My Grandmother

Like most everyone else, I was born with two grandmothers, my mother's mother and my father's mother. I was fortunate in my early childhood to get to live very nearby to my mother's mom and therefore developed a very close relationship with her. My father's mother lived farther away, but I grew to know her better as I grew older. Both women were wonderful moms and grandmas, and I am blessed that one of them, my mom's mom is still alive and we still talk often. But this post is about neither of these wonderful women. This post is about the grandmother I gained in 1994 when I married my husband, Thom.

Thom's grandmother grew up in the deep South -- Louisiana and Mississippi. She was one of 14 children. She was born in 1921. She quit school to work during the depression and she married young. She had one daughter --- Thom's mom. She loves to laugh. She's easy going. She loves the Lord. She loves her family.

When Thom and I lived in Massachusetts neither of my grandmothers ever came to visit, neither of them willing to fly. Thom's mom and grandmother came up when Thom graduated seminary, when Kara was born, when Thom was ordained as a deacon at our church, and when Caleb was born. She was the grandmother who stayed in my home. She was the one who stayed up late and watched movies with Thom and I and his Mom. She was the one who sat in my kitchen and talked with me about things like cooking and marriage, taking care of babies and what it's like to have a spirited daughter. We laughed, a lot. And, when I didn't always understand my mother-in-law, mostly because she thinks like my husband and my daughter--or the other way around really -- I understood Grandmother. Pretty soon the distinction between her being Thom's grandmother and her being mine began to fade.

Thom and I will be celebrating our 17th anniversary in April. That's 17 years of knowing Thom's grandmother as part of my extended family. That's 17 years of her becoming a grandmother to me.

Somewhere along the way stories started to lean in the direction that things were changing with Grandmother. A fall here or there. Items going missing in their house and turning up somewhere odd. Strange stories of seeing ghosts or worrying that people were breaking into their house. Things were shifting.

Now things are different. Grandmother is often confused. Grandmother and Thom's mom come to visit every Christmas, but Grandmother no longer knows who we are really. She sees my parents, and it's like she's never met them before. She's nice to the kids, but she doesn't really know that they are her great grand children like she once did. Yesterday was Christmas, but Grandmother didn't really know it. She didn't understand who the gifts were to or from and wondered all day why she was wearing new slippers, not realizing they were one of her gifts. She wandered around a little bit lost all day long. And there was no way to reach her.

But today. Today she is here. And that is what inspired me to write a post after so long. Today she laughed. She talked about flowers. She tried to understand Kara when she gently and sweetly explained how to click Legos together. Even at this moment she is following along with the movie Angels and Demons, a pretty complicated suspense movie. And here's the catch .... It's 1:30 in the morning!!!! Thom and his mom played music together and sang hymns all e evening. Grandmother stayed awake and followed along in a hymnal. After the kids went to bed I was going to sit and get an article done for a deadline. It was late, but I could do it. Grandmother came and sat with me. She was laughing. She was chatting. She is herself tonight and she asked me to come and watch the movie with them. Sure it was already midnight and its crazy to turn on a movie at midnight, but it's crazier to sit in the kitchen and do work, when this might be one of the last times ever that Grandmother is happy and lucid and asks me to be a part of what the family is doing.

I'm awake in my living room with my family at 2am because my grandmother of nearly seventeen years is having a good day and I didn't want to miss any of it.

I want a new job

Mother's aren't allowed to quit. Well, technically some do, you can tell by the condition of their home, but it's seriously frowned upon. My mother is a superb housecleaner and homemaker. Anyone who's ever been to her home now or in the past will tell you. The house never looked like two kids lived there. It also never looked like she took a day off, a moment's rest, or, God-forbid -- a nap!

I am, sadly, not my mother. I frequently want to run screaming from the duties of housework. I want nothing more than to abandon my post as cook, clothes washer and cleaner of all things bodily function related.

At this very instant, I have abandoned my job of cleaning the carpet in my son's room. I sorted and picked up the toys. I cleared off the carpet. I got out the carpet cleaner (thanks Mom for the Bissell 2X Heat machine, thingy that works wonders on my carpet!). I cleaned his carpet. Why you ask? Why his room and no others -- well, as far as I know, no one else woke up in the middle of the night and peed all over their room because they lost their way to the bathroom down the hall. So, why did I stop? Oh, that'd be because as I was inverting the dirty water into the downstairs toilet -- I, um, missed. Not entirely, but enough. Enough to remind me of how often I deal with things that other people in this house refuse to touch.

Dog pee.
Sheets with puke on them.
Kid pee.
Kid poop.
Kid puke.
Kid hair with kid puke in it.
Dog food.
Strange items that have been in the refridgerator for so long they're nearly unrecognizable.

Therefore, I want a new job. One that does not involve gross things. One where things stay clean. One where someone else cleans everything.

I want a mom. I want MY mom. I want her to live her and pick up after ME. I want someone else to be in charge of gross things.

Children have no idea how good they have it. Even my children!

Quiet dog

We have a dog. I walk the dog. There. There's the setup. Across the street is a soggy slab of mossy grass—weeds mostly—slanting up or down into old-growth thatch. The dog, Happy, gets the news and weather from nosing across its length and breadth, and a bit of exercise hauling me, his human behind. I suspect he picks his deposits randomly so as not to give out any doggy secrets. Today's favorite stump is tomorrow's cast-behind. Lately it has been a miserable and muddy mess. I wear mowing shoes. Who cares what you step in. I catch myself whistling or humming whatever tunes the inner radio desires. At night, off in the distant, there are lights. Beneath them, men and women work shifts at a paper mill. I count off the hours sometimes, “Happy, they have three hours to go.” It has been over twenty years since I worked shifts, but you don't forget the weight of those hours. Happy stops. I stop and count my blessings. At night it is very quiet. Most of the houses around are dark, though a few lights here and there tell of hours still winding down and putting the day to bed. I try and turn off the radio and just be the quiet. To feel the wind and hear the slight night sounds and the whuffle of the dog and just be.

happy happy joy joy

We just got back from a road trip to Indiana. L's grandmother celebrated her eightieth birthday. (I hope I'm that spry at eighty.)

The road trip itself was a kind of trial run for a much longer trip to Disney World later in the year. Can kids and parents cope with each other while being strapped into a moving box for hours on end? I'm happy to report, yes. We did all the hokey stuff. We sang. We ignored each other in favor of computer games. We searched in panic for shelter when Caleb announced that he had to pee NOW! And we talked.

Some time between mid-state Indiana and home, L started asking me about joy. "When did you begin to experience real joy?" she asked. Real joy. She meant not a happy moment, such as a birthday, but a deep immersion in satisfied well-being, a deep sense of . . . well, I guess you'd call it gratitude or thankfulness. Those are different words than joy, but to me they express the same thing. Gratitude and thankfulness are, in my mind, the beginning of any real and wholesome ethic.

"Not until the last few years," I said. She didn't seem to like the answer. I thought perhaps I was being too serious about it. (I can definitely treat a question much too seriously.) "Not really until I was out of work," I continued. "During that time I felt so full of gratitude for the realities of living, for the common but important things that we pass over now." That answer didn't seem to satisfy her either.

So let me, then, ask and see what might come of it. Joy. When have you or did you begin to experience joy, to know what it means and where to find it?

Oh, we're also getting a dog. More on that later.

Matthew 21.16

Just when you think you've failed as a parent (for the things we have done and for the things we have left undone), something like this happens. Tonight, just as I had finished reading the story of Solomon to Caleb and was trying to lovingly cajole him into his bed, Kara comes in. I started to wave her off saying, “He's just getting in bed.” But she plopped down next to him, opened our hymnal for kids, and started singing, “The B-I-B-L-E”. Caleb joined in, following it with a rousing four-year-old's rendition of “Zaccheus was a wee wittle man.” And the two of them sang song after song for five minutes or more. What can a parent do? I joined in!