"H" is for Baby

Grandparenting offers hope and healing.

When you reach a certain age, people often tell you, “wait ‘til you become a grandparent,” insisting the experience is joyously, breathlessly life-altering. I’ve never been the kind to say, “You must go here,” or “You should eat here,” so this talk of imperatives around grandparenting gives me pause.

Plenty of my life experiences already qualify as life-altering—birthing a child after some harrowing labor events, mourning a young husband who died from cancer, watching my sister suffer from alcoholism and an anoxic brain event, my father dying from unknown causes, and walking with my mother as she disappeared into dementia. Life-altering. And too, several friends of mine are raising their grandchildren. It’s life changing for them—just not in the same way it is for others.

Perhaps, when someone insists, just you wait until you have grandchildren, it’s really their way of saying, come with me into my joy. Or is it something altogether more?

I thought about this perspective again last week, while snuggling with our new little nipotina, Nora Susan, my stepdaughter Shannon’s newborn. I won’t overshare in the lives and confidences of our children. Suffice it to say, my husband, Mark (aka Pappy) and I are very happy.

But note how I left off my grandmothering name above—stuck as I was for a while. My mother-in-law, Carol, is Nana, with a short a (ă) sound. My Italian mother was never Nonna. Nonna is a noun, not always a name. My mother was primarily Nana, but pronounced Nah-na. After writing a memoir (and a second forthcoming) about her, I couldn’t imagine stepping into her shoes, or Carol’s. Nana didn’t feel right at the time.

How do we take on the mantle of grand mothering someone into this world? Do we heft it onto our shoulders? Or do we quietly slip inside it? For me, the questions were complicated by being grandmother not by blood, to this new little life. I wanted to honor that too.

I decided on a name I could make my own—Netti. Only a select few are/were allowed to call me that. They are very precious to me, thus making it a blessed name. Netti also sounds un po’ italiano!

In the end, the name won’t matter. We can only receive or earn that mantle of grandmother if we’ve set aside the last vestiges of our ego and give of ourselves over to our children and theirs. A lesson I learned in the soup aisle of Giant Foods.

One of the more ubiquitous and sacred tasks of grandparenting comes in the form of grocery shopping and making meals. Mark and I shopped in no less than five different D.C. area grocery stores during the past week to help out Shannon. A new appreciation for our Cincinnati-based Kroger chain of stores arose in us each time we visited another grocery that didn’t stock what we needed.

At Giant Foods (aka Giant), Mark and I split up. His mission was lunch staples. My target was dinner. While working out a recipe of spiced chickpea stew for mamma’s first meal home, I became disoriented, reading broth labels four or five times before understanding this stasis.

You see, my parents also had come into a different view of grandparenting. They babysat my nephew when my youngest sister was a single mom. They helped raise my niece in the years my older sister was in the first spin of her disease. For me, they, along with my in-laws, Don and Judy, spent their grandparenting time actually parenting, in lieu of myself or my first husband during his cancer treatments. And they slid down the slides (yes, Nana did) or all four of them and decorated our Christmas tree, or taught Davis the subtle art of rock throwing and golf and eating peanut butter and chocolate Rice Krispie treats and pizzelles. They did the grocery shopping for countless consecrated meals, frequenting a myriad of stores and bringing the food and news of the outside world to us.

They astounded me at each turn with their brilliant selflessness.

That soup aisle at Giant held me in its warm embrace, as I remembered all my parents and in-laws did, not only when Davis was first born and they were there to cook or make blackberry jam while I recovered from a C-section. They were also present when life punched us in the gut. They were left behind to help pick up the pieces. The same was true for Mark’s parents, Mark and Carol, and his in-laws, Barbara and the now-deceased Walter, the ones who are now celebrating with Shannon, her husband, Michael, and Nora, while grieving the certain loss of their daughter, Susan, the namesake for tiny Nora Susan.

Like rubbernecking on the highway, we cannot pass through the highs in our life without getting a good look at our lows. The question remains, do we stop and examine the wreckage or move on?

On the night Shannon called from the hospital to confirm her decision to have a C-section after enduring countless hours of labor, my heart ached for her. I stayed awake for hours, feeling again that physical pain of tugging, of stitches, of holding a hand to a stomach, hoping for the best outcome for her. And too, the psychological pain crept up on me, the agony of making that choice, the first of a thousand cuts in motherhood when you must choose between the expected thing—and what’s right.

I cried for Shannon for a long while. Then for me.

We process our own griefs amidst the mourning of others. Watch or read From Scratch if you don’t believe me, and I’ve lived that depicted life already.

I had no choice about an emergency C-section, nor bottle feeding a child who hungered every two hours. Only months after I had recovered—from the fourth-degree laceration, from the sleepless nights, from the crying that never stopped, from the long, lonely stretches of time when Devin traveled Monday through Friday and returned on weekends—our feet were kicked out from beneath us.

Observing my parents and my in-laws, recalling their sacrifices that knocked me sideways in the soup aisle, I realized one doesn’t always return to the “joys of grandparenting.” You explore beyond.

Could I wait to be a grandparent? My mother used to tell me to slow down. Wait your turn was her mantra for me.

Many life events happened earlier for me anyways. A son born four weeks early, the death of my first husband. Later, I remarried a man whose children were older than my son, I was making college visits and wedding plans long before many of my friends. My parents married late, had children late. They left this life sooner than I wished for.

But I waited anyway.

I waited to see little Nora days past her due date, through the extended days of her mother’s prolonged labor and hospitalizations, waited for her birth grandfather, Pappy, to hold her at the hospital before it was my turn, waited for her family’s return from the hospital to cuddle with her soundly and coax her to sleep.

The entire week felt like standing in a queue at Disney World without the FastPass. I’m certain Shannon felt the same.

When the waiting was over, when we could squeeze out no more hugs, we said teary goodbyes to the new family of three, including Nora, that little bundle of goodness—and joy. On our late-night plane ride home, somewhere over the skies of D.C., the last drop of mourning over my own mothering journey trickled out of me. In its place, I felt a hope course through my blood and heal a long ago ache. A little bit of humility flowed through me too, trusting we too will travel deeper into the life of this beautiful new soul.

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