My eighth grandchild was born last week. Madeleine is a tiny girl with fairy-like hands and a mass of dark hair.
While she was arriving, I was fulfilling one of the more traditional female roles, caring for the new baby’s 4-year-old sister, Catherine.
Grandmothering is not the same as mothering. But it is important and the role of grandmothers within a family is reverting to something more traditional, close to the “grandmother hypothesis,” the anthropological theory that explores the role the mother’s mother played in the advance of civilization.
My grandmothers did not play active roles in my life. However, that was due to illness for one, and social and physical limitations for the other. My paternal grandmother had multiple sclerosis. Although she was only 44 when I was born, she was confined to a bed in a county hospital. Her paralysis was so profound that speaking was difficult.
My maternal grandmother, the youngest of 12 children, was orphaned at age 5. Taken in by an older sister, she was made to leave school at the end of the second grade in order to care for her cousins. By 48, she was a widow whose growing deafness, as well as her lack of education, largely separated her from the world.
The current generation neither dresses nor behaves like “little old ladies.” We benefit from better health and better educations. So do our “grands.”
Some provide full-time day care because the cost of good child care can be prohibitive, even for professional couples. Others open our homes to grandchildren on weekends. Catherine paints with her paternal grandmother about once a week, or as often as she walks with me or sews felt animals or treats me to “tea parties,” of wooden food served on tiny plates on the floor of her playroom.
A visit with grandmother includes watching “Frozen” or “Sarah and Duck” or “The Octonauts” on her laptop. She makes playdough with the kids and might take a middle-school student to her first live theater experience. My friends who are grandmothers like buying drawing paper and watercolors more than they enjoy shopping for clothes for themselves. And we all have “Little Baby Bum” on our playlists.
I don’t see my son’s children as often as I see my daughter’s, as my son has made the Army his career. But, despite the distance, I love keeping abreast of their achievements.
I was in the delivery room when my first grandchild, Donacienne, was born. She is a budding writer who turns 16 this summer. The next two, Noemie and Elodie, are mathematicians and logicians.
The youngest haven’t discovered their special interests yet, but they’re already part of the family legends: Magalie for her open friendliness, Genevieve for her budding shrewdness and Sebastien, the only boy, is famous for helping himself. One day, he put some leftovers, stored in a plastic bowl in the refrigerator, into the oven and turned the oven on, melting the bowl, ruining the oven and his lunch.
Being a grandmother means enjoying the developing language skills of the grands. When Catherine was 19 months, she and I went for a walk after sundown. When we returned, she told her mother, “I walk outside Gramma see moon sky.” There were no prepositions and she only used the personal pronoun once, but it was a complete story in seven words.
Donacienne and Genevieve created their own nicknames while learning to pronounce their names.
Being a grandmother means listening to songs sung in lisp. It means sitting with lacing cards on the sofa in a sunny playroom. It means using blocks according to the dictates of a pre-schooler and learning not to be disappointed when the furniture in the doll house is rearranged.
As a grandmother, I cannot say that I have more patience than my daughter or my son, but I can say that my patience is different. They easily allow things I would not because they are anxious to have some time for themselves, because they want to shower before going to work, or because they want dinner on the table at the ungodly hour of 5.
I know my role is to fold the laundry still in the dryer, to identify animal tracks in the snow, to bake cookies and to play. My role is to hug and to listen and sit on the floor and build castles. And it is fun.
Susan Wozniak, of Easthampton, is a retired journalist and writing professor who writes a monthly column.