For Gaga this Mother's Day

While I was pregnant with Sam, my mother sat me down for one of her talks. She informed me that she would love her grandchild but her life was full and she didn’t want to be one of those grandmothers who spend their twilight years doting. She would be busy. I’ve had more than one of these talks with my mother—when I went away to school, when I was about to be married. I took her declarations in stride. For all her adventurousness and travel lust, my mother doesn’t like change especially when I’m the one doing the changing.

My mother lives by a set of rules and she doesn’t understand why others don’t have the good sense to live by them as well. To be fair, they’re a good set of rules—be good to others, take care of yourself emotionally and physically, don’t be excessive except for walking (there is no end to walking) and do what you have a passion for. She must look in wonder at her children—both excessive except for walking which means we’re not taking care of ourselves and our passions seem to shift and drift.

Right before Sam was born, she worried. She feared that the pregnancy and the C-section would do me in—if I had only taken better care of myself, if she had only insisted on one more walk…thank goodness my mother-in-law, a nurse—who according to mom are people trained in competence and good sense—was there to allay some of her fears. But then Sam was born, I became background noise.

It seems there’s a significant difference between a theoretical grandchild and an actual grandchild. You can’t smell the top of theoretical grandchildren’s heads, swaddle them nor gaze into their recently-arrived-from-oblivion eyes.

I became a mother and a Sam Delivery System—from what I’ve read I’m not the only daughter to have gone through this type of transformation. And my mother’s Declaration of Independence from the tyrannical state of Grandmotherhood went right out the hospital window. I realized this when in the hospital I woke at 3am to a vision: my mother who had draped herself and Sam in long flowing bedding swayed about the room with him, singing lullabies—appearing to me like apparitions from a 19th century novel. At first I thought it was the drugs…

Sam has power, a power my brother and I never possessed, to drive my mother to express excess. And oh baby baby, she is excessive with her attention, affection and need to please and tend to him. In his presence, her world found its centrifugal force. While she is super-grandma to him, she’s absent to anyone else in the room. And she can’t grasp that he radiates goodness and light for a few; he isn’t the light bulb for everyone in the room.

And here is why I chose pictures of Ava for this entry.

Nancy, Mom’s BBF (as in Best Buffalo Friend), had her first granddaughter 6 months before Sam was born. Nancy is super-grandma too and suffers from the same singular devotion. The four of them, Mom, Sam, Nancy and Ava, can be seen around and about town beginning at Trinity (many friendships seem to begin there including Mom and Nancy’s) to Music and Me to Lisa Taylor Dance, from Sweetness to the Globe Market, from Shea’s Theater to the Science Spot even at Talty’s tavern for some St. Paddy’s Day fun, Mom and Nancy supervise their grandchildren’s cultural development. Grandmothers offer a gateway to the community outside the nuclear family and that is what Sam’s and Ava’s grandmothers offer them.

During one of mom’s many travels (she reserved a few rights from the discarded declaration), I took Sam to dance class instead of his Gaga. I forgot his shoes and his sticker card; Sam came undone and wanted to go home and I too began to emotionally unwind and wanted to go home. Nancy whispered to Ava. Ava took off her shoes, gave them to Nancy and reached for Sam’s hand. Relieved, he took her hand and together they strolled into the dance studio, shoeless. And she left her card with her Gammy as well; after class they burst out of the studio with stickers on their t-shirts. Nancy and Ava’s kindness and Sam and Ava’s solidarity leveled me. My three year old son already has a life long friend—a friendship born out of Grandma Love.

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