn it!” I thought the earth might shudder to a halt in its customary revolution. Honestly, it’s the most profane I ever heard her be.
I am much more profane than that. In my defense, after convent school and a women’s college, I spent the most formative years of my life in a graduate-level institution for the use of bad language: a newspaper newsroom. It was also aces for the use of great language. I am a nana with a rich vocabulary. Thank you, editors and colleagues.
The rich vocabulary I will pass along. The profanity I will
try to curb. I know very well that if I just stopped in the park, with the dog’s leash tangled around my ankles while I held desperately on to the stroller, and marked the moment by saying “^^@?***#” or words to that effect, it’s a cinch that some version of the same thing would eventually come out of my grandson’s mouth.
And that would be bad.
But of course it’s not just bad language. It’s bad behavior, too. Part of becoming a grandparent is deciding that you must bring your A game. When I lose my temper and yell at the dogs, I see a look of surprise and distress on my grandson’s face. It’s almost as though, before he has grown the carapace of maturity, he knows instinctively what is not right. So I try not to do what is not right. Which leads to an inevitable and daunting conclusion: we have to be our very best selves around our grandchildren. For that to be true we sometimes have to be different people than we are when we are just slogging through the day. Being a good grandparent means being a good person.
So I will do this as best I can. As best I can: those are words I remember from my time as the mother of small children, and I think of them often today. They are forgiving words. When they hired the ayi, Arthur’s parents had a plan that he would be fully bilingual. But then the ayi moved back to China to help with her own grandson, and the Mandarin preschool program cost the earth, and the wheels started to come off the bus of that part of the operation. (When I was raising our kids, the wheels came off so often that eventually the operation I was running was like one of those cars on cinder blocks parked next to a chop shop: No wheels, doors, wipers. Just a chassis. A chassis of motherhood.)
This also happened with our Mandarin lessons. Our teacher moved back to China because of visa issues, and though we kept talking about finding another, life intervened. Pop got busy. Nana got busy. Arthur learned to say “Ferdinand” and “flower” in English. But then he went to Hong Kong to see Laolao and Laoye and spoke mainly Mandarin during the visit. One day we were sitting on the kitchen floor—it was during the period when we did a lot of sitting on the kitchen floor—and he said something to me in Chinese. And here’s the thing: I managed to figure out what he was saying! He wanted milk. Niunai! It was in one of our earliest lessons, along with my pivotal identity: “I am grandmother—Wo shi nainai.” And milk he was given. Niunai. Arthur had expanded my world, pushed me into a place I entered uncomfortable and never expected to inhabit. I wonder how many times that will happen with my grandchildren in the years ahead. Music, movies, books, clothing, technology. I will try to deal. Will they appreciate it? That’s not the point.
Nanaville Page 3
