Nanaville

by Anna Quindlen

  My grandparents looked like old people. Kitty had silver hair and Cuban heels. Gene had spectacles and a considerable waistline. Concetta wore shapeless dresses of indiscriminate color, and no makeup. Caesar tended his tomato plants in dress shirts and sharp sharkskin slacks. It would never have occurred to any of them to get down on the floor with us, and, not to be mean, but I’m not sure they could have gotten back up again if they had. Children played and tried not to bother anyone. Adults had cocktails and talked among themselves. You could interrupt to tell them one of your cousins had broken a leg in the backyard, and you might still get in trouble for interrupting. If my grandparents ever babysat for us, I have absolutely no memory of it. Why would they? Our mothers never went anywhere, and if they did, we could be dropped off with Aunt Joan or Aunt Gloria.

  My grandmother and grandfather Quindlen were both children of large Irish families, who produced such a family themselves and expected their own children to do so. The continuation of their line was taken for granted: there would be Quindlens into perpetuity. They would be Catholic and, of course, Caucasian. And yet, in this new world, here we are with a grandson neither Catholic nor Caucasian. He will never have dozens of cousins, and in some ways he doesn’t need to: as families have grown smaller and more far-flung, most young people have created a family of friends. While in my extended family we had a rotating cadre of aunt and uncle godparents, today my younger son is the godfather to my best friend’s son’s little girl.

  The numbers make this a necessity, and grandchildren a different sort of gift. Some of our friends had just one child, and in an age of falling birth rates that may mean no grandchildren or perhaps just one. This is a marked change in the landscape of life. A friend of my daughter’s once said at our dining room table that he was an only child, and my father acted as though he were a unicorn. Do the math: the only way in which my paternal grandparents would have had no grandchildren was if the planet had been wiped out by an asteroid.

  My father used to call me almost every morning, usually to discuss some relatively obscure book he was reading. A typical opening gambit went like this: “How much do you know about Charlemagne, baby?” Then he was off to the races. But one day he said, breathlessly, “Did you see Nova last night? Unbelievable. They showed a baby being born. I’ll tell you, I was moved. Really moved. I cried. It was really something.”

  The man had five children and had never seen a baby being born until he watched it on public television.

  It’s not that being a grandparent today is better or worse, it’s just different. Since baby boomers will live so much longer than past generations, many children will have grandparents far longer than I did, and those grandparents will be more active, more likely to take them skiing than to sit at the kitchen table and quiz them about their last report card. People are always surprised to hear that the average age of a grandmother at the moment is around fifty. That’s because, when life expectancy rarely breached seventy, fifty seemed old; today, with more people than ever before reaching ninety, fifty seems young.

  Baby-boomer grandparents will seem both older and younger than their predecessors. Older, because many of them are—a rise in the age of childbearing means that, while the average age of becoming a grandparent is fifty for a woman, those women who waited until their late thirties to have children and who have children who are doing the same may not become grandmothers for the first time until they are in their seventies. (I recently chatted with a new mom whose daughter has two sets of grandparents, one pair sixty-four, the other eighty-one.) Younger, too, because in a society in which a high school student and her grandmother may wear the same kind of jeans and the same T-shirt, and in which there is an 80–89 age group in the New York City Marathon, the age of the cozy cookie-jar grandmother is skidding to a close in many households. Our grandmothers were pre-gym, pre-Botox, pre–skinny jeans.

  I was sixty-four when Arthur was born, as opposed to my grandmother Quindlen, who was forty-seven when her first grandchild arrived. But I daresay that in many ways I seemed younger than she did then, in how I looked and in how I lived. One of my most comical nana moments came waiting to order fish at a gourmet market on the West Side of Manhattan, with Arthur in a sling on my chest. I was kissing his head and murmuring nonsense and waiting for tuna steaks when the woman next to me said, “You look great. For how young he is.” It took me a moment to realize that she was suggesting I was the baby’s mother. Now, I look okay for my age, but no one is going to mistake me for a thirty-five-year-old, not by a long shot. But I realized that there are in fact women closer to my age than that of my daughter-in-law who, by virtue of medical intervention, have children, and that maybe I had momentarily been mistaken for one such. Today’s forty-seven-year-old could be a much older mother or a youngish grandmother. It’s a sea change.

  But some parts of being a grandparent haven’t changed much, because grandchildren still want some of the same things they’ve always wanted. They still want to eat cookie dough before the cookies are baked, to come down the sliding board backward, to bounce on the bed even if they know it’s forbidden, and to jump out from behind the door and say “Boo!” and have you act as though you’re shocked and terrified. Sidewalk chalk, bubbles: those still entertain. For how long have grandfathers been pretending to take your nose by pushing the pad of their thumb through their first two fingers? My father did it to my kids. Even my stolid grandfather did it to me, although his manner probably made me genuinely believe not only that he actually had taken my nose but that he was unlikely to return it without good reason.

  At age two, Arthur loves it when Pop takes his nose. At age five he will play along but insist that it’s not his nose at all. “That’s your thumb,” he may say accusatorily, as so many have done before him. In Nanaville a two-year-old finds almost anything weird entertaining and, often, hilarious. As he ages, he will become more jaded. A five-year-old cares if you are fun, a teenager that you are cool. You want your parents to be leached of all eccentricity, but it’s acceptable to have a quirky grandparent (although not too quirky). I remember one of my kids at the end of Grandparents’ Day at school saying, “Everybody thought Grandpop was funny.” Gold star for Grandpop.

  I didn’t think my grandfathers were funny. I thought they were the patriarchs, the source of all judgment and wisdom. I don’t think either of them ever hugged or kissed me, ever praised me or said they loved me. Yet I knew that they did, even without words. I suppose that particular patriarchy is done, and in the main that’s a good thing. It is better to hug, to kiss, to praise. But it makes me wonder how our grandchildren will place us in this new world. For those of us who had a more egalitarian, less arm’s-length relationship with our children, it may be inevitable that our grandkids will see us less as towering figures and more as demi-parents, who pick them up at school when their parents are not available, who trail around the county fair behind Mom and Dad, waiting to be asked for a waffle ice cream sandwich or a roll of tickets for the rides. My grandparents did not do county fairs. They weren’t even interested in hearing about them. Sometimes I wonder now: once all of us were born, could they tell you all thirty-two names? Perhaps that’s beside the point. In their time they were not having grandchildren so much as building a clan.

  DID THEY ASK YOU?

  I’m not going to go into too much detail here, because most of it reflects badly on me. Let’s just say that two very thoughtful and caring human beings made the decision, after their first sitter went back to China, to handle childcare by sending their son to something they referred to as a preschool. This very much upset the little boy’s grandparents, who felt that their grandson was far too young for such an arrangement. One of the grandparents—let’s say the nana, since the pop was upset but wasn’t going to say a word except to the nana—said something. Well, maybe more than one something. Maybe several things.

  At which point her son, who had rarely don
e so before, pushed back. Hard. He was not rude or mean-spirited, but it was clear he wanted his mother to back off. And so back off she did.

  So the next morning the nana—let’s call her, for the sake of argument, me—was out for her morning walk with her friend Susan, whom she considers a source of all sensible insights and who once taught the nana’s sons in elementary school. Susan’s last name is Parent. You can’t make this stuff up. So I recount this entire chain of events, and at the end there is a silence so loud that you can hear the birds singing in the trees. And then Susan says, not at all unkindly, “Did they ask you?”

  Have you ever had one of those moments when you hear something that you think you should cross-stitch on a sampler or format in a continuous digital loop across the bottom of your computer screen?

  This was one of those moments: Did they ask you for your opinion? Did they want to know what you thought, whether you approved or not? Or did you proffer your unsolicited advice and considered judgment, which, in the case of child and parent, inevitably sounds like Mother Knows Best?

  This moment reverberates in my head continuously, and I hope it will do so forever, because it marks a moment when I truly got nana religion. Did they ask you? When our grandson is throwing a fit and his parents are dealing with it. When he has a slight temperature and is cranky. When he wants to go in the pool, doesn’t want to go to the potty, wants a cookie, doesn’t want peas. I have opinions on all of those things to a greater or lesser extent. That boy is crabby. That boy is sick. He needs Motrin. He needs a good talking-to, a good night’s sleep. A veteran of motherhood often talks in declarative sentences. That baby is tired. That baby is hungry. How odd that the addled parents of years past become so certain of so much when they are a generation removed. How odd, and how dangerous, to talk as though your words are on stone tablets. Nana judgment must be employed judiciously, and exercised carefully. Be warned: those who make their opinions sound like the Ten Commandments see their grandchildren only on major holidays and in photographs.

  There are really only two commandments of Nanaville: love the grandchildren, and hold your tongue.

  I am sad to say that the grandparents who do otherwise are the ones about which we tend to hear most often, that great Greek chorus that says, mine were out of diapers by age two, how come he isn’t talking yet, and, later on, I don’t like those friends of hers, why did you let her do that to her hair, what kind of wedding is that? Many human relations are about power and control at base, but the grandparents who try to exercise that power and exert that control do so at their peril, especially with parents who may already be feeling frazzled and unsure. Which, as far as I’ve been able to tell, is most parents much of the time.

  Being a good grandparent requires you to bring the past to the table and then let go of it in the face of change. It is easy to feel defensive if your son or daughter is doing things differently than you did, as though the differences are a rebuke. But so much of the change our children exemplify is change for the better, in ways large and small. So much good stuff has been invented since I was last doing this, starting with maternity clothes that don’t look like a floral hot-air balloon. It is almost impossible to try to communicate the vast improvements in breast pumps, particularly once you’ve actually witnessed a young woman wearing one that attaches to a sports bra and fills two plastic freezer pouches at once in the time it takes her to send a couple of business emails. I never used one, since those that existed when I was nursing took the length of a television drama to give you some sad ounces at the bottom of a bottle.

  Then there is the car seat. As I looked at its construction, which appears to have been undertaken by NASA, and its installation, which initially stymied two highly intelligent college graduates, all I could think was that every time they were in a moving car, my own children were in imminent danger of death. And these were the kids we thought we were protecting so diligently, given that as toddlers many of us were bouncing around in the back of a station wagon, without seat belts because there was no such thing as seat belts.

  The temptation is to see these shifts and to push back against them. Don’t. Just don’t. Each generation inevitably gets better stuff, and some of it is prime.

  One of my favorites is the monitor that is in Arthur’s room. It is video as well as audio, and you can get the signal on any device. Which means that one of my favorite things to do—while reading in bed at night, waking at dawn to make the coffee, or even when across the country, me in a West Coast hotel room, he asleep in New York City—is to check in on Arthur. Sometimes he’s lying on his back, one leg bent at the knee, a foot held on a slat. I don’t know how he sleeps like that. Sometimes he’s in a far corner, outside camera range, and I have to listen closely for his breathing. Occasionally I catch him newly awake: “Hello?” he calls. “Hello?” I love that. Every once in a while I hear one of his parents reply from the kitchen next door, and then I shut the camera down. I have rules for myself: as soon as the parents can be heard or seen, I am so out of there. I only watch when Arthur is alone. It is always infinitely more entertaining than reality television. One day I tuned in to a spirited rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” There was a moo moo here and a moo moo there. “Ee i ee i ooooooooh,” he sang loudly. I listened for a long time.

  I suppose if you were being literal you could consider this cyberstalking.

  What a balancing act this is, in some ways unparalleled in the annals of parenting. Arthur’s other grandparents live a world away; how thrilling it is to see him, sitting in front of an iPad, talking to them on WeChat. Technology is a wonderful way to narrow the distance between grandparents and grandchildren when people live elsewhere. You couldn’t do that in the good old days.

  I’m not a fan of the so-called good old days. It seems to me obvious that our grandchildren will grow up in a fairer and, in some ways, more interesting world than we did. We will tell them the stories, of how a telephone was once anchored to the wall and had a cord attached to it, of how watching a specific program required you to be in front of a television at a specific time. What’s that, Nana, they will say, looking at the small round scar on my upper arm, and I will say, there was a disease called smallpox and we all got inoculated against it but then it was gone and you didn’t need to get one of these anymore. Now you get inoculated against chicken pox instead. But when your daddy was little they didn’t have that vaccine yet, and so your daddy and your uncle and your aunt all got chicken pox around the same time, and we spent several summer days in oatmeal baths. These are the kinds of things grandparents are built for and invaluable at. Research shows that one of the most useful functions of grandparents is to transmit stories, to reflect a personal history that enriches children’s sense of the world as it once was. Although I have to admit, when I was young I got a little tired of those Great Depression stories. Were they really that excited about getting an orange in their stockings at Christmas?

  No question that some of the progress with which our children have grown to adulthood and then parenthood comes with substantial pitfalls. It was bad enough a century ago to have your mother living in the house next door (or the room next door), getting on your case about indulging the child or not indulging the child, having your aunts stopping by to opine on your mothering skills or lack of same. But today there is also a great faceless mob of strangers passing judgment, in magazines and newspapers, on television programs and online, saying that you haven’t breastfed long enough, that you haven’t chosen the right preschool, that you haven’t handled sibling rivalry or stranger anxiety or Oedipal transference properly. There are so many people giving young parents conflicting information and telling them that they are botching what they understand is the most important job they will ever have. They certainly don’t need Nana adding to the din. If anything, they need you telling them to ignore the naysayers and follow their gut.

  I appreciate that this
is difficult, that having done the job of parent in a satisfactory way there is the temptation to simply try to sidle into the slot again. There’s a knee-jerk response that so many of us can’t help having, like this, a Christmas ago, my eyes aglow, my lists at the ready:

  Hooray! I finally get to be Santa again!

  Mom, I’m Santa.

  Da-dum-dum.

  The flip side, of course, is that we grandparents feel responsibility without true authority, which is an uncomfortable place to be. (It’s also the place where teenagers most often find themselves, which is why I’ve always been hugely sympathetic to adolescents.) I think of this most often when I pass a large building near our home in the city, a place where a terrible tragedy occurred. A residence for older adults, it has benches facing the street outside, and a woman was sitting on one of those benches with her two-year-old granddaughter when a piece of the brick façade fell and hit them. The grandmother was injured. The child died. I never walk past without thinking of the two of them, and of the little girl’s parents, but I can’t think too hard or too long. I also never walk on that side of the street when I have Arthur with me. This is silly, of course. It’s probably one of the safest places in the city, right? After something like that, the owners probably go over the façade with a magnifying glass. And I tell myself that, but I still cross over with the stroller.