Now That YOU'RE the Grandparent…

I would have more in common with her now. I would sit at her kitchen table and drink my tea and eat the Pepperidge Farm Oatmeal-Raisin cookies she always bought for me and not have one eye on the clock and one foot out the door. I would listen to her stories and take her advice and not be so quick to say, "But things are different, now." "But I'm not you." "But you don't understand.”

She understood.

When she was 87 and failing, I asked her one day, "What am I going to do without you?" It was a question I meant but it was also intended to flatter my mother-in-law, a different way of saying I care about you and I'm going to miss you.”  In fact, though, I believed I had learned everything she could teach me and that I would be sad but okay without her. That I would sail through the whole rest of my life on the winds of her wisdom.

Her wisdom lives in me even now, a decade after her death. It lifts me up on good days and anchors me on bad days. I know what she would do and say about almost everything. But this knowing doesn't make me miss her less.

It makes me miss her more.

We would be pals today, best friends strolling through Macy’s in the children's department, picking out tiny pants and sweaters, big-girl dresses and tights, holding them up, laughing, asking each other, "What do you think?”

We would be in the toy department checking out games, at the bookstore buying picture books, and at the library choosing DVDs.

In the time warp of my mind, she would be in search of things for her grandchildren, and I would be in search of things for mine.

We would be trading stories, too.

"He ate all of his oatmeal and all of his strained carrots. And then I bathed him. And now he is sleeping like the angel he is," she would be saying about my son, Rob — now grown and married with a child of his own.

And I would hear what I didn't hear when I was young. I would hear all the love behind the words — the love and pride and gratitude and wonder. And I would recognize these things because I know them now. Because they are in my voice whenever I talk about Lucy or Adam or Charlotte or Megan. 

Because I am a grandmother, too.

We would be closer, because I understand, the way I didn't, the way I couldn't before I was a grandmother, that my children were my mother-in-law's joy. That they were never, ever burdens. And that every time I knocked on her door or called on the phone and asked, "Can you watch them?" "Will you come over?" "Can Lauren spend the night?" my request was a gift.

"Sure, come now," she'd say. Or "I'll be right there." Or "Of course Lauren can spend the night.” 

I always knew she loved them. I just didn't know how much.

I used to wish I knew her when she was young. I used to listen to her stories and picture her life in Glasgow. I gave images to her words, envisioned blond curly hair, big blue eyes, a 5-year-old perched on her father's lap, her father's favorite child until World War I took him away.

I imagined her a few years older, high-stepping it to the butcher shop, "Don't dawdle, Peggy," eyes down, coins in hand, a serious child hurrying home to help her mother shuck peas and peel potatoes. I conjured up her school on top of a hill and her little church with a big steeple and choir practice once a week on Tuesday nights and her riding the trolley home with Ian, the minister's son. 

When she was 15, she came to America and left her friends and Ian behind. "I wish I had been there," I told her. I wished I could have known the young girl she had been.

Now I wish I could have known for longer the old woman she became.

She loved my children and she loved me. I always knew this. But not in the way I know now.