Trail's End Week 10 2021

A day late. It was challenging to stay inside and write my post yesterday morning. The morning so beautiful with crocuses and tulips beginning to carpet the less frozen ground. Instead, we did something normal. We went to brunch.

This past week my Covid granddaughter had a new experience at thirteen months old ~ she met another child. My son and his wife rented a beach side home in Kennebunkport, Maine for the week of spring break and had a good high school friend and his wife join them with their son who is just six weeks younger than Tala. Tala has seen other children; from across the street in her stroller, over FaceTime, in a book that features babies and emotions. But, she has never been close enough to actually interact with another child. Both sets of parents, excited to bring their families together, recorded the first interactions.

I have now watched that recording maybe ten times or more. It is so rich with grandmother feelings that I am also experiencing for the first time since Tala was born. I of course adore and am in love with my granddaughter. That is what everyone told me would happen and it turns out to be true. But like so many things about parenting, grandparenting is similar in that what people told you only scratches the surface of the kinds of emotions that little creature can bring out in you. It is hard to describe the tenderness that my heart felt when I watched that little girl be EXACTLY like her father in her first social peer interaction of her young life. Tears welled as my mind rushed through the many memories of my own little thirteen month old and the dismay he expressed at negotiating his own introverted boundaries in merging his experience with that of another his size. She looks just like him in that video; so much so that I had to keep reminding myself every few seconds that it was not Kiel turning away from a new friend and focusing on the ceiling fan, it was Tala.

Everything about the worries a mother has regarding her child's vulnerability in the world was encapsulated in the watching of that video. Everything I know that can happen going forward, that did happen to my own child, rushed through my mind in the way I imagine people experience that feeling of "my whole life flashed before me...". That two minute video grabbed my heart unawares and took me on a journey of love and tenderness and grief. I expected to see my own child in my grandchild: I expected to see him in her features. I was completely caught off guard to SEE HIM again.

So that is one thing that I hadn't expected in grandparenthood, but here is the other. I hadn't expected the range and depth of feeling I have watching my own child be a parent himself. Part of what affected me so deeply in that video was my son and his high school best friend being delighted and protective in facilitating these first experiences for their own children. Kiel and Gahl, who hung out at our house after school so many times I cannot remember (two smart ass, snarky teenagers who playfully and endlessly teased me, sometimes a little too hard, in the offhand and careless way young people can treat adults they are comfortable with) are now tender and gentle fathers and husbands whose worlds revolve around their own families.

Love and tenderness and grief. I am blessed with having these intense feelings that momentarily daze me as I watch that video over and over. Sometimes with the sound turned up so I can hear my son in his fathering; sometimes with the sound turned off so I can watch my granddaughter's experience with no distraction. I am drawn to the brilliance of those feelings as they remind me of the rich life I have had raising my own two children into their own adulthood, and the knowledge of the swiftness with which my granddaughter will move through her own life, becoming herself, while taking a piece of her father to be her own. Perhaps taking a piece of her grandmother along with her as well.