Nanaville Read online

  Nor bone of my bone,

  Yet somehow miraculously my own.

  Don’t ever forget for a single minute

  You didn’t grow under my heart, but in it.

  It’s different with a grandchild. He hasn’t grown under your heart, but he’s part of your flesh, only secondhand. Your baby’s baby. It seems absurd when the baby is bearded, bass-voiced, big-footed, smarter than you are. And yet there’s something about having this little boy that makes you look at the big picture, turn the telescope around so that you’re suddenly aware of the continuum, not only of your own life but of where you’ve come from and where you’re going.

  And, above all, becoming a grandparent offers a chance to love in a different way, a love without the thorny crown of self-interest. I wish I could say I loved my children that way, but it wouldn’t be true, and it wouldn’t be true of anyone I know, either. There is always that part of you, that shame-making part, that sees everything from toilet training to college honors as a reflection on how well you’ve done your job. The mother who sits in the darkened auditorium mouthing the actor’s lines because she has been running lines with the actor for weeks is not a disinterested party. The curtain call is, in part, her triumph.

  I can tell you that unequivocally because I was that mother. Still am. Some years ago a man who has worked with their father witnessed our three grown children together at a hockey game, laughing and talking and getting along, as they now tend to do. That man wrote the loveliest letter about how terrific it was to witness this. That letter is in the box on my desk where I keep special keepsakes. It might as well have at the top, in red marker: “A+. Good work.”

  The great thing for me about being a grandmother is that no one is grading me in that way. My grandson doesn’t reflect on my performance except that his existence is, in some manner, a reflection of my own. It’s pretty immaterial to me at what age he learns to read, whether he has a good throwing arm or an eye for color and form. I am much more capable of seeing him purely as himself than I ever was with his father, his uncle, or his aunt.

  I’m tempted, writing that, to think reflexively that that is a healthier way to be, to care, to love. But that’s exactly the response I’ve learned not to have to being Nana. No best way. No right answer. What gives me pleasure is that this boy is surrounded by so many different iterations of love, and when I think back on my own family, I realize that was the buoy. It’s like a meal, isn’t it? Your parents are the protein, the chicken and the fish or maybe the tofu. Your aunts and uncles are around the edges, vegetables, salad. We grandparents, if we play it right, are dessert. Not the main course, surely, but something very sweet, which most people really like and want a piece of.

  One day, when this boy was an infant and was being tetchy, I took him from his exhausted parents and muttered into the flower cup of his little ear, “You’re going to the Nanaville Correctional Institution.” Inmate no. 000000001, I called him, and I was the warden. He was incarcerated more than once during his infancy. It was mostly wonderful, for me if not always for him.

  Nanaville has morphed now, from a tiny prison to a small town. Every once in a while we go there, my grandson and I. Population two, I say, although someday soon it will be three, and then maybe four or more.

  My grandchildren will likely come to think of Nanaville as an actual place, the place where they sometimes stay. They will probably still come to sometimes think of it as being taken into custody, as well, being remanded to Nana for a meal, a movie, a trip, a day, or occasionally a week when their parents are willing, or busy, or maybe just want to have a life for a while.

  But I think of Nanaville as a state of mind, a place I wound up inhabiting without ever knowing it was what I wanted, needed, or was working toward. People ask me sometimes how I came by my profession, and one answer lies in a moment when my eighth-grade teacher, Mother Mary Ephrem, looked up from her desk and said to me, “You are a writer.” A declarative statement carries a powerful, almost undeniable sense of conviction.

  “You are a grandmother,” my son said one day in April, and I became something different than I’d ever been before. But becoming a nana is something different even than that, because it is being a grandmother in my own way, figuring out my rightful place in this new territory, with these new people. I am the mayor of Nanaville, and I vow to carry out my duties well.

  THIS IS HOW IT BEGINS

  This is how it always begins: with an exclamation, a phone call, perhaps even the sound from the next room of a thready querulous cry, an inaugural announcement. World, I am born.

  Or a text message.

  LYNN’S WATER BROKE. AT HOSPITAL NOW. STILL VERY EARLY IN PROCESS.

  I am in a hotel room in Baltimore, the morning after speechifying at a girls’ school a few miles away. At 6:00 A.M. I wake to walk, run, or combine the two, depending on what my knees have to say about it, but before I do, I look at my phone, and there is the text from my eldest child, my elder son. He is about to become a father. I am about to become a grandmother. An estimated 360,000 people will enter the planet on this day, and my grandson is just one of them. Still, I feel as though the world has tilted on its axis.

  I happen to have a very low resting heart rate and very low blood pressure. I think I feel both of them go sky-high. Knees or no, I run up to the girls’ school campus where I spoke the night before, and back again. I want to get on an early train. I want to jump in a hired car. I want to go to the hospital. I want to rush into the delivery room. Instead, I take the Acela home, exactly as planned, and then sit at the dining room table with my second child, my younger son, who is about to become an uncle. He even has T-shirts at the ready: I’M THE CRAZY UNCLE EVERYONE WARNED YOU ABOUT, one says, and another says UNCLESAURUS. He is so ready. I am so ready. And yet, when the occasion arrives, not. We sit across from one another with the dumbstruck look of people trapped in the amber of a great moment with nothing to do, like actors backstage in the dark of the wings, waiting to go on. Several hours in, both of our phones buzz, and as though our movements are choreographed we each snatch them up and read.

  BORN VIA EMERGENCY C SECTION. TERRIFYING EXPERIENCE. BUT HE AND LYNN MADE IT. 7 LBS 9 OUNCES. WILL UPDATE AGAIN ONCE I’M WITH LYNN IN RECOVERY.

  This is how it begins. Or maybe this is not the beginning at all. You could say it began when a young man walked into a bar in Beijing and met a young woman or, for the more conventional, the moment when those two people traded vows in the chambers of a judge and then in a field in Pennsylvania. Or when that same young man was born in New York City and the young woman in Beijing. Or, further back still, to his people coming to America from across Europe, to her Han Chinese family. Every baby arrives trailing endless ribbons of DNA, a microcosm of history, nationality, ethnicity, family. Somewhere in this infant is a trace of my mother, my father, the parents of Arthur’s grandfather, the grandparents of my daughter-in-law, people he will never meet or know but who are embedded within him. I remember reading about the discovery of the remains of Richard II of England beneath a parking lot and the confirmation of their authenticity—more than five hundred years after the king’s death—by the mouth swab taken from a Canadian-born cabinetmaker. Scientists figured out that some bones in the Russian countryside were those of the last tsar and his murdered family by analyzing genetic material from Prince Philip, who was not yet born when they were killed. People spit into a tube and a lab somewhere tells them whether they are Slavic or Scottish, Native American or Mexican. Each human is, in some way, a long long story, a saga with a beating heart, and our grandson is no different.

  There’s an entire history in every baby, even before that baby’s own story has truly begun. As he figures out how to focus his eyes, as she manages to roll over, as he crawls and she walks and he talks and she runs, we intuitively feel ourselves watching the progression of existence. Better still, we appreciate it all over again. L
ook at the trees. Taste the applesauce. Kiss Mama. Hug Daddy. Take chances. Fall down and cry and stand and fall again. Feel safe. Each baby is the homunculus, that small human dreamed up by alchemists hundreds of years ago, not only the beginning of his own story but a plotline in a larger one, a branch on an enormous tree. A son. A nephew.

  A grandbaby.

  Of course, when we finally meet Arthur Krovatin for the first time, he is just a bundle in a blanket with a full head of glossy black hair. There is only the promise of things to come: steps, words, school, work, marriage, children of his own. The future. And when I first saw him in the hospital, the day after my elder son’s terrifying experience, I did not really see him himself. This is always the problem, isn’t it, our natural inability to see a child as himself alone, not hung about from the first with similarities, expectations, and assumptions like the familiar ornaments on a Christmas tree. I couldn’t help noticing that Arthur had a good deal of hair, as his father, his mother, his aunt, and his grandmother had had as newborns; I couldn’t help noticing that he looked beautifully Chinese, which was something my own grandfathers would have found astounding and, probably, disconcerting. Because of the speed with which his mother had wound up in surgery, our son had only managed to stand in the doorway while the actual incision and extraction was happening. Because of the speed with which the surgery had been necessary, an obstetrician who had never met my daughter-in-law before did the procedure and, looking at the baby’s father, said quizzically, “This baby looks Asian.”

  “The mother is Chinese,” a nurse said, and the doctor looked over the surgical drape and said, “Oh, hello.”

  “Thank you,” said my daughter-in-law.

  Standing in the hospital room, watching her try to find a comfortable position after abdominal surgery, watching my son crumple their carefully crafted birth plan in his hand (natural birth, no epidural; so much for the best-laid plans), I felt for them. They will never forget this day, just as I will never forget the days on which I gave birth to my children. But it will pale next to the day-to-day of having a child. One of the most resonant moments of my past was when I had the first contraction the second time around. I was immediately overwhelmed with muscle memory and incredulity: why in the world did I decide to go through this again? The answer was simple. It was because the first time it had been such a trip, watching this big-eyed big-headed big-bellied person change by inches, until in what seemed like no time at all he went from a crumpled little vermilion face and terrifying cone head in a birthing room to this tall dark man holding his own newborn son.

  I don’t have precisely that time-lapse experience with our grandson now because, although we see him often, we don’t see him every day. I miss some of the synapses, which means I am always rediscovering him. This gives your grandchildren a certain allure, a kind of mystery that your children seldom have. From time to time I will say, “I wonder what Arthur is doing.” Since I was with them all the time, I rarely wondered what my own three were doing, unless there was a loud crash from upstairs. Occasionally when they were at college I would idly wonder what they were doing, but then my mind would take a sharp left turn into some safer cul-de-sac of contemplation, like whether there was yogurt for breakfast or the recycling was due to be picked up in the morning.

  Mothers know the day-to-day; nanas wonder between times of togetherness. It’s one difference, but there are many. I have no text message, no date or time to mark the moment I truly became Nana. I can’t remember what day it was, only how it happened:

  I am changing his diaper, he is kicking and complaining, his exhausted father has gone to the kitchen for a glass of water, his exhausted mother is prone on the couch. He weighs little more than a large sack of flour and yet he has laid waste to the living room: swaddles on the chair, a nursing pillow on the sofa, a car seat, a stroller. No one cares about order, he is our order, we revolve around him. And as I try to get in the creases of his thighs with a wipe, I look at his, let’s be honest, largely formless face and unfocused eyes and fall in love with him. Look at him and think, well, that’s taken care of, I will do anything for you as long as we both shall live, world without end, amen.

  I can’t remember when exactly I had that moment with my own children. I suspect it was different: that final exhausted terrible satisfying push, and then the feeling of vast responsibility. At some point, in our big brass bed, a few days removed from the hospital, I looked down at our first, the father of this first grandchild, and I felt a frisson like falling. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to send us home with a semi-cooked human? I thought. My son says it’s called the fourth trimester, a term that must be new, because God knows I read everything when I was pregnant and postpartum and never heard it. But it’s apt, that feeling that maybe this person could have used a few more hours in the oven, so to speak. You watch on the giraffe cam, and that spindly-legged baby has a couple of hours to struggle with competence, and then it’s on its feet. Humans are the animals whose newborns take the longest to get it together. Maybe that explains the love; it’s hard to imagine not cleaving to a being so conspicuously needy. And not being afraid that you’re somehow going to break it, too. I am the eldest of five, and Pop is the eldest of six; clearly we are two people who might have been assumed to know what it takes to care for an infant. But, oh, the responsibility of your own is indescribable until it falls on you like a house.

  I feel a sense of great responsibility with Arthur, too, but being an old hand has its rewards. When he was very little and not on an easy footing with sleep, he would go seriously sideways in the late afternoons. “He’s inconsolable,” his grandfather said, inconsolable himself. It was true. Existential angst stripped down to its essence. The air, the sunlight, the feeling of cotton on skin, the feeling of moving through space, the effort of holding a head on a neck, a neck on the shoulders: it all seems terrifying when you not only have never done it but when you’re so absent any other thoughts or distractions that it is what fills your mind. But I knew that this would pass. I knew that a wailing infant is nothing compared to an unhappy teenager. Also that sometimes if you put babies belly down on top of the dryer while it’s running they will soothe. When he was inconsolable, I wanted to take Arthur to the basement.

  In other words, I wanted to take hold, to act, to do something.

  But as a grandmother and not the mother, I have to temper that. That day awaiting news at the dining table, both Christopher and I wanted to do something, but we did not. My daughter-in-law had not asked me to join her in the birthing room, and I have to admit that I was a little disappointed, reading all those stories about women who stood at the foot of the bed while a grandchild emerged, lovely and yucky. Like most decisions my daughter-in-law has made since I have known her, this one was absolutely correct. I can imagine myself in the hospital that day. I have a bit of a sideline in practicing medicine without a license or, some people might argue, not much of a clue, and my inclination would have been to ask too many questions, make a fuss, all while someone else was actually having contractions. Not a good look, or a good benchmark for the future. “Begin as you mean to go on,” a British preacher once said many many years ago, and, boy, is that good advice on delicate human relations.

  But it can all go wrong for my generation of what have come to be called helicopter parents, who have not only overseen but have engineered and interfered in the lives of their children. Those impulses are powerful, even for those of us who like to believe we have not yielded to them.

  (I qualify this assessment of my own mothering in the face of one afternoon when I gave a speech that, for some reason, all three of my children were attending. I mentioned in passing that I knocked off my writing day when they were young an hour before I went to pick them up at school, so that I could successfully morph from writer to single-minded mother. The look of incredulity on all three of their faces as I said this made manifest that the morphing h
ad been unsuccessful.)

  What’s expected of new parents is rather clear, and clearly task-based, at least at first. But it’s less clear for grandparents. The first time I saw Arthur, in that hospital room, I reached for him reflexively and then stopped. “Can I pick him up?” I asked my daughter-in-law, testing the waters. “Of course,” she said, signaling right at the start where I stood. I cannot emphasize that more strongly for those of you in this situation. The matter-of-fact tone of voice, the sense that I was obviously entitled—our first grandchild’s mother was sending a message of clear permission. It made all the difference. It will make all the difference. Whether grandparents of a toddler or teenager, we know we are part of the program.

  This goes both ways, of course. I’d like to think that I sent a message that day, too, that I would be careful and thoughtful, neither one of which I’m necessarily suited for by nature. Thank God that Christopher and I were together that afternoon at the dining table, or else I might have run the ten blocks south to the hospital and insinuated myself where I was not needed or wanted. Lesson one of being a grandmother: do not do that. Perhaps we make the mistake, having been handed an inchoate package of undifferentiated humanity with an umbilical stub once upon a time ourselves, that this will be just like that. It’s not. Arthur is not exactly my job but a good deal more than a hobby. I suppose now being his nana is my avocation.

  Someone else nurses the baby. Someone else decides whether he will be rocked to sleep or allowed to cry it out, whether he will be permitted his thumb or switched to a pacifier, whether he will be circumcised and weaned and shod. Someone else will choose his name, and if you don’t like it you’d damn well better arrange your face as though you do, and soon enough you will discover that since it’s his name you like it just fine, you love it, even.