grandparents

A single grandma on a windy hillside with a lot of cats

/ startraylor / Leave a comment

I would imagine being a single grandparent is more enjoyable than being a single parent because grandparents aren’t supposed to have full-time, 24-7 child-care responsibilities.

Except sometimes they do.

My mother became a grandparent in her late 40s after over a decade of being a single parent trying to survive in a remote dilapidated farmhouse on a windy West Virginia hillside where there was no doorbell, and if there had been, no one ever would have rung it to offer lawn care services.

By that time, she had gotten used to repairing things herself using what few resources she had. When she had to bust a hole in her downstairs ceiling to remove a dead kitten that had somehow squeezed through an upstairs floorboard, she covered up the hole with posters that remained for a decade because it was impossible to find a contractor willing to tackle that minor repair job.

Mom welcomed her new role as a grandparent when my sister had her first child at 20, and she often kept my niece for entire weekends. Then, on a few occasions when my sister was in the hospital, she kept her for much longer – several weeks at a time. Naturally, she had to take time off work, which probably would not have been possible had my family not owned the business.

At the time, I was a workaholic news reporter in my early 20s, not exactly sure what one did with a toddler all day. From looking at all the photographs my mother took, I could tell they spent a lot of time playing outside with the animals. My sister and her husband had a border collie named Mackenzie that also ended up living at my mother’s house because the dog needed more room to run than she had at my sister’s house. Such is the way for grandparents as with parents – we end up taking care of our kids’ pets.

Shortly after I had my son at 27, we sold our family business, and mom had some free time to spend with us. She coached me through a long spell of what most people would have called postpartum depression, though I don’t think I would have described it that way. How can you not be depressed when you experience a complete loss of identity, coupled with chronic sleep deprivation and social isolation? And, oh yeah, a colicky baby.

Much of what I learned about parenting, I learned from my mother, but my experience with mothering was in many ways the opposite of hers. She had continued working while her three kids were babies, wishing she could stay home.

“If I didn’t work, we didn’t eat,” she said. It was true. Even with both my parents working when I was a child, we lived in a tiny log cabin. I remember once when my father brought home a new pair of shoes for each of us and a bottle of soda. What a celebration we had. The soda may as well have been champagne.

My mother had loved breastfeeding even in the late 70s when it was considered optional. By the time I had my children, breastfeeding was a moral obligation. I did it, but found it very confining since my kids didn’t take bottles. The first time we gave my son a bottle of formula, his stomach swelled up and he cried for four days. We ended up at the hospital for a stomach X-ray. Turned out he was severely constipated and had a dairy allergy. “Don’t give him any more formula,” the doctor said. We weren’t about to.

The fact that neither of my kids could tolerate formula and didn’t take bottles, coupled with the meager wage I would have earned as a news reporter, turned me into a stay-at-home mom and freelance writer for six years. Friends who were editors would give me story assignments as a favor so I could get out of the house for an hour here and there between nursing and changing diapers. My mom would watch my kids. I didn’t get much satisfaction from my brief outings. Although people told me how lucky I was to be able to stay home, I thought my friends whose kids were in daycare all day had it easier than me.

Then when I took a long-term substitute teaching job, my mom moved into our house so she could care for my 4-year-old daughter full-time. Like a stay-at-home mom, my mother took care of my daughter even when she herself was sick, or tried to anyway. I came home one day to find my mother sick in bed and my daughter playing downstairs by herself. On days like that, I found that what they said about women’s choices between a career and family were true. There were no good options.

My mother became a single parent after 10 years of marriage. She was 36. She never dated much when I was younger, but once remarked that it seemed married men were more eager to date her than the single ones. She wasn’t interested in being somebody’s “other” woman. She preferred to stay single. At least she didn’t have to cook or keep house for a man. She often said to me, “It’s better to want someone you don’t have than to have someone you don’t want.”

My own experience with marriage and parenting was that I apparently had unrealistic expectations. Older women told me I was lucky. Lucky my husband worked a steady job, loved his children, didn’t beat me. I don’t know what I thought it was supposed to be like, but I did not feel lucky to be relieved of a full-time job in exchange for full-time childcare and housework. Most of the time, I felt lonely and resentful.

I was, however, lucky that my mother was willing to take care of my children when I needed to go, and that she taught them things I never could, like how to identify plants, how to play chess, how to sew. As they got older, she kept them for entire weekends, doing the things that grandparents do, even though she never had a husband to help her out, give her a break, or even pay the bills or fix a broken appliance, like I did. My mother taught my children to not just care for animals in the perfunctory way that I did, scooping the litter box and vacuuming the floor robotically, but to understand animals, talk to them. They’ve nursed many a sick stray kitten and even a wounded buzzard back to health at my mother’s home, where free-range guinea pigs hide under a garden shed when they hear the lawnmower start.

As a teacher, I read a lot of essays by students who say their grandparents were there for them when their parents were not. It’s no secret that sometimes parents run away. There’s the proverbial deadbeat dad, but the dark secret of motherhood that really is no secret is that sometimes we want to run away too. Sometimes we do.

Now that my children are older, they spend more time glued to electronics than they do helping my mother take care of her animals. They want to hang out with their friends instead of spending the night with grandma. She understands. She says the stray cats, rabbits, and guinea pigs are good company for a single lady in a wind-blown farmhouse on a hillside in West Virginia.

Where the heart is

/ startraylor / Leave a comment

It’s a beautiful season to be born, and a beautiful time to die. The sun is strong and warm. Leaves are starting to turn and fall. Shadows are growing longer. Crickets chorus in the golden twilight and break the solitude of a lonely dawn.

My grandmother was born and died in September. Sometimes on her birthday, we take flowers or some other token to the cemetery. My grandmother was fond of white roses, white doves, and the color green.

I live in her house. It is my house now, but it will always be hers, too. The thick carpets and wallpaper are gone and now the hallways are lined with backpacks and book totes. Tables are covered in permission slips and order forms.

Growing up, this house, in the suburbs, was the constant in my life. The others were variables. There was the log cabin where I was born and lived until my family moved to the old farmhouse.

When my parents divorced, my father had an apartment at the back of an alley on a city street. We’d pack our bags to visit while listening to our parents debate over the phone whose “turn” it was that weekend. I decided then that when I grew up, I didn’t want to live out of a suitcase. I wanted a place where a thin layer of dust would collect on my little bottles of perfume as they caught the afternoon light. My grandmother’s house was that place.

I moved in with her when I was 18, leaving half my belongings here and taking the essentials with me to a dorm room an hour away. I’d return on breaks from school and Grandmom and me would be kindred insomniacs. We’d hold communion at the kitchen table at 3 a.m. She was partial to Otis Spunkmeyer muffins with milk and berries, but she said eggs were really the best food to cure insomnia.

My grandmother didn’t like alcohol. She told me that in her younger years, when she went to a cocktail party, she would ask for rum punch and hold the same drink all night. Once, when I was nursing a bad case of insomnia with a glass of red wine, she started in on me about temperance. Exasperated, I poured the remainder of the bottle down the sink and told her she ought to know I was too much of a control freak to become an alcoholic like the boy I was in love with at the time. She liked him because his family went to the same church as her, but I was lucky, because he didn’t love me back.

When you lose your grandmother, you essentially lose your fairy godmother. You lose the person who clipped all the stories you wrote for the newspaper and kept them in a scrapbook.

For 50 years, my family ran a nursing home that my grandmother owned. I grew up there, talking to the Alzheimer’s patients and working in the office on the weekends. I wasn’t always the best employee because I was a teenager whose family owned the place, but some of the old folks who lived there liked talking to me and appreciated when I made them coffee or lit their cigarettes. This was back when smoking was socially acceptable.

My family sold the nursing home after my grandmother died in 2005. By then, I was three months away from having my first child, working full-time, and tragically unprepared for the changes that were coming.

Profits from the sale left each of Grandmom’s descendants with a small nest egg, but the money went quickly for those in my family. We had grown accustomed to always having something to fall back on in the form of a job or a dividend and now we would have to make our own way in the unforgiving world where you really do have to know somebody. In fact, you have to know a lot of people, and you’d better hope you treated them at least as well as they treated you.

These days, I tell my 8-year-old she can’t take my grandmother’s green satin clutch purse outside to play. It’s one of a few handbags my grandmother left that I hold dear, but rarely use. I still have some of her china in the cabinets and most of her wooden dining room set. I’ve been meaning to have the chairs reupholstered for about a decade.

One of my students recently told me that he doesn’t want to get stuck in Winchester. It’s a tragedy, he said, when people get stuck here.

When my grandmother died, I was living in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, about 45 minutes away from her house. I’d return to Winchester to visit friends or family with my colicky baby in tow. I brought the Dustbuster with me because the sound comforted him when he was hysterical, and sometimes he became hysterical in the back of my car by himself on the long ride.

When I came back to Winchester, we’d check in on her house, the one I live in now, which had a For Sale sign out front. I’d nurse the baby in an empty room that had been cleared of the carpet and wallpaper and most all of the furniture. It seemed to me that Winchester had changed so much in the few short years since we’d moved away, and I was homesick.

My family did receive an offer to buy the house, but the offer was low, and they declined. I ended up moving back to Winchester, to my grandmother’s house, not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

Teenagers, especially those who have never had to pack a suitcase every other weekend, think it would be tragic to “get stuck” in their hometown. One thing I’ve learned from reading their essays is that many of them are very angry with their fathers. Some of their mothers have done their best to make up for the fact that their fathers were gone, but of those who are disappointed with their parents, many love their grandparents because their grandparents were there for them when no one else was.

Grandparents tend to behave better than parents. They don’t yell as much and they’re less likely to desert their families or use some addictive poison to cope with the drudgery of adulthood.

My own daughter holds her grandmother in the highest regard. Grandmothers are all adulation. Someday I want to be a good grandmother, someone who doesn’t whine about the laundry the way I do now. Someone who hardly thinks about laundry.

I am sure that there are places other than Winchester where September is lovely, even if there are no walnut trees dropping green fragrant ornaments into piles on the ground, and I admit that I have visited too few of these other places.

But I can go with my mother to visit my grandparents on their birthdays, or their death days. I can put white roses in a vase in my grandmother’s kitchen and light a candle and be grateful to remember. I’ve seen enough to know it’s better than the alternative.

Whose idea was this?

/ startraylor / Leave a comment
My kids Annabelle (center) and Oliver (right) with their friend Maggie, and their hamsters.

My kids Annabelle (center) and Oliver (right) with their friend Maggie, and their hamsters.

The other morning around 6 a.m. we heard our neighbor’s son pull up outside their house to drop his kids off before he went to work.

I looked at Dan and said, “Thank God for grandparents.” He nodded in agreement.

Most of the people I know, Dan and I included, couldn’t survive as parents without the help of our own parents. For Dan and me, my mom has been a lifesaver, taking care of our kids when they were sick, and even when she was sick, so we could go to work. So we could pay the bills.

My mom is the kind of grandmother you read about in storybooks. You go to her house when you want to play with magic wands and flying squirrels and eat at a buffet of candy corn and gummy worms.

There’s a poster that hangs inside some businesses and says something like, “Unattended children will be given espresso and a free kitten.” That poster should be hanging on the door to my mother’s house because that’s pretty much what happens every time my kids go to Grandma’s. Usually they fall asleep on the ride home from Grandma’s after telling me that they stayed up until midnight watching vampire movies from the 1980s.

This weekend when I picked my kids up from their grandmother’s house, both children brought hamsters home with them. I was told this would be a temporary situation and that the hamsters will eventually go back to my mother’s house because a) I’m scared of rodents and b) we already have a cat, a few turtles, a fire-bellied toad, a lizard that requires crickets to survive and poops every time we take him out of his cage, and a bunch of fish. We already have to hold a fish funeral a couple of times a month.

Did I mention that my daughter is allergic to everything, including animal dander?

So Dan and I had made ourselves clear about how we weren’t going to get any more animals, and yet I found myself pulling into our driveway a couple of days ago with two hamsters.

Last night we hosted our first sleepover at our house. Dan was away, so my friend spent the night with her 6-year-old daughter. My kids were excited to show their friend their new hamsters.

We thought the kids would be tired after a day of swimming, so my friend read them a bedtime story around 8:30 p.m. and turned the lights out. She came downstairs and we turned on Netflix to try to watch a movie. I say try because that’s what you do as a parent: you try.

A few minutes later, footsteps descended the stairs. And so it began.

Someone wanted a drink. Someone was scared. Could they sleep with the lights on? Could they switch beds? Could they sleep on the floor?

I’m proud to report that at no point did I stand at the bottom of the stairs and yell, “Go the hell to sleep,” though I wanted to.

I didn’t even go into the bedroom and start beating the kids with a rolled up issue of “Rolling Stone” magazine, which is what our parents used to do when my siblings and I wouldn’t go to sleep.

I did look over at my friend at one point and calmly say, “This is why I don’t usually do sleepovers.”

The two girls eventually ended up falling asleep on the floor of my bedroom. My friend drew the short straw, so she ended up sleeping with them in my bed.

I went off to spare bedroom, but before I fell asleep, my son Oliver came in to inform me that the hamsters were attacking each other and needed to be separated. He needed to go to the garage, find a box, cover the bottom with paper, and put one of the hamsters in it for the night.

So about four hours after we initiated bedtime, we were all asleep and the hamsters had stopped fighting.

This morning Oliver told me I needed to go to the pet store and buy a new hamster cage. What choice did I really have but to comply?

I guess technically I could have done something noncompliant, like screaming, “I will not buy any more pets or pet accessories!” Then I could have run out the door and down the street, never to be heard from again.

But that would have been so out of character for me.

When we called her this morning, my mother did offer to drive into town and buy the cage for Oliver. I declined, partly because I do intend to send the creatures back to her house later this week. For some reason, paying for the new cage will help alleviate the guilt I will feel for sending them back.

But why do I feel guilty?

My kids now have two happy hamsters living peacefully in separate cages. And I sure hope both are female, because it looks as though one certainly is.

At this moment, the kids are thinking of what they want for dinner, and dessert, and what they want to be for Halloween, and what they want for Christmas. They aren’t thinking about the drought, or climate change, or Syrian refugees. And they sure aren’t thinking about how, for the price of a hamster cage, I could have gotten myself a cute pair of shoes.