Becoming a parent is frequently under your control, although those people undergoing in vitro fertilization could argue differently. Becoming a grandparent is totally under the control of others, as any would-be nana who has hinted, cajoled, begged, and passed along endless photographs of other people’s grandchildren can attest. (“Look at how cute! Twins! And she was two years behind you in high school!”) Understanding this is the first step to understanding that what sort of grandparent you will be permitted to be is also under their control. Everyday nana. Occasional nana. Seldom. Never.
Once again we are reminded that there are no guarantees, that we make plans and God says Ha, that we work with the family hand we are dealt. When Arthur was introduced in a plastic bin and striped swaddle within the walls of Mount Sinai Hospital, he had four grandparents in the room, two from each side, a full conventional complement. This is apparently a bit of a throwback; one young woman described the somewhat uneasy gathering of her father, his second wife, her mother, her father-in-law, her mother-in-law, and her mother-in-law’s boyfriend. At least her father-in-law didn’t bring his new wife along. One thorny nomenclature issue today is what to call the stepgrandmothers. Families today seem more complicated than they once were, which means grandparenting is, too.
Joan Didion once wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, but I think we tell ourselves family stories in order to exist, to feel really real. This seems especially true nowadays. The independence and individuality of modern life need to be leavened with an understanding of our place at the table, and often today people find that through genealogy, which is undergoing an enormous boom. In decades past it was a bit beside the point: when I was growing up, almost every member not only of my father’s family but of his father’s family lived within an easy car ride. I was rooted firmly within the branches of my family tree, even though I often found it a tangle. But people are more mobile now, and spread around the country and the world, and as families have grown ever smaller the thirst to become part of something larger has grown, too.
I suppose that’s what some of my friends yearn for, knowing that they will never be grandparents. Reading history, looking around us, we have gotten accustomed to the feeling that family is eternal, spooling into the future without end. I have that feeling very powerfully now in a way I did not before my grandson was born. This is my afterlife. The children, the grandchildren: as long as they have stories to tell, I live. If the stories are good enough, I live for a long long time. Arthur Krovatin: life everlasting.
Maybe that’s why I am happily a nana and not in the least a nono, why I never once have said, “I feel too young to be a grandmother.” I don’t care that much about getting older, but I don’t want to be forgotten, because to be remembered is to live and to be loved. What remains when the synapses have begun to die, when we ourselves are gone? Jorge Luis Borges said, “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.” When mothers die they leave children, and when nanas die they leave grandchildren and perhaps a trace memory of being coddled, kissed, attended to, and loved, of being chased across the lawn or rocked in the middle of the night or taken seriously. In Nanaville there is always in the back of my mind the understanding that I am building a memory out of spare parts and that, someday, that memory will be all that’s left of me.
LUCK OF THE DRAW
My kids are a pretty tough crowd. “What do you bring to the party?” might be one of their mottoes. So when the younger two came home from visiting their brother in China united in their appreciation for the woman who was his girlfriend, I was pretty impressed. There was no carping, and as someone who has herself been carped about plenty by this group, I was somewhat envious. But not for long.
On paper the woman who would become our first daughter-in-law sounded like a bit of a crapshoot: an only child, while my three constituted a spontaneous flash mob; the daughter of a Communist atheist country, whose boyfriend’s family had deep Catholic roots. One of the first times we were together was at the San Gennaro festival in Little Italy. She definitely got the point of the calzone and the zeppole—if she hadn’t, that would have been a deal breaker, because fried dough, come on—but she was perplexed by San Gennaro himself. It wasn’t just him; it was the whole concept of saints, a concept that is as natural to me as breath. Show me a stained-glass window with a rendering of a guy crucified on an X-shaped cross or a nun with her arms full of roses and I can tell you who they are without even thinking hard. (St. Andrew and Thérèse of Lisieux, for the record.) But when I started to describe the canonization process, the miracles and the relics, the whole deal from the ground up, I realized it sounded quite peculiar.
The woman who married our eldest child is nothing if not sane, and smart, and wonderful to be with, even as she’s looking quizzical while you describe the transubstantiation. A thousand times since she showed up, at the dining room table or at the shopping outlets, working out with her or watching her crack up with my daughter and younger son, I’ve thought to myself: boy, did we luck out. Soon after she was married, someone asked her if she had any siblings. “Now I do,” she said.
See what I mean?
This has become ever clearer as she has morphed from girlfriend to wife to mother of our grandchild. The addition of a baby into the mix throws the relationship between you and your daughter-in-law into high relief, the good times and the bad, the joy and the sorrow, as our daughter-in-law once heard our friend the judge say as she stood in a white dress holding a bouquet in a field full of interested parties. Over the years I have discovered through observation that there are many kinds of daughters-in-law:
The ones who are really, really nice when they are dating your son and then, once married, not so much.
The ones who are really, really nice when they are married to your son and then, once they have children, not so much.
The ones who believe in the one-woman man and think they should be that one woman, which means eliminating the mother.
The ones who are very, very close to their own family, which means yours is secondary, if not fungible.
The ones waiting patiently for you to make what they consider a critical mistake, which will lead your son to say sorrowfully, “She’s not really that comfortable leaving the kids with you,” as though you are the kind of person who lets toddlers play with matches and scissors, as though you are not the person who raised a boy into the man who is now selling you out.
The great ones, who more or less roll with everything.
Since their baby was born, it has become very clear: somehow, luck of the draw, when my son met a woman in an expat bar in Beijing, we wound up with one of those last. And I know it. And I thank God for it, did when I was just the mother-in-law, double-do as the nana. Because when your son becomes a father, so much that follows depends on how your daughter-in-law feels about you. I saw an article once about advice to the mother of the groom. The headline read: WEAR BEIGE AND KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT.
I look bad in beige.
Times have changed on the woman/man, wife/husband, mother/father continuum. Perhaps it was best summed up for me the day I was running in the park and came upon what I can only describe as a pack of bros. You know the type: khaki shorts, pink polo shirts, conservative haircuts. Brooks Brothers, not Birkenstocks. And yet each of them had one notable accessory: a high-end stroller. Well, a high-end stroller with a baby in it. One of them had stopped because the binky had fallen out of the baby’s mouth and all hell had broken loose. I have to say, he wiped that pacifier off very assiduously while the other two watched and waited. Then they moved on, a dad phalanx.
Now, my children’s father in fact did push a stroller from time to time, but rarely on a weekday and certainly not with a bunch of buddies. Just like he did school drop-off from time to time but not virtually every day, the way our son does. I don’
t know that my father ever actually laid hands on a stroller, although he did teach me to fish and to tell the difference between an alto and a tenor sax in a jazz recording. I can promise you that neither of my grandfathers ever pushed a stroller. Fatherhood has moved along a continuum during our lifetimes so that the hands-on dad who wears the baby carrier and does the school run has become a commonplace.
But one thing that seems to have changed little is that many women still control the agenda of a hetero family. Research has even shown that grandparents are more likely to see the children of their daughters than the children of their sons because of these sex-specific social arrangements. And what that all means is that if your daughter-in-law likes you, you’re in luck. And if not, not. This is why I said for years that the most important decision your sons would make was whom they married. This is why I heaved a sigh of relief when both chose women whom we liked.
I have heard all the alternative stories, so I knew. Of the DIL who asked, “What are you two planning for Thanksgiving?” after mentioning that she was cooking for her entire side of the family. Of the one who always cancels coming for Sunday dinner on Friday afternoon. Of the ones who live in other places and never bring the kids for a visit, and the ones who live in the same place you do and, somehow, ditto. It’s hard work, navigating the vagaries of a sort-of daughter not your own. I suppose the good news is that eventually grandchildren make their own decisions about who to cleave to, and the nana who may be an occasional visitor from the big city for a toddler becomes the nana whose big-city apartment is the destination of choice for a teenager.
In the meantime, only patience is possible, although it would be lovely if it worked both ways. One young woman said to me of the grandmother of her children, “She buys them the kind of clothes that kids don’t really wear.” I happen to know her mother-in-law, who said, “I never see the kids in the outfits I buy them.” And in those two sentences was an entire universe of disconnect that I assumed would have been worked out had the two been mother and daughter instead of in-laws. Although perhaps not.
Naturally I’ve heard the son-in-law stories, too, of the ones who have laid down the law about grandparent visits, or the ones who want grandparents to pay for something, access to the grandchild contingent on checkbook. But more of those stories end with a daughter bringing the kids over on Sunday afternoons on her own, trailing excuses about how busy her husband is, or how he has a standing golf date with people from work, or how he has a touch of bubonic plague but almost certainly will show up next time. In our more egalitarian age, the equivalent would be the son who brings the kids to see you on Sundays even if his wife prefers to watch TV and mull over some passing remark you made at her bridal shower that seems rather anodyne but which she will never, ever forget. Maybe I just hear fewer of those stories. And, to be fair, I hear fewer stories about how the SIL doesn’t pitch in enough and more about how the DIL has ridiculous dietary rules for the kids and never writes thank-you notes. Apparently thank-you emails don’t count.
Having been a DIL myself, I was ready to give my first DIL as much latitude as my mother-in-law gave me—and believe me, as a DIL I was a lot. But that’s been unnecessary. Diligent, accomplished, she has done her best at virtually everything she’s touched. But, as with my son, her husband, I’m not sure that on paper I would have figured her for the excellent mother she’s turned out to be. She told me once that she was out with her girlfriends and said in passing that she didn’t think she’d be the hard guy, the enforcer, a tiger mother, and that they all goggled at her and then busted up laughing. She is in fact that person but with that sense of love and fun that leavens it and turns it into really good parenting. “Where are you, my angel?” I hear her call in a singsong voice across the lawn to her son, and my heart lifts. If she were my mother, I would feel loved.
From the beginning she has been open to our hands-on involvement in the life of her son, and we have been open to providing it if we’re able. Sometimes I ask, and she has other plans. Sometimes she asks, and I do. But there’s no drama to any of this. If she says no I don’t read it as an insult, because when I say no she doesn’t read it that way. When her baby was only a few weeks old, she and our son came out to live at our house in the country for the summer, so that I got to observe and participate in the earliest weeks of our grandson’s life. “You are so lucky!” all my friends told me, and I agreed, but it was really only afterward that I realized how remarkable that was and how much confidence a person would have to have to do it. You’re never more unsure of yourself than when your first child is still nearly fetal, even if you’re from a big family and have diapered a few babies when you weren’t much more than an overgrown baby yourself. I’m not sure I would have been comfortable sharing the earliest days of my first child’s life with my mother-in-law, a woman who had raised six sons. She might not have been judgmental, but I suspect I would have been judging myself harshly, and mightily inclined to make myself feel better by assigning that judgment to her. Thus do the Sunday afternoon schisms begin. The baby cries. Your mother-in-law looks up. She is thinking, I wonder why he’s crying. Or maybe she’s just thinking, I don’t think that soup I had for lunch is agreeing with me, or, I wonder when those shoes I ordered online will arrive. But you are the DIL, so when she looks up you might assume that she is thinking, That girl doesn’t really know how to take care of a baby.
“Can I take him?” the nana might ask, and you will say, “No, no, I’ve got him. It’s fine.”
Luck of the draw: one afternoon we are walking around the pond. It’s late in the day, drawing in on what someone described many years ago as the arsenic hours, that time when small children unravel like an old sweater. Arthur is unraveling for sure. I read somewhere that when interrogators are holding suspected terrorists, they pipe heavy-metal music continuously, loudly, into their cells, which they think makes people more likely to break and talk. Me, all you would have to do is play a crying infant continuously and I would cop to almost anything, from shoplifting to serial killing.
I draw up next to my daughter-in-law as the keening continues and hold out my arms. Without hesitating a moment she hands her son, my grandson, to me. “Give it a shot,” she says.
SMALL MOMENTS
Family dinner, Easter Sunday. Everyone is hungry, because the older ones have outgrown the Easter basket, or at least outgrown trying to eat an entire hollow chocolate bunny at one sitting, and the youngest among us has not yet been given free rein. He is in his booster seat, and he is not eating much. One of the great things about being a nana is seeing things from the perspective of a small person: soda bubbles go right up your nose, bugs crawling across the pavement are mesmerizing. One day, walking down the long driveway, Arthur discovered his shadow. Boy, that was something. Move leg; shadow moves leg. Wiggle fingers; shadow wiggles fingers. Walk and it walks to one side of you. Eventually it got tedious, but before the tedium was the surprised recognition that I hadn’t thought about my shadow in decades, that down to its essence it was a pretty wild concept. Nana walks. Nana’s shadow walks. Wow. What a time we had.
At Easter dinner I realize that ham has a weird texture. Think about it: like a salty pencil eraser. We are all digging in and Arthur is chewing, then taking the chewed food out of his mouth with a bemused grimace, looking at it, and finally putting it on the tray of his booster seat. I bought and made the ham, but suddenly the ham feels weird in my mouth. Still I chew and swallow, because the nana has to set a good example, which is why I am still trying to swear less, damn it. First time a dog eases a bagel from this child’s hand and the child lets out a dirty word, I am going to be in big trouble with everyone. He already said “Oh my God” one day. I would say he picked it up elsewhere, but he sounded just like me.
But Nana is empathizing, too, so that when Arthur takes one last piece of ham from his mouth and says, “All done,” I am ready to let him get down from his booster seat.
Not his mother, who insists he remain until dinner is over. Which reminds me that in this government, in terms of the line of succession, I am either the speaker of the house or the president pro tem of the Senate but definitely not the president or the vice president. I do not have the right to sign off or veto.
The problem with empathy for the children in your life is that there is a fine line between identification and indulgence. Conventional wisdom has it that indulgence is the privilege of grandparents, and I suppose there’s some truth to that in terms of serving dessert even if there wasn’t much eaten at dinner. But parents aren’t that wild about grandparents who indulge too much, because it sometimes makes them feel one-upped or disrespected. And respecting the parents, as you can tell, is the linchpin of success in Nanaville.
And sometimes empathy can lead you astray. It’s all well and good to say that you hated summer book reports, too, but the summer book reports still need to be done. I was conspicuously empathetic when all three of my children sucked their thumbs, since I was what you might call an accomplished thumb-sucker, up to an age that I would mention except that it’s much too embarrassing. But I found myself blowing off the orthodontist over and over again, until one day I realized that my children were not me—which is, of course, the biggest moment in your progression as a parent, and for some people never arrives—and that they needed to stop thumb-sucking. I will add that I did not resort to the usual noxious substance on their thumbs, since that was tried on me many times and I just sucked the stuff off. In one case bribery was involved, and that’s how my daughter got her ears pierced.
So Arthur stayed at the table until the rest of us were done with our ham. He didn’t make a fuss. I didn’t act precipitously. Eventually he said, “Excused please, Mama,” and was allowed to slide out of his seat and down to the floor.
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