Seven years ago I sat with my friend in her living room and she told me she had had to quit her job because she was too sick and too weak to work anymore. The doctors didn’t know why. She had worked seven days a week for years, but now, no more. I had begged her many times to rest a bit, and often worried for her health. A year later she was diagnosed with advanced cancer. Her first question to the doctor? “Will I live long enough to see my grandchildren born?” The doctor asked when they were due. She admitted, “They haven’t been conceived yet.” During the following prolonged cancer battle, each of her children presented this dear lady with a grandchild, and she joyfully celebrated the beginings of their lives as she reached the end of her own.
A little over a year ago, this same friend’s daughter, now a friend of mine as well, asked me to serve as grandma for her young children. And I am over the moon! Oh, it terrified me at first. Something so informally given might so easily be taken away! But I love these children, and I am grateful to be able to have time with them. That sofa where I sat with my friend as she told me she was sick, is now a place where her grandchildren and I snuggle, read together and I sometimes tell them what a wonderful woman she was.
When The Writer was a toddler, due to long lived great-grandparents, as well as divorces and remarriages among grandparents, there were a surprising number of grandparents in our family. At a reunion, a friend of my in-laws asked how we would explain to our then two-year-old why she had so many sets of grandparents. My father-in-law, the Lawyer, immediately responded,
“You’re lucky. You have more people who love you.”
At the time it was startling, but it really is a brilliant answer. In the years since then, The Lawyer’s wife has become my Bonus Mother-in-Law and has been an outstanding grandmother to our children. Our children really have been utterly lucky to have her.
The years progressed and during the sometimes oh-so-painful junior high years I reminded my children on a few occasions, “I expect to get grandchildren out of this — cute ones!” But, with two children identifying as transgender and two children telling me they are gay, and one who is straight but doesn’t show much interest in relationships, in recent years I have, at times, despaired of grandchildren happening much.
During that time, I found some comfort in reading. One of my favorite, albeit all too infrequently read, book genres is that of food memoir, and one of my favorite examples is Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl.
I’ve read Ms. Reichl’s Tender at the Bone several times since discovering it fifteen years ago and I am reminded of a passage sometimes when I think of my (unofficially adopted) grandchildren.
In this passage, Ms. Reichl describes the way she acquired one of her grandmothers. Like I, Aunt Birdie became a grandma in a rather unorthodox way, and Ruth’s life was all the better for having another person in her life who loved her.
GRANDMOTHERS
I had three grandmothers and none of them could cook. My mother’s mother didn’t cook because she had better things to do. She was, as Mom proudly told everyone she happened to meet, an impresario. My father’s mother didn’t cook because she was, until Hitler intervened, a very rich woman. And Aunt Birdie didn’t cook because she had Alice. Aunt Birdie wasn’t really related to me; she was my father’s first wife’s mother. But she desperately wanted to be a grandmother, so when I was born she went to the hospital, introduced herself to my mother, and applied for the job. She was well past eighty, and this looked like her last chance. Mom was happy to take any help she could get, and Aunt Birdie threw herself into the job. About once a week I would come out of school to find her waiting on the sidewalk. My friends instantly surrounded her, enchanted by standing next to a grown-up who was just their size. At four foot eight, Aunt Birdie was the smallest grown-up any of us had ever seen and when she said, “Let’s go to Schrafft’s!” there was a general moan. Everybody envied me. We always ordered the same thing. Then we ate our chocolate-marshmallow sundaes slowly, watching the women ascend the restaurant’s wide, dramatic stairway and commenting on their clothes, their hair, the way they walked. Aunt Birdie always acted as if I were the world’s most fascinating person. I wondered if she had been this way with her daughter, the one my father had once been married to, but each time I said the word “Hortense” she pretended not to hear me. Everybody did. Afterward, Aunt Birdie always took me back to her house. After the long bus ride I’d run into the kitchen, throw my arms around Alice, and beg her to let me roll the dough for the apple dumplings she made every time I slept over. “Well now,” she always said in the soft Barbados accent she had retained after sixty years in America, patting me with her floury hands. She was a handsome old woman with brown skin, short black hair, and a deeply wrinkled face. She smelled like starch, lemons, and if she was baking, cinnamon as well. I loved helping her, loved feeling the fresh buttery pastry beneath my hands, loved the clean way the core came out of the apples. I loved carefully wrapping each apple in a square of pastry and pinching the top shut, just so. We’d arrange the dumplings on a baking sheet, Alice would put them in the oven, and we’d both go into the living room to watch The Perry Como Show. This was a big thrill too; my parents didn’t own a television. Alice always left as soon as the show was over. Then Aunt Birdie and I ate whatever she had left simmering on the stove for supper. On Saturday mornings we ate the remaining apple dumplings. We brushed our teeth. We made our beds. And then we went into the kitchen to make potato salad for my father. It was the only thing Aunt Birdie ever cooked. “Alice is the cook in our family,” she said. My mother would have pointed out that Alice was not really in Aunt Birdie’s family . . . Dad was different . . . he understood Alice’s position perfectly. And so each time Aunt Birdie handed him the jar of potato salad he would fold his tall frame until he could reach her cheek, kiss it, and say gently, “Alice is a fabulous cook. But you make the world’s best potato salad.”
From the second chapter of Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl
Being asked to serve as grandma to my friends’ children and grandchildren has met a need in their hearts and in mine. I think everyone can benefit from having a grandparent who adores them present in their lives. I feel profoundly lucky, incredibly blessed and grateful beyond words to get to be someone’s Grandma.
Maximum Grace 