Grandmother

My mother’s mother died before she was two. My father’s mother died when he was forty-six. I am always wistful and a bit envious when I hear women tell me they have four generations of thriving women. I wonder at times how it would have been to have had a grandmother in my twenties or thirties or forties or…. if I would have been receptive? or if my unreceptivity would not have happened if there had been grandmother energy in my life.

My father allowed his mother to create great strife in his marriage. Raised without a father (he died when my father was 14) he had a very close relationship with his mother. I am reading about the Oedipal Victor and wondering if that is something my father may have experienced? When I have thought about family dynamics before – I always pondered the lack of parenting that my parents received and how once they met, they parented each other to the exclusion of many other relationships – including their children.

My son is probably a long way from making me a grandma, nana, meemaw and all those other terms of endearment. I feel a long way from the mothering experience where my life is all about babies and toddlers and development. Yet there is this deep maternal type stirring in my heart as I interact with this almost five month old baby. He taps into some deep universal love that makes me weak in my knees. It isn’t because he has cancer. It isn’t because I was there at this first breath. There is something else that is awakening in me.

For several years now, I have been working on creating my internal mother and recently have felt her fully developed and present in my life. The next step seems to be a mending of another layer of that mothering energy – the connection between a mother and her daughter and her child – what I used to refer to as mothering the mother – but now with the added twist of the baby.

Some how this feels rambling and inelegant – but I wanted to capture the experience when it is still fresh. Yesterday, once again, as I held this precious boy child in my arms, I received the name of grandmother. It seems to fit and I accept it as a blessing and an honor.