In the past year and a half, three of my close friends welcomed their first grandchild, and five others, including myself, had their second or more. Although we were told, “Just wait, it’s the best,” by our friends who had already had grandchildren, we could not really imagine the immediate and sometimes frightening love we feel, whether for the first time, or the fifth, and the pride and delight we take in observing and nurturing our grandchildren.
Compounding this pleasure is watching our own children step into their parenting roles and take on a whole new persona. Is this a new phenomenon in our generation (we are all in our 60s and 70s), or did this connection between grandparents and grandchildren always exist, perhaps with less demonstrative expression? That certainly was not my experience.
My maternal grandmother, Flo, was small — barely 5 feet — yet for many years of my young life she was the biggest fear I harbored. She wore her hair close-cropped and, as a chain smoker, had a hoarse voice, and often spoke with a cigarette dangling from her mouth.
One of my earliest recollections of us comes from when I was 4. My mother and father were taking a boat to Florida and were leaving me in my grandparents’ care in Parkchester, the Bronx, where they lived. I can remember my mom, both arms laden with brown paper grocery bags, stooping for just a moment to give me one quick kiss goodbye. The door, with a peephole and three locks, so different from our always-open home in the country, closed. My mother was gone and I was left.
In the mornings that followed I stood in the bathroom, trying not to cry. Trying to choke back tears would only make them flow more, and my grandmother was always quick to notice. Far from being softened by my distress, she would respond with anger and sarcasm, yelling that I had nothing to be crying about. I sobbed openly with joy and relief when 11 days later my mother walked back in the door.
When I was 8 and my mother was about to have my youngest sister, my grandmother came to watch us. On the morning my mother went into labor and I knew she would be leaving us in her care, I walked out in the backyard and fainted. I remember my father gathering me in his arms and letting me ride to the hospital with them, momentarily alleviating my distress.
My grandparents came for a visit in the summer of my 10th year. Shortly after they arrived, my grandfather suffered a stroke, and when the ambulance took him to the hospital it was the last time we children were to see him. A year later, my grandmother left her apartment in New York and came to live with us. She moved into the yellow bedroom that I had shared with my two sisters, we moved to the blue bedroom, and my three brothers took up residence in our semi-finished basement.
I am certain my grandmother never hit me, but there was something in her tone and demeanor that made me fear and dislike her. It made little difference when, at the age of 14, I drew myself to my full height and found myself taller than she was. She continued to seem large and formidable to me.
For the remaining years that I was in school, my grandmother and I had our ups and downs. She was forever complaining to my mother that I had given her “that look,” which, of course, I denied any knowledge of. Sometimes she would cry and sometimes I would, as I was often punished for my reported behavior. My mother was exasperated that we couldn’t get along, but once confided that my grandmother “could dish it out, but couldn’t take it.”
Although my grandmother treated all of us with much the same sternness, four of my siblings managed to stay on reasonably safe terms with her. My youngest sister, however, suffered the same fears and tensions that I did, except that with her, my grandmother complained of “that tone.”
One night in the spring of my senior year in high school, we all came together in a minor mutiny. We were having dinner, and my grandmother was picking on my sister, who was 11, and she began to cry. My parents were away, and I, upset and empathetic, began to cry too. My grandmother mimicked me, and I ran to my oldest brother, who was staying next door at that time. He came over, gathered us up, and we escaped to his house for the night. Although the five of us returned the next day, my grandmother refused to sit at the dinner table with us, and for the rest of my parents’ vacation ate at the counter, her back held stiffly to all of us.
I never believed that my grandmother was any fonder of me than I was of her, but when I went to college and was home much less, we came to a kind of understanding. I would appear to be pleased to see her, and she would do the same. In a few rare instances she would do something to make me wonder if she didn’t care for me a little, such as the time she made me banana bread, my favorite, to take back to college. And sometimes I would ask my mother on our weekly phone call how she was doing and feel some small stirring of genuine interest. Away from her and older, I began to forgive her a little for her meanness and lack of laughter.
In the spring of my first year out of college, when I was teaching, we planned a family gathering in Florida, where my father’s parents lived. My grandmother was staying home alone, but a neighbor’s daughter was going to look in on her. The night my parents arrived, our family doctor called to say that my grandmother had had a heart attack and was in critical condition. Our neighbor had found her on the floor in the bathroom. I booked my mother a flight home the next morning. The rest of us, who had driven down, were to stay and wait for further word.
Two days later, I drove north. I arrived late on Sunday afternoon, and Mom and I went to the hospital. My final recollection of her is from that night. I guess I had always known in my head how small my grandmother was, but I had never felt it so keenly until I saw her in that hospital bed. She looked so very little under the white sheets — almost like a young child. She had a tube taped in her mouth, and was attached to several machines, but when I came next to the bed, she opened her eyes and moved her hand toward mine. She began to struggle to speak to me, but the tube prevented her and she tried to pull it out. We urged her not to try to talk, but she continued to struggle with tears rolling down from the outer corners of her eyes. A nurse ushered us out.
When I was told I had a call on the front office phone at school the next morning, I knew my grandmother was dead. She was 69 and I was 22. Our long altercation was over.
In the years that followed, I would sometimes wonder if it had to be the way it was between us. As I grew older, I came to know more about her life. She had lost many of her family members to illness, and her husband had abandoned her six months after her only child, my mother, was born. She struggled to raise a child alone and she worked as a bookkeeper in the city to support them.
When my mom was 10, my grandmother married a widower with four daughters who did not make her life easy. When they were adults, they rarely welcomed her to visit or stay with them, so even though we had the least room, she came to live with us. I knew all of these things, but I rarely thought much about how my grandmother felt, mostly unwanted and unloved. I wonder if I could have been helped to understand more.
I have often thought of my grandmother with sadness. Sadness that she never seemed to enjoy being alive, to take pleasure in watching us grow, to give and receive the love and connection she surely must have wanted. It is hard to grow old, to be dependent, to feel useless and in the way.
It is hard for a young child to understand these things; a child responds to what she feels, and I felt only my grandmother’s bitterness and anger. If she had lived longer, perhaps I would have learned more how to try to bridge our divide.
My friends and I have come to know firsthand the sense of safety and comfort that grandchildren feel when they are so celebrated, accepted, and loved. A gift perhaps like none other. My grandmother and I missed something important, but I no longer feel, as I once did, that my grandmother need bear all the blame.
Randi Dickson, who was born in the Bronx and has lived on the East End since she was 6 months old, taught English and writing in the East Hampton Middle and High Schools for 20 years. She is the author of “In the Very Air We Breathed,” a Holocaust memoir.