It occurs to me that one reason I am a better grandmother than I was a mother is that I have more money. I always liked to buy books and toys for children and indulge them but now I can do it on a larger scale. Another thing I love to buy are beautiful clothes. My older grandchildren are wonderful to shop with. My oldest grandson is six foot seven inches tall. When he had to have his first tuxedo there were none to rent long enough for him so I took him to the Beau Rivage Casino and bought him one at the Armani boutique. His mother just shook her head. Nine years later he still wears it, it still fits, and he still looks grand in it. He was going to the prom with an older girl who is now his wife and the mother of my great-grandchildren. I know when to hold them. I know sure bets when I see them and I back winners.
Another unending thrill is taking my two oldest granddaughters shopping for expensive blue jeans. The oldest is six feet tall and thin and gorgeous with wild red hair. The second one is five seven and has her mother’s dark hair and my dark brown eyes. They both have exquisite taste and look wonderful in clothes. I also take them all to bookstores. I am blessed in that my sons marry women who love books so the children actually read. Is this also DNA? Sometimes I wonder.
Another good thing about having enough money is that I don’t like to be left alone with small children after dark. Especially more than one small child from the same family. I CANNOT STAND SIBLING RIVALRY. I rail against it, but cannot stop it. It is one of the most powerful forces in the universe as the authors of the Holy Bible know. The story of Cain and Abel gets played out every day and night in every household in the world, not to mention politics and war.
I especially do not like to be left alone with small children after nine o’clock at night, which is my bedtime. Thanks to not being poor I have developed a strategy to deal with this problem which still allows their parents to stay out late with their friends. I have found a beautiful, strong teenage girl named Rachel Picard who is always saving up money to go to church camp in the summers. She has three younger siblings and can deal with bedtime fears and sibling rivalry like a professional. I hire Rachel to help me and she takes over when I fall asleep.
I have learned a lot from watching her interact with small children. She is strict and no-nonsense like the marine officer who babysits in The Pacifier. She does not beg them to stop fighting. She orders them to stop fighting. She does not beg them to get in bed. She puts them there and tells them to stay put.
It amazes me that it took me so long to think up getting babysitters to help me with grandchildren. It is the absolutely best idea I have had in years.
I don’t think I was ever very good at disciplining children or making them mind. It is a gift I do not have. As I told my friend Molly Giles, “I was always putty in their hands but now I am their slave. I would always have killed or died for my children but I did not know why when I was young.”
“Your children are not your children,” the great philosopher Kahlil Gibran wrote. “They are the sons of daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. They dwell in the house of the future, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”
What does that have to do with adoring your grandchildren and great-grandchildren? Everything. It is about loving life itself, about watching the unfolding and coming into maturity of your own self and your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. DNA is especially easy to spot when you have redheaded children. This strange recessive gene has given me four granddaughters with brilliant red hair of different shades. Beauty, power, order, the amazing intelligence and mystery of DNA, the wild order of the chromosomes. The apple does not fall very far from the tree, my daughter-in-law Rita loves to say.
You bet it doesn’t. So maybe I adore these children because I like myself. Maybe I’m a better grandmother and great-grandmother than I was a mother because I’m more content. Whatever life is, I love being here. If it ends, so what? All that DNA is out there replicating and expanding and becoming new people who like to shove turkeys in and out of ovens as much as I once did.
I have not even mentioned the wild joy I take in watching small children learn THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Hearing them sing songs I once sang, read books I once read, make jokes, ask endless questions.
When one of the parents of a young child calls to catch me up on things the questions I ask are, what is he saying? What does he call you?
Children take themselves seriously. We have a two-year-old who won’t sit in high chairs or any sort of device made to make him able to reach the table. He is a player. He doesn’t sit on baby seats. So we just let him sit on regular chairs and watch as he goes to the elaborate trouble of reaching up to get a spoonful of cereal. He manages to do it. This amazes me so much that I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. How did he figure out that sitting in a high chair made him less of a player? Everyone says his brother must have told him so but I do not believe it. I think he just figured it out. We have no idea how smart small children are because they cannot talk.
On the day my first grandchild was born I looked at him and realized that I would never fear death as long as he lived. When his wife gave birth to his first child I looked at him and said, “Well, I’m in the gene pool for another hundred years.” Since he shares my imagination and sense of humor he knew what I meant. “Thanks,” I added. “Don’t mention it,” he answered. “Courtney did the heavy lifting.”
There is so much going on that we don’t understand. When I looked at my first grandchild and knew, in a blinding illumination, that I would never die, maybe that was a glimpse behind the veil of all we do not know about chemistry and biology and connections.
I don’t think you have to have children to share in this wonder. We are all part of the great gene pool of our species. If I were a Zen master I might be able to see deeper than that, might know connections that are vastly wider and infinite.
For now, for this life, I’ll just go on being grateful for this smaller knowledge. And for the luck that put me here and has kept me here long enough to learn a little about love.
JANUARY 2008
Grandmother, Great-Grandmother, What Next?
I NEVER DREAMED I WOULD LOVE MY GREAT-GRANDCHILDREN AS much as I love my grandchildren. I never knew they would capture my imagination and attention. I thought that no one could ever love anyone again as much as I love my grandchildren. And yet here they are, a four-year-old boy named Marshall and a two-year-old named Garrett and they have stolen my heart.
I think a great deal about children and grandchildren, about DNA and how the recessive gene for red hair keeps creeping in, even in families where neither the mother nor the father has red hair. It’s a marker, as is the powerful personality that always accompanies it in my family.
I have a lot to think about. I have three sons, fifteen grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. “Hostages to fortune,” Francis Bacon called our progeny. But they are so much more than that. They are our riches, our gifts to the earth, our endless sources of curiosity. The things that happen as children grow into adults and the things they say when they begin to talk are the most amazing and unimaginable things in the world. The red-headed Garrett, at eighteen months, just said his first sentence. It was a question. We were walking up to my front porch. The front door was being guarded by a huge green and yellow grasshopper. “What’s the bug doing here?” Garrett asked. We all stood still. We didn’t know he could talk and here it was, a complete English sentence with all the words in the right place and the attitude and gestures to accompany it. A great Shakespearean actor could not have delivered the line with more perfection.
Flash That Light Over Here is the title of a mystery novel his father started when he was eight. I asked him if I could borrow the title but he said no, he would just save it for his own book.
I made a copy of the title, Flash That Light Over Here, and rolled it up like a tiny scroll and put it inside a shell that sits over a pond in my house. A thousand times I
have been cheered up by opening the shell and reading the title. What a title! What a great idea! What a wonderful life I have led since my grandchildren started being born. They live all over the world, in Denmark and the Virgin Islands and Germany and Australia. But they are there, my beautiful gene-bearers, sending me postcards and letters and lately, Facebook messages. Because so many of them are far away I have had to learn to use a computer. This has been a boon to my colleagues at the University of Arkansas.
I am a better grandmother than I was a mother because I have had a lifetime to watch children grow into adults. I know that what I see when they are six months old is what I will know when they are twenty and thirty and forty. It is amazing how the personalities are stamped on the face and shown in the body language. It is amazing how much you can know about a person from the moment they are born. I do not need scientists to tell me anything about DNA. I have been watching it play out in its mysterious patterns for fifty-five years in the lives of my children.
The amazing thing is how much like my children their children are, whole personalities passed down from uncles and grandparents also. This may be because my sons married women who are like our family, not completely but basically. I received an email yesterday with a photograph taken in my son’s farmhouse in Denmark. They have rebuilt the kitchen and living areas of the house. It looks like something I would build, very clean, very orderly, very simple, plain and elegant. Are tastes also inherited? I’m beginning to wonder.
Anyway, I like to play with children more than I did when I was young. I like their company. I see their points of view. And, of course, they go home sooner or later so I never get tired of them.
Postscript: More Miracles, April 22, 2015
I HAVE TWENTY-ONE PROGENY BUT I HAD NEVER WITNESSED A live birth. My own three were Caesarean sections and I’ve never had the courage to even watch a movie or television program of what happens when a woman delivers a baby into the world.
Since all three of my children are males none of my grandchildren or three great-grandchildren have ever been born to a woman who was my blood kin. I have loved these women for the children they gave my family but I have never been deeply involved in the pregnancy or the delivery. Selfishly I let their mothers and grandmothers carry that burden of worry and love.
I have eight wonderful granddaughters and I have told the oldest ones for several years that if they don’t get pregnant by the time they are thirty years old I want to bribe them to have some eggs removed and put into freezing storage. It wasn’t a joke, although they always laughed and acted like it was one. I was ready to make the bribe an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Last year, when she was twenty-nine years old, my oldest, tallest, redheaded granddaughter and her husband, Sean Perkins, decided to begin a family. Her name is Ellen Gilchrist Walker Perkins. She is my namesake as well as the oldest granddaughter.
None of this had anything to do with my threats to bribe her to freeze her eggs. Their decision was their deep love for one another and their combined love for other people and animals of all kinds.
I followed the pregnancy from Fayetteville for the first four months, vitally interested in every visit to the doctor, a monumentally wonderful and expert gynecologist, Dr. Hope Ruhe. By the time I met Dr. Ruhe I had heard her advice so many times (secondhand from Ellen) that I thought she was an old friend.
In December I applied for an unpaid leave of absence from my work at the Writing Program in the English Department of the University of Arkansas and drove down to my house on the Mississippi coast to be near New Orleans and my expectant granddaughter.
My house is on a small beach only eighty-nine miles from New Orleans and is in the town where Ellen grew up and lived until she went to New Orleans to college. Her home here was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina so my place has become the spot where the grandchildren who lived here come to see old friends, attend weddings and baby showers and funerals and just to stay near the beach where they played all their lives. Also, it is a good place to get away from the craziness of New Orleans at times like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest.
The pregnancy went by like a dream. There was morning sickness and fear of ruining her beautiful tall thin body but she kept on with her work of teaching yoga and did exactly what the doctor and the Internet demanded, no alcohol, a careful diet, vitamins and calcium pills, and whatever else was suggested by a daily pregnancy site she watched on her computer. I thought some of the warnings on the site went a bit too far but if I had been having a baby in 2015 I would have been watching it too. In the 1950s I was surrounded by aunts who had given birth, and cousins and friends and a sister-in-law so I got lots of advice, most of it sound but some of it silly. Everyone said if you want the baby to come on out you should run up and down the stairs a lot so I did that and my first child was born a month early coming one foot first, which is why I had to have a Caesarian section at a time when they cut from side to side through the large muscle groups to get to the uterus. After that all the following pregnancies have to be Caesarians or the muscles might tear.
Ellen’s Internet advice had been peer-reviewed and she was dedicated to do this pregnancy and birth to perfection. Her husband was so into it he gained a few pounds and showed other signs of being deep into the process with her.
From the beginning Dr. Ruhe had predicted the birth to be on April 21, a prediction she told me later almost never was this specific.
On April 17 Ellen and Sean drove the ninety miles to my house to spend the weekend and get some sun and sand and attend the funeral of a much-too-young mother of one of Ellen’s close friends. My youngest son, Pierre, and his wife, Natalie, and five-year-old daughter, Josephine, came over also to help watch and wait. The soon-to-be-parents were getting ready, and so was Sunny Louise. Ellen was dilated one centimeter. She had seen Dr. Ruhe that morning who said the baby probably wouldn’t be there until the following week.
Ellen went for short walks, but for the first time in her life didn’t seem to really want to exercise. We tried watching Downton Abbey but the men got bored so we watched the Discovery Channel and saw a fabulous film about the building of the Roman aquaducts in the third century B.C. Pretty amazing creatures, human beings. All the while Sunny was kicking the hell out of Ellen’s liver with her very long and, it turned out, strong legs, and moving nearer and nearer to her destiny with the sun for which she would be named.
At ten that night I wanted to go to sleep but before I went upstairs I said we had to have a plan in case the water broke while we were sleeping. Ellen said she would go five miles away to the Ocean Springs hospital and would not try to make it back to New Orleans but she hated not to have Dr. Ruhe there.
I managed to sleep most of the night, as did most of the party and at ten the next morning Ellen and Sean started driving back to New Orleans.
The excitement was building. The plot was thickening. I went around “praying without ceasing,” advice from the Old Testament which I had been remembering from something I heard on television or read in a book. It is from II Thessalonians but is also somewhere in St. Paul. I first learned it from a book by J. D. Salinger called Franny and Zooey which I have read six or seven times and am going to read again this week. Between “praying without ceasing,” yoga breathing, wishing on stars and being eternally grateful for the strength and health of my beloved grandchild I made it until Sunday afternoon when I called and Ellen told me she was having contractions. The next morning she saw Dr. Ruhe and was told to go home until they became stronger and closer together. It was happening. Om Mani Padme Hmm, I kept repeating and started packing a suitcase and carrying things out to the car. “You don’t have to come yet,” Ellen told me at six o’clock Sunday afternoon, but the only reason I didn’t start driving that moment was that eighty-year-old women really shouldn’t drive at night.
Early the next morning I put gasoline in the automobile, threw clothes in the car, called and got reservations at my favorite New Orleans hotel which is only one bl
ock away from Touro Infirmary, the hospital where Ellen was born thirty-one years ago this August first. It was a miracle of another order that they found me a room at the beginning of the first weekend of Jazz Fest. Some dear soul somewhere cancelled their reservations at the exact moment I called, in case you want to call that a coincidence. I’m living too high right now to doubt luck and divine interference if you’ve been good enough and been “praying without ceasing.”
At ten o’clock I was halfway to New Orleans and called Ellen’s brother, my physician grandson, and he told me that Ellen was in a delivery room, had already had an epidural and to drive carefully because the baby wasn’t expected until the afternoon.
I drove eighty but I was extremely careful, hands on the wheel, Bach on the stereo, eyes on the road, being terribly polite to other drivers but moving on.
I got to the hospital at eleven-fifteen, found the room, washed my hands for about fifteen minutes, and went to sit on the couch beside my grandson-in-law.
Ellen was in no pain, a registered nurse as tall as Ellen was in attendance and she was turned on her side waiting and resting before the big show.
I don’t think I had ever been this excited in my life, I kept thinking about the three times my own mother had to drive or fly to where I was having a baby. Her love and devotion and attention were with me. The look on her face when I would see her was the look I was wearing. This was happening to me, now, to my own flesh and blood.
Things like the Truth Page 22