Nana
During the years while my daughter was growing up, each time I took a trip without her – as the airplane struggled to lift off, as the engines strained and the wings tilted alarmingly toward earth and the landing gear groaned fatally – I gripped the armrests with white-knuckled fingers, wishing from the bottom of my soul that I had never come on this stupid trip, and anguishing over the thought of how in the world my daughter would manage to grow up without a mother.
While she was small, the thought of her grief was unbearable and made my heart race with terror. When my daughter reached eleven, the thought was still terrible, but I knew I was no longer quite so essential, and I began to hope she would survive. At eighteen, I wondered in my heart of hearts, if she might actually be happier without me. When she was twenty-one, I stopped gripping so hard – though not altogether.
When you first become a mother, your child becomes the center of your gaze. This is biology at work, survival strategy: human babies need more care than any others on the planet. So this is how you start out together; her helplessly dependent, you fiercely protective. For years, as she is growing up, you are wholly responsible for everything, and whatever goes wrong is your fault: the time she got that terrible infection and had to go to the hospital, the time you were late and the non-English speaking babysitter walked out and left your three-year-old alone in the house, the time in seventh grade with those awful girls; the time the horse kicked her. To say nothing of the times when you were mean instead of kind. All these things would not have happened, as you well know, if you been a better mother. You should have prevented them. They will still wake you up, years later, with a dark stab of guilt: there are things for which you will never forgive yourself. Because long afterward (forever, in fact) you will continue to carry your child as you did in the months before her birth. She is still there, just under your beating heart, a constant beloved presence, burden, and delight.
It’s a deep connection, between mother and daughter. So when all my friends told me that being a grandmother was “the best,” I wondered. What could be better than this? My friends should their heads. “Whatever you expect, it will be better.” Everyone loves being a grandmother. What is it about this job that’s so great?
I was curious and eager to find out for myself, but this is a job you can’t apply for. Whether you get it or not is entirely dependent on someone else. Your qualifications have no bearing here.
My daughter is my only child and that makes me think of the old adage, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” If you have only one child, this is just what you’ve done, both literally and metaphorically. This is where all your maternal energy and intensity is focused, and it’s where all your biological information is stored: this basket matters deeply.
Two years ago, my daughter (also Roxana) was married and I began turning into an old adage myself, wondering when she was going to have a baby. Isn’t this what old women do – aren’t they always asking when younger ones are going to have babies?
I didn’t feel particularly old, but I suddenly understood why they do it. As a mother, you too are part of the biological clock; its steady tick reverberates within your consciousness as well. My friends and I ask this question all the time about each other’s daughters: “When is she going to have a baby?” It’s a question we can say out loud, unlike the one that precedes it: “When is she going to get married?” Those questions are taken from the same text. We’re asking if our children will enter into the dance of the future, if they’ll take those opening steps that lead to the next generation.
This too is biology, ingeniously at work through the emotions; these questions are intensely important, and when we hear about a wedding or a baby, delight fills us. This sudden upswelling of happiness has something to do, of course, with the particular love that you feel for a particular child, and also with something larger, more encompassing – the long steady beat of life.
One evening last summer, my husband, Tony and I were about to go out to dinner with Roxanna and her husband, Danny. We were all in the living room of their apartment in Greenwich Village, ready to go. My daughter, standing in front of the bookcases, pulled on her sweater, then turned and said she had something to tell us. Her voice was annunciatory and proud. It was the look on her face, really that delivered the message, and the room lit up with joy. Of course they’d had their earlier private moments of joy; we multiplied this by the length of another generation.
That was my first moment of grandmotherhood, I suppose – seeing my daughter so fresh and radiant, making her announcement, her still slim body holding its secret.
During her pregnancy, I watched Roxana become fuller and rounder as she moved toward The Day, taking on the peaceful beauty of women who are literally, full of life. Now everything was focused on The Day. She told me her plans: a midwife, in a hospital. She was taking Lamaze classes in natural childbirth. She was using a doula, who was also her Pilates teacher. What, I wondered was a doula? Explanations didn’t entirely help: it seemed that the doula offered something part spiritual and part physical, but it wasn’t clear to me exactly what.
One day we received an e-mail with a mystifying attachment: the sonogram. This is the baby, we were told; here is her foot, there her head. We could make nothing of these amorphous outlines. It was exciting, but also somewhat unnerving; it seemed to me too intimate for us to see. I felt I shouldn’t know what she looked like now, before she was ready to be seen, while she was still dreaming, while her brain was still forming, while her world was liquid.
But it was extraordinary: she was there. She was real.
And she was a girl.
They’d chosen her name, but wouldn’t tell it. My daughter said, “If you tell people the baby’s after it’s born, they say, ‘Oh, what a great name.’ But if you tell them before, they say, ‘Oh, don’t name her that. We had a dog named that, and she bit everyone.’”
Of course she was right; still, I was dying to know. Sometimes I asked her outright.
“Is it Melchisedic?” I asked – Sarah Crewe’s pet mouse in The Little Princess.
“It might be Melchisedic,” she said laughing.
As the due date approached, Roxana was more and more enormous, the baby so demandingly present that each day the birth seemed imminent. But there were some false starts, and by the date itself Roxana announced that she’d given up hope. She’d decided that pregnancy had become a permanent condition.
The next day she went into labor, very early in the morning. All day I waited near the phone as the hours dragged past. Danny called periodically. The doula was there, I was told. The mysterious doula! What was she doing? She was making tea, buying groceries. She was coaching my daughter’s labor: then I began to understand. Midwives encourage you to spend most of your labor at home, so now the presence of the doula, with her deep intimate understanding of the body, made sense. She stayed all day. I spoke to my daughter once or twice, but she was in a removed and distant state. She was being taken over by the life of the body. She herself, her own consciousness, was being submerged in it, in this mysterious force, with its violent paroxysms, its urgency, its own interior logic. She was deep in the center of the current, too far out for us to reach, and she was headed for the falls. All of us were helpless on the banks, watching. All during the pregnancy we’d talked about the birth, every aspect of it, the thing we didn’t mention was that birth is perilous. It’s very close to death. The two things move terrifyingly close to each other, like two huge planets. Their conjunction is unthinkable.
That evening she was still in labor. She’d been in to see the midwife, who sent her back home. As I got into bed that night, I was suddenly sick with fear, terrified by all the things that could go wrong. Roxana had told me one day about how the baby’s head must turn and twist and bow and straighten during the birth. I hadn’t wanted to listen, to visualize it – the chances of something going wrong seemed greater if I dwelt upon it. Now the risks seemed too immense, too dangerous to consider. And I was helpless, I could do nothing to protect her. All I could do was whiten my knuckles and grip, afraid again for her, but this fear was different: it had nothing to do with me. It was only her. My daughter was struggling in this wild current; it was she who was braving those rapids, alone in the frail craft of her own body.
The following day she was still in labor, but now in the hospital. I sat waiting by the phone, biting my nails and jumping at every sound. Danny called every few hours. In the afternoon, the phone rang.
“Hello?” I said breathlessly.
“Hello, Grandma,” Danny said.
“Oh,” I said. I was stunned. A stillness spread out around me. My eyes filled. I couldn’t think of the next thing to say.
“She’s here?” I asked stupidly.
“She’s here,” he said, “come and see her.”
My husband was due home shortly, and we were meant to be at a black-tie dinner at the opera in an hour.
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I said.
We arrived in our evening clothes.
They were still in the delivery room, which held a bed, a chair, and a high padded table. It hadn’t been cleaned up and was still unkempt, echoing urgency. The bed was pulled out from the wall; the sheets were tumbled. On the floor was a smear of blood. My daughter was in a hospital gown; a transparent oxygen tube was taped to her nose; there was an IV stand by the bed: frightening reminders of the passage she’d just made. I didn’t want to look at them, but my daughter was smiling – beaming, in fact – and there was something else to look at. There was the baby, wrapped like a loaf of bread, in a striped tea towel.
She’d arrived.
She was strange, glowing brick-red from the compression of the birth canal, from her passage from the other world. She was full of blood; she was weighty, over eight pounds, and gravid with life.
Her hair was thick and black, thatchy ad damp. Her cheeks were full and pink and her eyes – oh her eyes. They were open and liquid, and indescribable color, neither blues nor brown – the color of new. Her gaze was mysterious and calm. She had never seen anything before this room, these faces. This was the world, where she would now live.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Lucy,” they said.
It was perfect, a jewel of a name.
“And what do you want to be called?” my daughter asked me.
“Nana,” I said. This is not what I called my grandmother, but what we called my mother’s favorite cousin, who was also Roxana. The baby and I each had a new name, as of course did my daughter: she was Mama.
“That’s your Nana,” my daughter said to Lucy, who gazed at us thoughtfully.
The 36 hours of labor were now behind us. The oxygen tube, the IV stand, the bloody smear were all irrelevant. I watched Lucy in the arms of my beautiful daughter, who was now a mother, and also still a daughter, just as I was still a daughter, and a mother, and now a grandmother. This was part of the dance, these were the steps to the future.
Lucy, radiant and glowing, is the future. And she’s mine, in a way, though of course she’s much more my daughter’s. But she’s also mine and I am hers, as my mother is mine and I am hers. We belong to each other, linking past and future. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “We think back through our mothers, if we are women.” It’s our mothers who teach us how to live in the world. And we think forward through our daughters, if we are mothers, and beyond them, through their daughters.
“Would you like to hold her?” my daughter asked – an unthinkably generous offer.
I took Lucy in my arms: she was glowing with warmth. I touched her bare shoulder. It was the color of terra-cotta, and silky, unimaginably smooth; it had never been touched before now. She looked up at me with the preternatural gaze of the newborn: wise, quiet, sibylline. Her mouth was wide and delicate, the line of red lips perfectly distinct. Her black hair stood up wildly, like damp fur. Her nose was brief and curved; her eyelashes long, dark and fine. Her eyebrows were high and faint, the barest of brushstrokes. She was so new. I could hardly bring myself to hold her, she was so important, I could hardly bear the thought of giving her up.
I could see that her arrival – that time in which I was powerless to help my daughter anymore – was the end of one thing and the start of another. From now on it will be my daughter’s turn to grip the armrests. This is actually a relief: I couldn’t bear to go through it all again – the hospital, those mean girls. But here, for all those years of gripping, is my reward: Lucy. She’s my retirement gift, the platinum watch for being a mother.
Here is a baby for whom you don’t have to grip the armrests, whom you can adore without being responsible for everything that goes wrong. You aren’t in charge, so nothing will be your fault. It’s like being told you no longer have to eat vegetables – only dessert – and really only the icing.
This fortunate position – the one you couldn’t apply for – is one you can’t lose either. It’s yours for life: this will always be your daughter’s daughter. These two will always be yours, and you, theirs. I’ll always be Nana. Maybe this is biology at work once more: it seems now that this is just what I’ve always wanted.
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