Just Call Me Grandma
When I had my first child, my normally very reticent mother ran down the hospital corridor with m clothes in her hand yelling, “That’s my daughter” when they wheeled me into the delivery room.
I was in labor for days, right before Christmas, walking around department stores with Braxton-Hicks contractions every few minutes, playing board games with my husband for hours, waiting to somehow get to when the pains were steady, countable and strong.
Don’t you love to tell your delivery stories? Everyone loves to tell baby delivery stories and they are the greatest when they’re yours because they always seem so interesting. Which says something about how often anything really interesting and unusual happens to most of us. Having a baby is just really the final frontier because its so uncontrollable. Women who wax their floors weekly and scrub their bathrooms daily still cannot organize or plan when their babies are going to come.
The most amazing advice I ever heard was from Vicki Curtis down at Central Bank who told me that you should always get pregnant in September because you’d look cute at Christmas and be feeling good past your first trimester, you’d only have to buy winter maternity clothes and you wouldn’t have to go through August heat twice your normal size. I think this information, more than any of her significant other achievements, has made me think over the years that she’s smarter than me.
I have always been somewhere between the “Ohmygosh, honey, we’re pregnant” school and the “Is there another spirit waiting to come down?” school of parenthood planning. I remember with great relief the moment during my last pregnancy when I had the feeling that I’d definitely proven myself in the “willing to go forth and multiply” column of things to check off on the way to heaven.
I bring this all up because I’m going to be a grandma in the next few days! I have to qualify this by saying that I’ve been a practice grandma to three step-grandkids almost since Clay and I got married. But, frankly, I’ve been a slow learner. Being a step-parent has its own set of things to figure out—as anyone who’s been there can tell you. I love my step-kids and think they’re adorable in every way but, in true Mormon fashion, they are older than my kids.
But this is SO EXCITING.
Not that I’m all that big on biology—I barely got a D in it to get out of high school—but THIS-it’s like I’m expecting my grandma’s nose and my dad’s eyes and my mother’s too big calves to come back to life. I just can’t believe this little life is coming to us that will be a walking encyclopedia of all that’s gone before us in our family.
It’s always been fascinating to me to see how much comes down to us from generation to generation. I have a letter from my great-great-grandfather about going from New York to a new country, Texas, to start a new life. On the way, his ticket and clothes were stolen but the captain let him sleep on the deck of the boat in the rain as he went down the Mississippi. He thought a man could be as successful in Texas as anywhere in the world. And money has always been a great motivator for us.
My family would have never made hearty Mormon pioneers because they were too practical—and not overwhelmingly religious. My great-grandmother swept the missionaries off her porch in Austin, Texas, because she knew that the church stole young girls in England and carried them across the ocean to be married to hoary Mormon patriarchs in Salk Lake.
I can see that same desire to move to “new country” in my dad, myself and my own kids. I hear myself when I read those old letters, same humor, same reverence for the same values. Respectful, serious yet more than slightly disorganized.
So, I’ve been calling daily, waiting for labor to start. I told Clay that I hope he’s ready to start living alone because I plan to be traveling grandma.
If I would have known being a grandparent was this exciting I would have tied my kids to the railroad tracks and not let them up until they agreed to come home and get pregnant.
I was in labor for days, right before Christmas, walking around department stores with Braxton-Hicks contractions every few minutes, playing board games with my husband for hours, waiting to somehow get to when the pains were steady, countable and strong.
Don’t you love to tell your delivery stories? Everyone loves to tell baby delivery stories and they are the greatest when they’re yours because they always seem so interesting. Which says something about how often anything really interesting and unusual happens to most of us. Having a baby is just really the final frontier because its so uncontrollable. Women who wax their floors weekly and scrub their bathrooms daily still cannot organize or plan when their babies are going to come.
The most amazing advice I ever heard was from Vicki Curtis down at Central Bank who told me that you should always get pregnant in September because you’d look cute at Christmas and be feeling good past your first trimester, you’d only have to buy winter maternity clothes and you wouldn’t have to go through August heat twice your normal size. I think this information, more than any of her significant other achievements, has made me think over the years that she’s smarter than me.
I have always been somewhere between the “Ohmygosh, honey, we’re pregnant” school and the “Is there another spirit waiting to come down?” school of parenthood planning. I remember with great relief the moment during my last pregnancy when I had the feeling that I’d definitely proven myself in the “willing to go forth and multiply” column of things to check off on the way to heaven.
I bring this all up because I’m going to be a grandma in the next few days! I have to qualify this by saying that I’ve been a practice grandma to three step-grandkids almost since Clay and I got married. But, frankly, I’ve been a slow learner. Being a step-parent has its own set of things to figure out—as anyone who’s been there can tell you. I love my step-kids and think they’re adorable in every way but, in true Mormon fashion, they are older than my kids.
But this is SO EXCITING.
Not that I’m all that big on biology—I barely got a D in it to get out of high school—but THIS-it’s like I’m expecting my grandma’s nose and my dad’s eyes and my mother’s too big calves to come back to life. I just can’t believe this little life is coming to us that will be a walking encyclopedia of all that’s gone before us in our family.
It’s always been fascinating to me to see how much comes down to us from generation to generation. I have a letter from my great-great-grandfather about going from New York to a new country, Texas, to start a new life. On the way, his ticket and clothes were stolen but the captain let him sleep on the deck of the boat in the rain as he went down the Mississippi. He thought a man could be as successful in Texas as anywhere in the world. And money has always been a great motivator for us.
My family would have never made hearty Mormon pioneers because they were too practical—and not overwhelmingly religious. My great-grandmother swept the missionaries off her porch in Austin, Texas, because she knew that the church stole young girls in England and carried them across the ocean to be married to hoary Mormon patriarchs in Salk Lake.
I can see that same desire to move to “new country” in my dad, myself and my own kids. I hear myself when I read those old letters, same humor, same reverence for the same values. Respectful, serious yet more than slightly disorganized.
So, I’ve been calling daily, waiting for labor to start. I told Clay that I hope he’s ready to start living alone because I plan to be traveling grandma.
If I would have known being a grandparent was this exciting I would have tied my kids to the railroad tracks and not let them up until they agreed to come home and get pregnant.
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