Almost there, bear with me

Four Generations
By Amy Wilensky


The first time it happened Lily was just a few months old. We were sitting on a bench in New York’s Union Square by the fountain after shopping at the outdoor greenmarket: my grandmother, mother, daughter and me. My father had gone ahead to our favorite restaurant to wait by the door and stake our claim at the bar as soon as it opened. Our plan was to rest up my grandmother so she’d be ready to push the stroller—a sort of walker on wheels—in time to meet up for lunch.

A man was walking along the path in front of us, middle-aged, polished in camelhair coat and cashmere scarf. He smiled at my grandmother, whose rosy cheeks and coronet braids connote Norman Rockwell, but she was so focused on Lily she didn’t notice. I smiled back on her behalf, as I find myself doing these days, and watched him stop and take in the rest of us: my mother, reorganizing bags of produce and cartons of eggs, me, slunk down on the bench like a 30-something teenager, the intimations of a baby under a daunting bunch of pussywillows.

"Is this four generations?" he asked, slowly, addressing the question at me, and for an instant I thought he meant was that the name of the park. Then, it hit me, so obvious, although I’d never used those precise words to explain or define us. It was, remains, what we are, and I sought to see the scene through his eyes: My nearly-90-year-old grandmother’s finger being grasped by my four-month-old child, a literal bridge from the past to the future, three women, one girl, related by blood, divided by experience, bound by both habit and love. A moment: so ordinary for us that we'd forgotten it actually wasn't. Together, our lives span nearly a century.

"Yes," my mother finally said, and I knew the question had taken her, too, by surprise, this recognition by a total stranger of a bond, a privilege, we had never overtly acknowledged.

"That's just terrific," the man said, shaking his head in amazement. "Just wonderful. I hope you know how lucky you are.

I do now. Since that afternoon, four years ago, there have been many more such moments, and we are five now: my second daughter was born in September. Our unique situation has been noted, and commented on, and even celebrated here in New York, where I live, dozens of times, but also in my hometown in Massachusetts, where my parents and grandmother still live, on every vacation we’ve taken as a group, at weddings, in airports, most often walking down the street. Often, the observation is followed by a wistful explanation of personal loss--a new baby who will never know his grandmother, the parent who died too young. Most of the time my grandmother doesn’t realize what’s being said until the stranger departs, and we fill her in. Her hearing is going, but she refuses to consider hearing aids; they’re for “old people.” When we tell her, she smiles. A small smile, but a satisfied one.

We call my grandmother Mormor, which means “mother’s mother” in Swedish. She was born in 1917 to immigrant parents who spoke Swedish at home. Amazingly, I knew my great-grandmother, her mother, who worked as a cook and a maid in rich people’s homes and raised seven children. I remember her, just barely—white hair braided and pinned up like Mormor’s, her standing in a lobby somewhere with a black-and-white tiled floor, the smell of the nursing home she died in. From what I understand, she was a forceful, determined person, extraordinarily capable, with a streak of humor and irreverence she passed on to almost all of her children. She taught my grandmother to cook, and my grandmother taught my mother, and my mother taught us, and now—although she is just four—I am teaching Lily. The ability to roll piecrust, the gift of creating a meal for people you love, is one of the few constants in a world that has transformed itself overnight, or at least it seems that way to my grandmother.

Mormor tells stories, if you push her a little. The same stories I heard growing up I now beg her to tell Lily; I don't know if my mother heard them as a child or if life was then being lived in the present. When Mormor was four, ice was delivered by horse and buggy, and milk in glass bottles was left on the porch. Chickens were kept in the yard. My great-grandfather, who died young, built weapons at the Watertown arsenal. The world at large was changing, in ways apparent and with still hidden ramifications. World War I ended, and Hitler became the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. Women had—just—won the right to vote, and the world’s first birth control clinic opened in London—seven children in one family was still commonplace but not for long. Betty Friedan was born, but the Feminine Mystique was still more than forty years from publication--the women whose life traps Friedan mourned were my grandmother's children, not her. Mormor was the most academically gifted of all of her siblings, but there was no question of her going to college. She put herself through secretarial school and later—after raising three children—went to work at the local high school assisting the principal, although she would scoff at the notion that this was a career.

My mother, the oldest of these three children, was born in 1942. As a girl, in defiance of a bigoted uncle-by-marriage, she drank from a water fountain marked “colored” on a visit to his home in Alabama. Later, she went to college, marched with Martin Luther King, moved into her own apartment in Cambridge, and began working as a teacher in her own hometown—farther afield was not a real choice. From the moment my mother was born, according to my grandmother, she was “the image of her father,” not just in looks but in temperament: unfailingly reliable, hardworking, moral, self-contained. As soon as she could afford it, my mother bought herself—in what strikes me now as an emblem of freedom--the first of many racing-green MG convertibles.

Even as a child, I always knew my grandmother and mother were different from each other. In fact, over the course of my childhood, I saw up close the dramatic trajectory of my mother’s life from one like my grandmother’s, centered on home and family, to her reentrance into the workforce when we were small, to her return to school for the advanced degree she should have earned twenty years previous, and her eventual role—and finally the fulfillment of her destiny—as an educator and leader of a community. This message was not lost on me. I remember my grandmother showing me her own high school year book in which she was the only girl in the entire class not in the “homemaker” track—this due to the fact that her grades were too high, not to her own ambition or any sense of real possibility. My grandmother still begins sentences with the words, “I would have loved to….” and I wince, feel the weight of my mother’s choices behind the words. But my mother does not regret the years she spent in a life that didn't quite fit--she has us, and as the world changed around her, she was ready and waiting to meet it. Too often I have worried that my grandmother did have regrets, primarily about the era she’d been born into. But now, instead, she has Lily.

And Annika, of course, who is only five months old, but really it is Lily, Lily, in my eyes, who has changed the way I see my grandmother, and—I hope—the way my grandmother sees herself. I was never a girl who fantasized about marriage and children. To be honest, I sort of figured they would probably happen eventually and that this would be for the better—I would not regret having missed out on them in my own old age. And predictably, having Lily caused an inner tumult that is unlikely to ever subside; rather, I am learning to reconcile it with who I am now, now that I am who I always have been but also—and that “also” looks and sounds so inappropriately insignificant—a mother of two who loves her two children more than she ever imagined was humanly possible. Technically, I am of the post-feminist generation, benefiting from the battles my mother and her peers fought on my behalf. Although not one of my four grandparents went to college, by the time I was born, my parents, thanks to their own hard work, had reached the upper middle class, and the question for me was not if, but where and with what advanced degrees.

When Lily was born, I was 34, and I think my grandmother had given up on me in this regard. Although they could not be more different—where Mormor is shy, Lily is exuberant, where Mormor is passive, Lily is assertive—they were fast friends. From her earliest days, Lily was calm in Mormor’s arms, soothed, perhaps, by the constant beam of worship illuminating her tiny face. My mother watches out for Mormor, mothers her, and I try, relentlessly, to push her out of her complacency, but Lily—88 years her junior--treats her like a peer. It turns out to be just what she needs.