A Gift from Grown Sons

On the Danube, 1985
On the Danube, 1985

My sons are gifted givers of love.  To their wives.  To their sons. To us.  The richness of this awareness is indescribable.

To watch a man, a son of yours, arrive home from work, lift his infant son and greet him with such easy confidence and comfort and tenderness, help his toddler handle his anger, joke with his wife, ask with deep concern “how is Dad feeling?” well – you can’t imagine.  If you’re lucky, maybe you can.

To watch his brother conduct serious conversations with his one year old, read to him, laugh with him, unabashedly speak of his love for his wife and child and offer small acts of kindness to us – and to so many others – well – you can’t imagine.  If you’re lucky, maybe you can.

I know many families share in these blessings.  But I’m writing it now because I woke up this morning thinking this, feeling so full of gratitude you can’t imagine.  If you’re lucky, maybe you can.

Being a Grandmother, a Mother, a Daughter, and Sad

 

These two are both dads now.
These two are both dads now.

Once a year I pay special honor to my parents.  In a  service on Yom Kippur called Yizkor, I say a prayer to their memory and pledge to do something to remember them:  to donate charity for their sake.

This year, even more than usual, I wept as I prayed, and afterward. I have three grandsons now, one of whom shares my father’s name, and my parents don’t know it.  They aren’t here to enjoy these lovely boys, or to help me handle the issues that emerge when one’s children have children.

Our boys and their wives are stunning parents (and wonderful to us) and our grandsons are, of course, perfect; that’s not the issue.  It is, rather, that I know now some of what they must have felt and I would be so grateful if I could tell them what I have learned about their own grace as grandparents, and ask them for advice on the moments that grab the heart, or maybe even, as in every family, for a moment, break it.

For My Friends with Young Children, or My Annual Post-Thanksgiving Meditation

Farm tight
Here's the thing.  My children live far away, one six hours to the west and the other, with his fiance, six hours to the east.  We've been together for Thanksgiving week – all of us – hanging out, cooking, touring around DC, running errands and just being — and being thankful.  It's always special when the whole family is together; it seemed so natural when the boys were little and now it's a treat.  I cooked a million meals with them banging around in the kitchen.  Now it's a precious thing when I make turkey meatloaf with my younger son.  I watch him, an accomplished cook, chop like a pro, listen as he reassures me that this new thing will taste great, laugh with him, trade recipes.  I rode around in cars, subways, buses with them all the time, and, along with their dad, dragged them into a million stores from grocery to toys to clothing to antiques.  Now it's the pleasure of serious shopping at Ikea with my older son and his fiance, getting to be around while they choose a sofa.  Seeing what a fine woman she is, watching them seamlessly making decisions together, measuring, taking photos, laughing, planning.  It feels great to see them launching themselves so well together and makes it OK that much of their life is lived far from us.  That's how it is.

I know though, that when kids are little, schlepping them in and out of car seats and strollers, keeping them occupied while you try to cook, keeping little hands out of the Ikea toy bins, mediating murderous sibling battles, keeping a home running while keeping kids in line – it's a lot.  I remember.  It doesn't matter whether you work outside your home or stay home with your family; either way there's so much to handle.  I kept thinking about that as I wandered around Washington with these adults who are also, forever, my children, reminding myself how long it would be before we would all do it together again.  Reminding myself that it's a credit to us that our kids are self-sufficient, productive and wonderfully decent, funny, loving men — and how blessed we are that they chose to come to us for the holiday — and that it's right, and good, that they have their own lives and homes and futures.

But though that's true, I wanted to tell you about this because it goes so fast.  All the cliches are true.  Turn around and they're grown.  That doesn't mean it isn't hard to keep things going now, it just means that those days will be gone, sooner than you think.

My youngest is approaching 30.  My oldest is getting married.  They have money market accounts and careers and fiances and plans and even some gray hairs.  They teach me more than I teach them (although that was always true.)  They are, like those of you reading this, grown ups, and my husband and I have our own rich and happy life together.  But it still can be, for those few moments of farewell at the end of each visit, desperately painful, on both sides.

As we drove to the airport last night, I (sort of) joked that I had to hook my iPod up to the car radio so that, when I was sad after leaving them off, I could blast Bruce, or Great Big Sea to make me feel a little better.  When we arrived at the departure entrance, I got out of the car to help unload the bags.  My son the chef was still in the front seat of the car. I was worried that a cop would throw me out of the parking place so I went toward the door to ask what he was doing.  He turned around.  "You iPod's all hooked up" he said, and reached out to give me a hug goodbye.

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY: ROBERT FROST, YEAR’S END, AND FAMILIES

Robert_frost_4 Nothing ever stays still, does it?  I remember a Robert Frost poem we read in high school – Nothing Gold Can Stay:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower,

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

As this year draws to a close, I’m so aware of the rocky ride between joy and pain that life brings us.  Children succeed and are happy; suffer, argue, question and, as adults, make huge decisions whose consequences are no longer our business.  Others we love face illness, work stresses and moments of spiritual angst.  And we ourselves struggle. With our own pain.  With the knowledge that the best times — the gold — never last and must be cherished for the time we have them.  And with the realization that the job of parent includes a form of built-in obsolescence, that rescuing, even those we love, is not always a gift to those we try to help.

I’m still learning how to be the mother of grown men.  They have been and continue to be a joy to me but  the best gift I can give them, struggle to give them, is to be available but never more than that.  I’ve done pretty well, but in moments when I worry – health issues, love issues, work issues, life-changing issues – I have to hold my breath and hope.  To remember that over the years we’ve provided one another with many moments of "something gold" and that now, as their parents have, they must pass through their own moments of sublime and ridiculous, gold and dross. 

There’s an old saying that "you’re never happier than your least happy child."  I struggle not to allow that to be true.  The best gift I can give our boys – and for that matter my husband as well – is to separate, to trust them in their journeys and crises, joys and troubles.  To love them, listen to them, and respect them enough to allow them to live their own golden moments and mourn their loss – hopefully with enough experience over the years to understand that even as a moment of joy departs, another is forming just around the bend.