Special to The Washington Post
My sister once had to write a paper about a saint for our Catholic grammar school. She seriously considered using as her subject our grandmother, who was still living and had no miracles to her credit.
Still, to her grandchildren, these seemed minor technicalities for a woman who would cash her Social Security check only to spend it immediately at a grocery store where we were encouraged to fill the cart with all the junk food it would hold. We happily took our school vacations at her Queens apartment, where she’d spend the days fulfilling our every request. Meals and snacks were promptly delivered to wherever we were lounging, television played until our eyes couldn’t fight the sleep, and even on the rare occasion that she didn’t fix the game of slapjack in our favor, we still walked away with all the gambled pennies. It was the kid equivalent of a week in Vegas.
That’s why it was so confusing when the adults in our family — those self-absorbed people sandwiched between grandchildren and grandparents, the ones who ruled our world — did not always treat our grandmother with the reverence due a woman worthy of canonization. Our parents and aunt and uncle would sometimes roll their eyes, or sigh in exasperation.
I didn’t notice that it took our grandmother a half-hour to make a piece of toast, only that her toast was always golden brown and the butter was melted and evenly spread. I never tired of the story about how she and a neighbor boy once caught a rat at her childhood home in Ireland, no matter how many times she told it.
Her rechecking the locks on the door, the gas on the stove and even the dial tone of the phone a dozen times before bed only made me feel safe, never annoyed. These things were yet another facet of her endearing personality, no less charming to me than her lilting brogue, her soft hands or the glint in her eye whenever she looked at me. She was perfect and I couldn’t understand how her own children could ever see her any other way.
That is, not until my own mother became the sainted grandmother in our family tree.
When the first grandchild was born, my sister, brother and I regarded the prospect of Mom as a grandmother with a good laugh. Yes, she had an accent, but it was from Long Island, not Ireland. She did not knit or sew, save to replace the occasional button. Her hair was not gray, white or blue but, thanks to her beautician, reddish-blond. She didn’t own a housecoat. Contrary to what we deemed grandmotherly traits, she worked full time, had a social life, a car, a back yard and a temper, and was less than 100 years old. She may have shown up at church on occasion, but unlike our grandmother, this child’s grandmother was no saint.
That first grandchild is now an 8-year-old boy with a little sister and oh my, how things have changed from when we were kids. The mother I knew would holler about water usage and a wet floor every time I took a shower. The grandmother of these children turns the entire bathroom into a slip-and-slide for their endless play. If I complained about being cold, I heard a diatribe about heating bills. Now, unwilling to chance her grandchildren getting a chill, my mother’s house in winter is as hot as a Manhattan subway platform in August. My mother now can regularly be found having light-saber duels, playing with Legos and baking brownies. She’s fun, supportive and encouraging, and her pocketbook is a bottomless pit of Smarties and lollipops.
We, her children, couldn’t be happier about it. Watching one’s mother as a grandmother reminds us of all the things we loved about her, still love. It almost makes us feel we can just enjoy all of her magical qualities, leave the past behind once and for all and never fall into the old pattern where one wrong word from her can reduce the fully functioning grown-ups we’ve become into tormented teenagers. Almost. There’s a reason Deborah Tannen’s book about mothers and daughters — so aptly titled “You’re Wearing That?” — made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.
My sister asked her son, after he returned from a day at Grandma’s, if he and his sister had had a good time. “Grandma and I did not have a good day today,” he told her. She immediately called me and put me on speakerphone.
It seems my niece wasn’t feeling well and took a lot of our mother’s time, which left her less to lavish upon him. No big deal. It simply wasn’t the block-party atmosphere to which he was accustomed.
My sister and I, entertained by our mother’s less-than-stellar report card, tried to dig a little deeper:
“Did she yell?” I asked, knowing she didn’t raise her voice.
“Could it possibly be that she was a little cranky?” my sister inquired.
She and I continued amusing each other, cracking that he’d had a good, long run of pleasing Mom, probably setting some kind of record. We forgot that the little boy who worships the woman with the soft hands and the glint in her eye whenever she looks at him was still listening.
He knew we were up to no good. “I’m not talking about Grandma with you two anymore,” he said. He shook his little head at us — the new crop of self-absorbed people sandwiched in the middle between him and his saintly grandmother — and walked away from the mother who loves him and his sister more than they can ever imagine.
Special to The Washington Post Monday, May 12, 2008
