Choices

Sunday is Mother's Day, and I am grateful to still have my mother with me.  At 97, every single day is a gift, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to give back to her a little bit of what she has given me for 60 plus years.  

But I have also been thinking about what it means to be a mother to my own children.  Life is a complicated dance between competing obligations, and it can be very hard to decide which steps are most important at any given moment.

Grandparenting 101

 Sometimes the obvious is just not that obvious to me, as I have realized over the last few days.  My grandsons have their birthdays two days apart at the end of April, so I always spend time thinking about them this time of year, reviewing the past year and everything that we have done together and experienced.  And I also spend time thinking about my role in their lives, and what I bring to the table as a grandmother.

But this year, we laid to rest my aunt at age 100, as the boys turned seven and nine, and the juxtaposition of those two events has made me understand this relationship in a whole new way.

My mother's hand....

 I recently had the opportunity to observe, up close, my mother's hand as she lay still and quiet. I wondered what other people saw, when they looked at that hand. It is an elderly hand, one that has seen a lot of hard use over the 97 years it has served her. It is fragile, worn, chapped, swollen, and a little weary from all the work that has been accomplished, and it is ready to have some well deserved rest from its labors, just as my mother is.

But I don't see any of that as I gaze at her today. Instead, here is what I see when I look at my mother's hand.

Slán abhaile.

 I have been thinking about Sinead O'Connor quite a lot the last couple of days, as many people no doubt have.  Full disclosure:  I was not her biggest music fan, for a variety of reasons.  And yet... I was a true fan of her, Sinead, the person, and it is that which I have been thinking about.

Of course, I recognized she had the voice of an angel.  Haunting, emotional, tearing you this way and that.  She had a power like very few ever have to move the listener.  She did not need autotune and lots of special effects to do it.  Her voice, alone, was enough.  Sometimes it was too much, really.  She was almost too real to bear.

On being a grandmother....

 Every year at this time, I contemplate what it means to me to be a grandmother.  My two grandsons have their birthdays two days apart, and it always shocks me, each year, how quickly the years are flying by.  This year it is even more so, as they are both in school and they are so clearly growing up.  Their faces are no longer the faces of babies or toddlers - they are boys, growing and thinking and in possession of their own personalities and thoughts and plans.

I did not grow up with grandparents.  I always knew I was missing out on something, because my friends would talk about how great it was to go to their grandparents' homes, but mine all died before I was born, or when I was so young I don't remember them at all.  I didn't really spend time with friends at their grandparents' homes, either.  The only real example I had was my own mother as a grandparent to my kids, and while she did so much right, I thought about ways I would do it differently, also.  

So when I was approaching grandparenting myself, I felt like I finally had a clean slate to make the role my own.  I don't have to live up to anyone else's memory.  I don't have to follow anyone else's example.  I don't have guidelines or expectations to meet.  I get to be the grandparent I want to be, just the way I want to do it, and no one else is involved except the kids, who don't know any better.  Perfect!  What freedom!