The Whole Enchilada: A Draft--With Gratitude

Okay. If you're bored, skip tonight's entry, although for the first time it has a beginning, middle and end. I apologize--had not intended to drag this out here like this, but I have to say, selfishly, I am so, so glad I did. I have been trying to get a draft of this piece--enough of one to send to my editor, FOREVER, and this proved to be the way to get it done. Your feedback, your comments, your input have made all the difference in the world, as well as the fact that I know you are reading, some of you even--unless you are better liars than I think you are--actually waiting to read. I cannot tell you how grateful I am. I have been working off line on another project at the same time, and although it is hard--it is a new kind of writing for me--this is keeping me going, propelling me forward. And I am grateful. If you have any advice or suggestions for this, bring it on: I am planning on sending it in tomorrow afternoon but will await your input before doing so. It will feel enormously satisfying. Tomorrow: new day, new subject, onward into the great unknown, with a renewed confidence in my own ability to produce and again, gratitude.



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 pale green local 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 before used those words. It was, remains, what we are, and I sought to see the scene we made 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 at different stages of life, one infant--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.

"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 with complimentary champagne 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 just 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, standing in a lobby somewhere with a black-and-white tiled floor, the off-sweet 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 papers were full of news of the war. The world’s first birth control clinic opened in London—seven children in one family was still commonplace but not for long. My great-aunt wore her slip to school by mistake. My grandmother, a lifelong Red Sox fan, was allowed to go to one game a season—when they opened up the stadium for women and girls.

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, with her older sister, 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. My grandmother’s meekness found no vessel in her. 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 the creator and leader of a school and 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 best—I would not have to regret missing 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: the person I always was but now also a mother 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. I wonder what my grandmother thinks when I complain about my struggles for “balance.” She would never say, but I wonder.

When Lily was born, I was 34, and I think my grandmother had given up on me in this regard. When I brought Lily to meet her, five days after she was born, Mormor came running out my parents’ front door; I remember thinking I had not seen her run in twenty years. Although they could not be more different—Mormor is shy, Lily exuberant, Mormor is passive, Lily, let’s say assertive—they have formed a hilarious, bickering unit from which my mother and I are excluded, even, or especially, when we are a foursome. 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, irritatingly, 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.

My mother, too, found something she needed in Lily. When we were growing up, and she was achieving her own sense of balance in a world that wasn’t quite ready, she was the mother who sewed every costume by hand as well as the last one to leave her school at the end of each day. When I look back, I remember her always awake: late, late at night if I got up feeling sick or in need of a glass of water, she would be folding laundry, writing evaluations, doing what needed to be done. She made us feel special, always, but from pretty early on I knew that we represented a compromise she would have denied if I’d mentioned it, but now I am even more certain, now that I make it myself. With her grandchildren, there is no compromise. She is relaxed and loose with them, always. She takes Lily on “’jama walks”—her invention--to the local playground near our apartment, allowing Lily to pedal her tricycle up the street in her nightgown; watching them head down the hallway these mornings I feel a tinge of jealousy: this whimsical, permissive, even silly “Sands” (Grandma was never an option) was never my wise, capable, endlessly multi-tasking Mom.

Do I mind? Never. The fact that my grandmother and mother have their own relationships with Lily that are separate from mine—and from each of theirs with me—is perhaps the great unexpected joy of my adult life. To see my grandmother’s sense of humor at full volume, her pride unabashed, my mother’s unparalleled reserve traded in for an age-inappropriate delight in doll clothes and the occasional donning of a tutu, has opened my eyes to a complexity in them, a multi-facetedness, that could have easily bypassed me. In becoming a parent, I found a mother and grandmother I would never have otherwise known.

When my grandmother was born, women had just earned the right to vote. Today, my daughters are 4 years and 5 months old and the democratic frontrunner for president is a woman, a woman just a few years younger than my mother. The world has changed irrevocably, is changing still, but in my world, every couple of weeks, I am one of four generations of women and girls who know who they are partly by virtue of knowing each other so well. Most people I know never knew a great-grandparent. Many people I know grew up a plane ride or more from their grandparents. Still others have parents who are no longer a part of their everyday lives. I know now that our group walks down the street to the greenmarket--one stroller, one wheelchair, one stubborn little girl who insists on sharing that wheelchair with an all too willing 92 year old who can’t hear so well but can give her more of a run for her money than the rest of us—are nothing like ordinary.

*

The week before Mormor’s birthday this year, when we will be driving to Massachusetts to celebrate with her, Lily appears at my desk with a notepad and pen. “Mama?" she says, hiding the stamps she has stolen from my drawer behind her back. "How do you spell 'tease?'" 


“Why?” I ask, wondering if it is worth the sure-to-ensue mini-fit if I try to reclaim my stamps.

“I am writing a letter to Mormor. I want to tell her to stop teasing me,” she says.

“But you like it when Mormor teases you,” I say, literal-minded as always, and Lily, in a way that reminds me of my mother, her Sands, rolls her eyes skyward.

“Yes, Mama,” she explains patiently, as though I were a bit dim-witted, which she makes me feel sometimes, to be totally honest. “But Mormor will think it’s funny.” She is right. Mormor will think this is funny. I spell “tease.” And silently pray for a few more years.