Life Cycles

Over the past four-and-a-half years, since Lily was born, my parents have driven many times from their home in Massachusetts to New York to spend the weekend with us here in the city. Almost always, they bring my grandmother, who will be 93 in February. Partly due to the fact that I grew up two miles away from her house, partly due to her longevity, and partly due to my personality, my grandmother and I know each other better than most grandparents and grandchildren ever have a chance to, regardless of factors such as proximity and desire. But due to her personality--a certain inscrutable quality shared to some extent by all three of her children--as well as profound, lifelong self-effacement, sometimes I feel I don't know her at all.

I can't decide if this is intentional or not on her part. There is no question that she is not, has never been, a forthcoming extrovert by nature or design, although she can be warm and silly and has a wicked if quiet and only occasionally unleashed sense of humor. This is made manifest, still, in out-of-the-blue, off the cuff asides that usually come when we have assumed she has not been able to hear the conversation around her. I cannot decide if this, too, is intentional.

Regardless, over these past few years, I have learned some things about my grandmother that I may not have known had I not had children and the opportunity to spend time with her and them together. One is that my grandmother has a very funny relationship to her independence. I have been struck time and again by the ways in which the very young and very old are similar in this regard, never more so than when we go out as a family, one of us pushing the youngest member of the group in a stroller, another pushing the oldest in a wheelchair, a very recent development that my grandmother resisted until she no longer could. She used to push the stroller herself, using it as a sort of a walker, a tangible bridge from the past to the future.

Much as Lily, and now Annika, need to be able to walk away from me but even more so need to know I am there if they fall, my grandmother both resents and craves the assistance she now needs after years of living alone and taking care of herself. She still lives alone, but she needs more help from my mother than she wants or wants to admit, rendering her dependent for the independence she refuses to give up.

Although I expected this relationship as a parent, the dicey balance between my daughters and their need to cling and push, it has been harder to acclimate to the way it affects not just my grandmother's relationship to my mother but to me. I think my grandmother would be the first to agree that the two of us have always been more forceful and independent than she is, it must be said that it is my grandmother who has lived alone for twenty-four years; we never have. And it is also true that our tendency to boss my grandmother around has generally had less to do with age and aging and more to do with the nature of our various temperaments and styles, although increasingly age is a factor, to--I believe--our shared dismay.

Which is where Lily, in particular, comes in. When we are together, now, I notice my grandmother making frequent comments about my mother, in particular, and the nature of her care. This past weekend, for example, she kept saying, "Lily, do you think Sands is the mother or I am the mother?" Lily wasn't sure why this kept coming up, but in her mind it was a pretty dumb question.

"You're Sands' mother," she said, every time, and although my mother and I were doing some internal eye-rolling, at the very least, I can't help thinking my grandmother liked--likes--hearing this uttered out loud.

That's all for now; more on this at a later date.