Growth is about listening to someone else’s story before you live yours.
In 1993 I met Carol, a mature and elegant clerk I worked with at The Old Mill women’s clothing store housed in a quaint, repurposed Pennsylvania workshop in the Lehigh Valley. I clocked-in a few evenings a week, plus Saturdays, to get away from my three young children (all under the age of six) in a grasp for sanity. Everything I earned was spent on leggings and sweaters with sequins, not exactly the fiscal hike Dan had hoped for, but I reminded him it was cheaper than therapy. Carol and I spent a lot of time together sorting through dressing rooms, re-hanging discarded jackets and dresses heavy with giant shoulder pads. Finger-pressing wrinkled polyester, Carol spoke in kind ways about a daughter-in-law she could not like but tried very hard to love.
Her voice soft, she told me about her relationship with her grown children, stories littered with emotional landmines most people would choose to avoid. I remember feeling protective of her. Eyes misty behind butterfly frames, Carol told me about times she felt dismissed and unheard, the lenses of her glasses like translucent wings, open. She understood the currency of her voice and I hung on every maternal word, me, the motherless young mother. More often than not, I’d linger past my shift to hear more of Carol’s stories about how to parent, forgive, endure, and move through the world mining the best in everyone, even the hard people.
Carol’s narratives led with compassion. And soon, there was a grandchild who was held back on occasion as punishment from grandparents deemed too opinionated. This hurt Carol deeply but she was patient and willing to see where all of it would go. If she harbored resentment, she didn’t let it show. She loved this new little family, her son’s family, people she’d move heaven and earth to help. Yes, it was messy and hurtful, but Carol was optimistic. As I watched Carol’s big love for her children I really missed my mom, often wondering how she would have guided me had she been alive as I had one baby, then another, and one more. I watched in wonder as over time, Carol’s relationship with her son, daughter-in-law, and precious grandchild flourished because she understood people have the capacity to change their minds about things, especially when desperate and sleep-deprived and someone was willing to let them nap. When I see Carol’s face in my memory it looks like openness and expectant hope.
Years later, I find myself with a book on my lap, rocking in a gently lit nursery as I listen to our infant granddaughter, Sophie, doze contently in the crib across the room, inhaling and exhaling between pursed lips in perfect cadence with my heart. I spend naptime pouring over Anna Quindlen’s collection of essays, Nanaville, Adventures in Grandparenting. (It should be a primer for every grandparent.) Quindlen uses storytelling and a cheeky sense of humor to remind those of us who are unaware that we are not in charge when the baby comes. And if we want to enjoy the ride, we really ought to get comfortable sitting in the passenger seat, telling the tired new parents that they’ve got this. I’m lucky, Sophie’s parents lovingly welcome my partnership and that feels good. But the road to you know where is led by good intentions and I have a knack for overdoing the helper role. I studied the book as though it were the Bible, cramming, hoping it would reveal how I could work in concert with two worn-out new parents.
Quindlen’s chapter, ‘Did They Ask?’ was as revelatory as it was profound, causing me to stop reading for a few minutes and look up to stare at the Motowi mother and child giraffe tile resting on the shelf, using it as a focal point to process this new concept in grandparenting called waiting. What? I should wait until they ask me before I offer my marvelous advice? I remembered Carol and her stories, her respect, and her patience. Then I sat quietly with the epiphany. Waiting. Huh.
I came close to blowing it a few weeks after Sophie was born. I visited again to help out and I nearly forgot about boundaries. Losing my mind over the baby, I was filled with so much wantingness and emotion, advice spilled over the edge of my lip like an overwatered plant. Dan more or less had to place a Gentle Leader harness over my shoulders, like the one we used for our dog, to keep me from pulling and yanking and trying to direct outcomes. Fortunately, I remembered a conversation I had with my friend and wise sage, Mary.
“She holds the baby, you do the laundry. That’s it until she asks for more.”
Those were Mary’s marching orders and thank God I followed them. No matter what your relationship is with another person, even if you wiped their bottom long ago, asking what they truly need, listening fully, and doing only that, especially when they’re tired and vulnerable, is love. Despite moments of inelegance and occasional missteps, I’ve signaled I trust my children, the adults I have nurtured into being. I thought it would be hard for me to imagine that those small people who woke me in the night or ate crayons a few decades ago would be capable of managing the lives of others but I’m awed by them daily. Where did they learn how to parent? God, I hope it was from Dan and me, it’s been our life’s purpose to be around long enough to see our love for our kids reflected back in more tiny faces.
Babies conjure up big feelings, buried feelings. I thought a lot about my mom when Sophie was born, which makes sense because children are not the only ones who circle back and re-process loss when something significant happens in life, it’s a forever thing. I wonder what my mom would have wanted to teach me about mothering and show me about grandmothering? I wish she were here to tell me.
The most beautiful thing happened, some of my baby clothes were saved and passed to me when I became a young mother. I dressed my newborn girls in my embroidered infant gowns and delicate sweaters with little pearl buttons as though they were dolls. A soft, pink cardigan my mother wrapped around me has been passing like an inherited gene through our family. This tiny sweater as big as a postage stamp and as cozy as cashmere carries the love I know my mother would have liked to have given my children, and their children, like a hug. Long ago, as a baby, Laura napped soundly in this knitted blushing cloud, then Sophie put it on a time or two, before growing as if planted by magic beans. And now the sweater has been returned to me, the holder of things, this treasured garment, boomeranging back, feeling like constancy and the gentle hush of remembrance.
Copyright (2021) Suzanne Bayer. All Rights Reserved.