Grandma,….do you think that,…

It never ceases to amaze me the way the mind of a child works.

This week end as the girls and I drove to the store to pick up some ‘egg-coloring’ kits so we could spend the afternoon going through a dry-run of decorating Easter eggs,..we drove over a bridge where below us were train cars filled with coal. “I asked for some of that for Christmas, and didnt get any” Abigail said.

“What?” I asked

“I asked for some of that, you know, coal….for Christmas and all I got was presents” She repeated in a disappointed tone. Then she added “Grandma, the story says that bad boys and girls get coal, and good ones get presents, so does that mean if you are good and you ASK for coal, you can’t get it?”

I smiled and told her “Well if you are good, you would think that you could get whatever you asked for, right? So I am not sure why that didnt work”. And we left it at that.

We went to the store knocked ourselves out getting sparkles and decals and grass and baskets and any other little thing we could use to decorate an egg.

On the way back home out of the blue Abigail said to me, “Grandma,…do you think it would be okay to be bad intentionally this year,… so that I could get coal for Christmas?”

I just love the way a child’s mind works,…and I assured her that I would get her some coal if she was GOOD.

And baby makes “4″

Sometimes it seems so surreal to stop and seriously look at my life,  to acknowledge that “I” am a grandmother…an honest to goodness, in the flesh, grandmother of “4″ now.  Perhaps it has something to do with having raised the twins for 6 years,..and because I still play  a very big part in their day-to-day lives even though they live with their mom now, my ‘grandmotherly experience’,..just didn’t have a ‘grandmotherly’ feel to it yet.

I thought that when my son and his wife had their baby “that” would be when it would happen, when I would start to feel like a “real grandmother”. But no,..three years into that experience, I still feel no different. And now there is yet another precious grandchild to add to my list of treasures and I STILL just cant seem to experience this “feeling”  I have been expecting to show up with the grandparenting experience.

So I decided it was time to try and figure out WHAT exactly it was I was waiting for!

Was it that I was waiting to feel “Old”?  Because I don’t. I don’t feel like a grandmother.

Was it that I was waiting to feel “Liberated”? Because I don’t. I can’t let go of the responsibility and the privilege I feel to be vigilant, to ‘oversee’, to ‘keep a watchful eye’, on my family tucked safely under my wings.

Was it that I was waiting to feel “Stability”? Because I don’t. I was thinking when I got to this point I would have a life that represented some kind of ’security’, that there would be certain things like finances and such, that would be a ‘done deal’,..all in place. No such luck….here I am, experiencing the same fears and apprehension everyone else does, regardless of age, that is trying to ‘make it’ in this world.

Talking to myself I finally realized -  what I am waiting for will never show up. It can’t exist in this present era. Things have evolved, times have changed, I am not my grandparents and I will never experience grandparenting in the same way that they did. What I was waiting for, thinking would ’show up’,…won’t.  The feeling was misplaced, it was a lingering thought from another dimension of time that is long past.

Myself, and 43 million plus boomer grandparents are pioneering a whole new standard for grandparenting that is as unique as the grandparent themselves. There are no absolutes, nothing is written in stone. We have the freedom to not be shackled to old perceptions and stereotypes.

There is a new feeling now that has replaced “the feeling” I was waiting for, it’s the feeling TO BE FREE to be the grandparent I am.  *Deep breath* And it feels good.