Nanaville

by Anna Quindlen

  Do you know how deer care for their newborns? They leave them so that they will be less likely to draw predators. A doe returns to her baby to nurse and to eat its droppings so odors won’t attract danger. One of the mistakes well-meaning humans make all the time is to find a fawn curled into a spotted pillow in a field and think it’s been abandoned, when in truth its mother has evidenced a deep instinctive notion of how to keep her offspring safe until it is better able to fend for itself.

  And yet danger is sometimes inevitable. Our beloved dog, responding to millennia of instinct, once picked up a fawn from the tall grass as it screamed. From nowhere a doe appeared, rearing, running, circling. I will never forget her wild eyes or the sound her baby made before we persuaded the dog to back off. The impulse to protect the young from harm is primal; it’s why strangers stand below the windows of burning buildings and hold out their arms for a child. But open arms and enormous care don’t always forestall disaster. Bad things happen to little people.

  I only had the usual garden-variety share of panic-stricken blips. The babies fell off the bed. The children got illnesses of various types. Maria leapt from the sofa and broke her arm. Quin fell in the tub, Chris nicked his forehead, and both of them got stitches. Some of these occasions were educational: a doctor said that a significant number of men have a scar just beneath their chin from when they hit it just the same way Quin did, and another told me that you don’t need to make a fuss about a plastic surgeon if the line of a small wound runs with the grain of the skin, as Christopher’s had. At the sight of blood, I did my best to stay chill, for their sakes as well as my own.

  I could not be at all chill if anything happened to Arthur on my watch. The issue would not be dealing with the aftermath, the cut or the bruise. I can do those things in my sleep. It would be explaining to my son and his wife what had happened, seeing a scraped knee as evidence of my own carelessness. “Accidents happen,” I used to tell the kids all the time when the accidents were theirs. But now? I try not to be hypervigilant with my grandson: that way lies those poor kids who are afraid of everything. He’s pretty fearless, so we let him ride in the canoe (wearing a flotation device) and jump in the pool (with swimmies on his arms and an adult on each side). When he decided he’d had enough of sleeping in the crib, he managed to climb out, which gave me a day of palpitations, but his father, watching him on the monitor, described him as “reassuringly acrobatic in his escape.” So I calmed down.

  Arthur had one preschool teacher whose approach set a template that suits me fine: one day at our house he fell, and as I waited for a wail, he picked himself up, threw his hands in the air, and said, “Ay yi yi!” Lord knows I’m glad we’ve reached the point at which we don’t call kids crybabies or sissies anymore, but part of teaching them to be fully human is a sense of proportion. Some tumbles really, really hurt, and others are just ay yi yi. But, please, let’s keep all tumbles to a minimum on my watch. A nana accident doesn’t feel so much like an accident as like a betrayal of trust.

  Luckily, Arthur’s parents are a relaxed pair, his mother apt to say, “You’re okay,” when he takes a small bump or fall. And that’s my attitude, too, so that I am not tempted to rush in with my take on the situation, to opine when I have not been asked for my opinion. I know that if Arthur’s parents and I weren’t so much on the same page about what’s good for kids, it would be materially harder to keep my counsel. And there are many occasions on which they do actively seek it. I’m also grateful that the occasion on which I got my comeuppance came early on. I think making mistakes early, about things not quite so important on the great continuum, is an invaluable learning tool. And of course this entire nana thing is an education.

  Let me state for the record about preschool, about my reservations and their decision: I was completely wrong. I know it. I acknowledge it. I learned from it. Arthur loves preschool and has thrived there. On the mornings when I take him, he runs in to see his friends. He has grown so much. And so have I. I have strong opinions. Ask and you shall receive some useful version of them. Otherwise, I will try to be as quiet as the house at naptime.

  SMALL MOMENTS

  The parents are away at a weekend wedding in Minneapolis, and Pop has a work commitment, so it is just Arthur and Nana, alone in the country.

  When I heard him on the monitor, chattering to himself as the light seeped around the edges of the shades in his room here, I hurried over. He seemed delighted to see me, although he did look hopeful and say, “Dada?” as we crossed the drive later.

  We did a long walk, he in the jogging stroller, me breathing heavy on the hills, and then we threw a ball for the dog for a while. We drove to the historical farm for the crafts fair, and I was glad I’d given him scrambled eggs and yogurt for breakfast as we sat facing one another, eating some baked goods with pecans and frosting that seemed to be made solely from the three essential food groups: butter, flour, and sugar. Not for the first time, I thanked God that neither of his parents were crazy people about stepping outside the nutritional lines. I still burn at the memory of handing back a little girl to her mother after I somehow had been saddled with her for the day, along with my own three. Four had been a lot, it had begun to rain hard, and I had run out of steam and into the indoor playground at McDonald’s. When I mentioned that the little girl had had a Happy Meal with a small Sprite—no caffeine!—her mother said, her face as still as a snapshot, “She’s never had sugar before.”

  Arthur has had sugar. He was breastfed for months, and his diet is heavy on fruit and vegetables and hummus and suchlike. Chinese dumplings, too, which are another important food group. But he has been known to have a cookie and like it, because it’s too soon to tell who exactly he will be but he’s clearly no dummy. If he had a cookie and didn’t, I would be seriously worried.

  The crafts fair is less exciting than it sounds. Arthur has no interest in handmade belts or pottery planters or dangly silver earrings, but he goes on a hayride, and he is intensely interested in the horses and the geese, which I steer him away from because geese are nasty. One attacked my second son when he was small. “Bad, bad goose!” he had said that day, knitting his nearly invisible blond brows. A man dressed up in period farmer garb put a baby goat in Arthur’s lap, which I thought would be a wonderful moment, but he looked up at me as though to say, “What the heck is this?” so the man took it away and offered it to a slightly older child.

  “Goat,” Arthur said in the car, or something like it. So at least there was that.

  Home for a nap after a diaper change and a wipe of sticky hands, and then a toddle around the back paths to the pool. The two of us took off our shoes and sat side by side on the long top step with our feet in the water and chatted, as one does, which in the case of a toddler means you talking a lot about various subjects, stopping while the toddler repeats a few words, intelligibly or not, and then adds a few things that sound more or less like something. Then the nana nods and says, “I know,” or “That’s right.” It’s not exactly a conversation in the conventional sense, but it passes the time.

  It was very warm, and it had been a tiring day, because every day with a toddler is tiring, and so it took me a bit by surprise when Arthur, in a single movement, rose to his little unmarked feet on the step and launched himself into the pool. My first thought was that both of us were fully dressed and it would have been so much better if we’d been in bathing suits, and also that I was wearing a watch. It seems like every single time I’ve had to go into the water after a child I’ve been wearing a watch.

  Of course, I am making all of this sound like it happened over time, when it happened in the time it takes a nana to dive into the pool, fully clothed, and pull a small boy to the surface, sputtering and gasping and crying for only a minute before he says, “Wet! Wet!” over and over again, even as he is wrapped in a beach towel, stripped naked, and set down on the grass.

  Wow, the way a dispo
sable diaper inflates when it’s sodden is really something to see, even with these new thinner disposables. I knew that, of course. I was once staying with a friend at her in-laws’ condo complex in Palm Beach, and my little boy fell into the pool with his diaper on, which immediately took on the contours of a flotation device. Ah, if only it had been. Some person of stature there sent a warning letter to the in-laws, saying that we had violated pool policy by allowing into the water a child clad in a diaper. I wondered then if they also had a policy against drowning.

  We have no policy against diapers in the pool. However, we absolutely forbid toddlers to sink below its surface, eyes wide. The little ones always go down with eyes wide, although I suspect no wider than my own as I watch in that instant before I dive in.

  “Wet!” Arthur says, running down the slate path as I run after him, his butt dimpled as an orange.

  Lessons learned:

  We probably should have started baby swim with him earlier.

  Maybe turn on the pool heater?

  Be ready, self, because no matter what happens—coyotes, mean bigger kids, thunderstorms, carnival rides—you are going to do whatever needs to be done to keep this boy safe and happy. Yes, I did say “carnival rides.” I hate carnival rides, was forced onto a Ferris wheel several years ago by my whole family in an act of conspicuous cruelty and spent the entire time with my hands clamped on the safety bar and my eyes closed while my children laughed and made their cars sway back and forth. “Look at the view!” they shouted.

  But if it’s just a grandchild and me at the county fair and that grandchild wants to go on the Tilt-A-Whirl, will I say, “Nana is terrified of the Tilt-A-Whirl, sweetheart”?

  I will suck it up. I will dive in. Lesson learned.

  NONO’S

  It was easy for me to become Nana, at least in terms of title. You just take the letters of my first name and scramble them. In a similar fashion my friend Ronnie became Nonnie. Why complicate things for little people? Of course, sometimes little people have their own ideas. My friend Binky intended to be called Nonna but is now Nini because that’s what her grandson started calling her and she wasn’t about to correct him. Although, come to think of it, a child could easily call a grandmother Binky, except that they might confuse their grandmother and their pacifier.

  I hope my grandchildren all see me as a pacifier.

  According to Etsy, where the stock of nana swag is enormous, there are grandmothers called Oma, Maw Maw, Mimi, Gigi, Bibi, and the really pretentious Funma. (If you’re actually that much fun, it seems to me you don’t have to advertise it.) In Yiddish there’s Bubbe and Zayde; in Filipino, Lola and Lolo.

  It was a great relief to discover that my Chinese name was almost the same as my English one. There is no question about what Chinese grandparents are called; as with so many other words in Mandarin, the terms carry freight apart from their most obvious meaning. Nainai is the term for paternal grandmother. Maternal grandmother is Laolao. The grandfathers have different names depending upon which branch of the tree they inhabit: Yeye, Laoye. Our daughter is Gugu, our younger son Shushu, both titles that denote which side of the family they come from. It’s all codified in a way that, my son says, is very Chinese, but we discovered that the Swedes do it, too. A nice young Swedish woman filled me in one day at lunch: Mormor, Morfar, Farmor, Farfar. A Hindi student told me her maternal grandparents are Nani and Nana, her paternal ones Dadi and Dada.

  Which brings us to what I think of as the nono’s. These are the women who telegraph, at least privately to me, that they have mixed feelings about all this. The aging beauty who asked to be called Glamma. A socialite who told me she’d invented the name Tootsie. Some of them say they are not interested in surrogate mothering. “I’m going to be a grandmother the way my grandmother was, watching their mother chase them around,” one woman told me. “I’m happy to be a grandmother, but I don’t want to be a babysitter,” another woman said. If you want to see a real food fight online, look at the women talking about the refusal of their mother, or their mother-in-law, to take care of the grandchildren on a regular basis. I know many women who have signed on for childcare a day or two a week, and are delighted to do so, but others say that, while they love their grandchildren, they spent years raising their own kids and don’t want to revisit the experience at this point in their lives. It’s too exhausting. It’s too time-consuming. They’re still working. They have other priorities.

  But for many of the nono’s, the issue is not time management but growing older. There is no question that whether you are forty or seventy, the simple fact of being a grandparent telegraphs aging. Whatever you may be, you are no longer the young one. We were once buffered by generations: the elders, the parents, the older cousins. In what seemed like record time, we have become the elders, standing at the prow of the ship, figureheads with nothing between us and the wild wind but a vista of open sea stretching to the sheer drop of the horizon. This is one of those feelings only reinforced by becoming a grandparent, and one reason becoming a grandparent freaks some people out.

  Along with the nono’s I also meet a fair number of what I’ll call do-over grandmothers. For one reason or another they think they didn’t get it quite right when they were raising their own children, and they believe they will be able to bring their best selves to the table, which is a luxury you have when you’re a grandparent. You’re rarely the one snatching them up from school after you’ve had a tough day at work and then facing an empty fridge and a full hamper as well as a querulous kid who forgot the homework assignment sheet and might be coming down with something. Grandparents usually get the best-case-scenario kid, and even when they don’t, their time together has a sell-by date. The parents return. The grandchild leaves.

  That scenario is not true for everyone. At the moment there are many more grandparents raising their grandchildren full time than in previous decades, or perhaps ever. Some of that is due to drug addiction and parents who are too addled or ill to care for their children themselves. Some is teenage pregnancy in an era when pregnant teenagers no longer feel compelled to give their children up for adoption or enter into early marriage. Many of these grandparents don’t have formal custody; their grandchildren’s father and mother may not want them now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t show up in a year or two, minds changed, kids reclaimed, hearts broken. The parenting grandparents are exhausted, too, and with better reason than most of us, although they also often describe themselves as exhilarated by the chance to raise children again and, given the insufficiencies of their own kids that led to this situation, to get it right this time.

  It’s interesting, the things age teaches you, not all of them about hip joints and slack skin. I can’t imagine anyone ever thinks to herself, at twenty-five, Someday I will get to be a grandmother. None of us grew up thinking that playing Candy Land at age seventy was our birthright or even our endgame. But the years went by, and our nests grew empty. And while we had once hoped that our children would do better than we had in a variety of ways, we began to hope they would mimic us in one crucial role, that of parent.

  But while there are more grandparents then ever before, there are also many people for whom the role seems either elusive or impossible. The fertility rate in the United States as well as in many other countries has plummeted in recent years. Couples conclude that it’s expensive to have children. Women are wage earners with fulfilling jobs that they are loath to interrupt or to leave. And, let’s be honest: for every story you’ve heard about the enormous satisfaction of being a parent, the amusing and endearing anecdotes, the vacation photos with beach tans and big grins, there are all the other stories. The kids with terrible emotional problems. The teenagers teetering on the verge of felony and mayhem. The young adults who happily blew through usurious college tuitions without finishing and without gratitude. The grown children who, for reasons odd and obscure, barely speak
to their parents. It’s just as easy to conclude that parenthood is a glass half empty as half full, never mind all full, and to decide that having children is not for you. Which means having grandchildren is not for your parents.

  And then there are the grown children who are happily married, always in touch, terrific company available for anything from an elaborate home-cooked meal to takeout containers of pad thai, the kind of people you’d dreamed they would become when they were throwing a tantrum in the grocery aisle or slamming the bedroom door during early adolescence. The bridesmaids and ushers at their weddings, their friends from college and high school: you’ve seen one birth announcement and one shower invitation after another. Maybe at one of those showers someone’s mother is even pushy enough to say, what are you waiting for? And then your son tells you solemnly, his wife in tears, or your daughter sobs into your shoulder, her husband patting her back gently, that they’ve been trying for years, doctors, tests, shots, that for some reason, known or unknown, it is not happening for them, this thing that seems so easy for everyone else.

  The point is that just as some younger people have had to venture into a brave new world in which children are not a given, perhaps not even a goal, their mothers and fathers have been dragged along for the ride. The sons and daughters who decide against having children can’t help but make some of their mothers and fathers feel as though it’s an indictment of their own childhoods and upbringings. The ones who are foreclosed by biology can’t help but make some of their mothers and fathers feel as though they’ve sustained a great bereavement.