Grooving on Grannyhood

I waited outside the glass doors that separated "Labor and Delivery" from the operating room, knowing my daughter was on the operating table, and that her husband, clad in white paper scrubs, booties, cap and mask was by her side. I paced. Was that, finally, the unmistakable cry of a newborn? Did Katherine call out, "Is that my baby?"

Then, there was Ty as they rolled out the newest littlest being. Elation lit up his face like a torch. The glass doors opened, a nurse was reaching into the incubator and picking up a little swaddled bundle of baby boy and asking, "Is this the Grandmother?" Ty said yes and she handed him to me. The moment has gone. The feelings are stitched into my heart, that sort of love that is forever, an echo of holding my own newborn children, giddy and tremulous and grateful and delighted and delirious with joy. Someone took a picture. When I looked later it was all face, wet-eyed, stoned with happiness. The baby wore a tiny knitted blue cap.

I followed behind the rolling caravan of nurse and Daddy and baby boy. Ty stopped and pushed the button that caused "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to issue forth from invisible speakers, announcing the latest new birth. In the hallway outside the nursery, we ran smack into Katie and Jane, who are two of the Aunties, and the baby's 9 year-old cousin Isabelle. We wept and hugged and bounced and cheered and gazed through the nursery window at Ty as he gazed at his son, squiggling around and howling as the nurse examined him. 

Then Katherine was in recovery, numb-legged and groggy, happier then I've ever seen her, and she and Ty stared at each other in another one of those fat moments where words are unnecessary and they said his name: Anthony Fowler Cirelli, III. "He'll be called Tripp," Katherine said. "With two ps."

Welcome little one. You are perfect.

Baby Coming

"Mom?"


"What's going on?" I spoke into the phone with carefully practiced calm. I had been to a weekend meditation workshop with Pema. I was chill.


"Something's different."


"Different how?" I asked. I gripped the phone and mimed a state of joy to those in the room.


"I've been having pretty strong cramps about 4 minutes apart."


"Hm," I said.


"Should I call the doctor? I probably should call the doctor. I'll call the doctor. I'll just go ahead and call the doctor."


"Sounds like a good idea," I said. "Then call me back."


"Is this IT?" my friend Jane squealed. "This is IT, right?" A burgeoning ebullience lit her face from to grin to eyebrows. "I knew it!" (She always knows it.) "And you're here! Isn't that completely amazing?" She meant that there I was, about to participate - well, if not actually in the delivery room at the end of things, so to speak - in one of the most beautiful experiences ever, and there I was with her. My friend.


"She's going to have a baby girl tonight!" she stated.


"Not necessarily," I said. 


"You got 20 bucks?"


After Katherine had spoken with the doctor, and called her husband Ty, she decided to pack a bag just in case, and sort of putter at home and sort of time contractions. 


"Just come over," she requested.


I nearly drove over Jane backing up out of the driveway, but I was totally present. I swear.

*

"Oops, there goes another one," Katherine said, rubbing her belly and wincing. "What time is it?" 


"7:15."


"Write it down."


"Do you have a pen?" I wrote "7:15" carefully at the top of a white legal pad, feeling terribly important.


Upstairs in the nursery, we looked at all the tiny baby clothes packed neatly away in the built-in bureau painted white. Blankets had been folded and stored beneath the changing table. There were oodles of onesies. A bucket of spackle and a can of paint were under the window. Goodnight Moon was in the bookshelf. A little cow-ish rocking toy stood in the corner. Two little outfits for taking Baby C home from the hospital lay in the crib.


"I know... the paint and spackle cans, but, the baby won't be in here -- ooh, what time is it?"


"7:19."


"Mark it down."


"I'll clean everything," I said. "Don't worry about a thing."


"What do you think?" Ty asked when he arrived home.


"I don't know, I guess this could be it," I shrugged.


"He's asking me, Mom, ooh, another one. What time is it?"


"7:30." Ty said, looking around. "By the kitchen clock."


"7:25." I said simultaneously, checking my watch.


"What does it say on the TV?" Katherine demanded.


"The TV? It doesn't say anything on the TV," I said.


"You two are retarded. Can't you even tell time?"


At the hospital, things were light, joyous, edged with a touch of anxious humor.


"You're going to be so much fun," the admitting nurse proclaimed. "Labor and Delivery is upstairs around the blahdeblah elevator around the blahdeblah corner," I heard. 


Upon exiting the elevator, I went South, Ty went East, and Katherine strode West.


But, we found it, and a young nurse placed a blue disk like a laundry pellet upon Katherine's mountainous belly. We tracked Baby C's heartbeat chugachugging on the computer screen and watched a little rounded hump of a curve marking a contraction. 


"Oo," Katherine breathed.


"That's it, Sweetie, you're doing great," I croaked. Ty's legs danced and jumped. I had no saliva.


But, after a quick examination from the MD on call, it proved to be a non-starter. We checked out.


"Keep the phone by your ear," directed my daughter. "I have a feeling we'll be going back later. Oh, that was a strong one."


I called Will.


"It's started," I said.


"Uh huh."


"She's in labor!"


"Uh huh."


"She's not quite a centimeter dilated and her cervix is 90%..."


"Whoa! Whoa! Hold on!"


"Oh, come on, Will. This is a fact of life. You'll be dealing with this yourself someday," I giggled.


"This is my sister, all right? There are certain things I don't need to know. Boy or girl, niece or nephew,
that's it."


"Oh, for Pete's sake! I'll call you when things get going."


"I love you. Oh, sorry I didn't call you back on Mother's Day. I didn't have my phone."


As I reached for my cell about 6 a.m this morning, it rang.


"We're back in the hospital," Katherine said, sounding exhausted. "It's definitely today."


"Oh, boy," I said. "Or girl."


"Don't rush, but come over," she said.


"Okay."


"Oh, and that breathing thing you were teaching me? They don't do that anymore. You're supposed to go hehehehe now."


"Oh," I said. Note to self: No more suggestions. Just be there.


Then I called Jane. "I win," I said.

Whack it! Ball

We thought it looked fun. It would be a sport we could share, we agreed. Plus, there were the benefits of exercise. So, we signed up to take a few lessons, swinging our racket ball rackets impatiently as we listened to Bob explain the finer points of the game. The truth is: put a racket in my hand and I just want to hit something, I don't want to listen. It was harder than it looked, and we spent hours striking out in every direction like twin windmills run amuck, trying to anticipate where the blasted ball would bounce next. 

"Try not to hit the ball over your heads to avoid shoulder injury," Bob instructed.


"Right!" we grunted, flailing wildly. We caromed off the walls. We collided. We fell to the hard wooden floor, limbs tangled, howling with laughter. 


We bought special sneakers: white with removable colored plastic chevrons. Red for Juan and green for me.


There is something about a racket sport that ignites an aggressive streak in me. I play to win and, as I suspected, so does Juan the Gardener. It began with the rules. 


"If I hit myself with the ball first, is that my point or yours?" Juan asked.


"Mine," I said.


"It wouldn't be a do-over?"


"No."


If we couldn't agree, we went to the front desk like two children to have a grown-up decide. One of us might say, "Ah ha!" if she were right. We limped from the court after an hour's combat, gingerly kneading our shoulders, our necks torqued.


"Isn't racket ball kind of hard on the body?" concerned friends questioned.


"Nah!" we said.


Once, one of us hit the other deliberately.


"That's it! I think we have to break up," I said dramatically.


"No, we don't!  I'm sorry. I just lost it. It can be your point."


I didn't heed Bob's warning about hitting the ball low, because smashing an overhead with all my strength felt so delicious, so within a few weeks I couldn't lift my right arm above my shoulder. Massage didn't help, but two months of bi-weekly physical therapy did. 


Now, seven months later, we're back at it. We've gotten better. We play the angles; we vary our serves. Juan has a sneaky serve that glides along the wall and slides down, rendering a return impossible. When he uses it, I want to bash something. We wear plastic goggles for protection, which proved to be a good thing since recently the ball hit me dead on between the eyes, leaving a red indentation. Yesterday in the midst of a skirmish, a loud thunk! sounded behind me. I made the shot first, then spun around. Juan was prostrate on the floor.


"What happened?" I asked, trying hard not to grin until I had assessed the damage.


"I hit my head on the wall and bounced off," Juan explained.


"Are you okay?" I asked. I rubbed his poor sweaty head and offered him a hand up.


"I'm fine," he panted. "Did you get it?"


"Yeah, I did." 


We quit at two games each, but I've been wondering: is this a game for two Buddhists who believe in practicing basic goodness and non-aggression?


Last night after showers and quesadillas, we sat together on the couch and watched baseball. Juan held the clicker.


"If you rub my shoulder, we can watch the Yankees," he said. "If you don't, we watch the Red Sox."


Is there a grown-up in the house?

Keeping my Mouth Shut (Mostly)

I try to keep my mouth shut - really, I do. But there are just certain subjects, like using pesticides on one's lawn, where I just can't help myself.


"You're what?" I asked someone in my family who owns a dog named Quincy and is about to produce the Baby of the Century.


"Mom, our lawn is dead."


"Okay," I said, with that extra little inflection I sometimes use when it really isn't okay. Then I got off the phone.


The next morning I sent an email: 


Hi Sweetie,
I've been worrying about you using pesticide on your lawn. I really wouldn't, not with Quincy and the new baby. They say to keep off it for 24 hours, but the lasting effects are extremely toxic. What's a little crab grass? Please consider using something organic or just leaving it be. It's just grass, and the risks of pesticides are proven to be hazardous.
xxMom


"Oy veh," my daughter's response began. "Relax. It's not just a little crab grass - it's all brown and dead and looks terrible. I'll look into using lemon juice and vinegar as an alternative..."


I used to blurt things out. I just had to. I believed that keeping things to myself could quite possibly cause cancer. I also used to fire poison darts of emails and then sit back, fingers poised above the keyboard ready to do battle. Eventually I realized that emails sent in anger had far reaching consequences. First, they were preserved in writing and could be referred back to or forwarded on to members of one's family, which made small, interpersonal dramas much worse. There were those initial rapid pulse, heart thumping feelings of self-righteous indignation, but they evaporated leaving me deflated, vaguely guilty, and embarrassed. Ugh.


"You need to practice restraint of pen and tongue," a wise friend suggested. "Give it the three-day rule," she advised. "You can write it all out, but don't hit send." After several dozen false starts, this strategy worked. By the third day, I usually no longer cared; or, if I did feel strongly about a particular situation, I had time to fashion a thoughtful missive.


Back to my daughter. We were discussing the actual birth, who would be where, who would NOT (sigh) be in the delivery room, and I casually inquired would she be attending lamaze classes.


"No," she said. "I don't have time, and besides I know how to breathe."

So Close

One minute she was there: playing by the open door of the dress shop. My mother and I were trying on clothes.We had instructed my then two year-old daughter, blonde hair gone curly from Floridian humidity, to "stay put." I was half-listening behind the louvered dressing room door.


A few seconds later, an instinctual warning tugged at my heart. I peeked out. She was gone.


"KATHERINE!" I shouted. I leaped to the door and searched up and down the sidewalk and out into the street with frenzied laser-beam eyes. I took in a cream-colored station wagon, sidling down the block, slowly, shark-like, as if cruising for prey. I saw my little daughter, trundling away, holding a strange woman's hand.


"STOP!" I bellowed. "THAT'S MY DAUGHTER!" I bounded up to the woman, heart hammering.


"Oh?" she said. "I was trying to help her find her mommy."


I knew and I didn't know how close we'd come. 


"I'm her mommy. I was in that shop," I pointed, trembling. "Right there."


I picked up my daughter and turned away. I knew. I didn't speak another word to the woman, not a single stuttered thank-you, not an accusation. I turned around once, saw the cream-colored station wagon cruise up to this stranger who had had my daughter's hand in hers. A door opened, the woman got in, the car drove off.


"What happened?" I asked Katherine. I shuddered with guilt.


"She gave me some taffy," Katherine answered. 


We had the talk about never EVER EVER going anywhere with anyone, about never EVER taking candy from strangers. But, the truth was, if my mother's watchful heart had skipped a single beat, she would have been gone.


How could a mother EVER live with that?


Hours later, a blurry slow motion image of the cream-colored station wagon driving slowly by re-played itself in my mind. A glint of sunshine obscured the driver's face. In the flood of feelings - terror and guilt and relief -  it hadn't occurred to me to call the police. I had been consumed with my daughter's safety. What about the other children? 


I'm haunted still.

Finding a Place in the Sun

Following a lengthy operation to repair our 6 month-old baby daughter's broken heart, her dad and I took her to my parents' new place in Florida - a dock's length away from the ocean. We needed to rest, to let half a year's anxiety and vigilance drain away. I had slept on the floor by her crib, dropped heart medicine into her mouth like a mother bird, my senses attuned to the slightest change in her breathing. We hadn't even dared to hope.

Within days of luxuriating in balmy sunshine Katherine's previously gaunt little face with its pale bluish tinge blossomed into bountiful cheeks flushed with healthy pink color - the sort of cheeks that elicited exclamations of delight from strangers in supermarkets.

I held my daughter against my heart as we basked like sea animals in the pool. Her blue eyes sparkled under the yellow sunflower of a sun hat. She grew chins. She sprouted a tooth.

"I don't think that baby's mother would want her to be in the pool," a dour observer remarked.

"I am the baby's mother, and she loves it!" I said, twirling my daughter like a baby seal.

Her dad and I lay on the beach while Katherine sat beneath a beach umbrella gumming rattles and grinning.

At 11th months old, she wobbled in her grandparents' living room from chair to coffee table to couch. She raced in circles on the springy spongy green turf a year later. We picked strawberries with my father. 

When my parents gave endless streams of cocktail parties, Katherine hid beneath the square stone coffee table in a little blue smocked dress and red sandals, reached a hand up to filch cooked shrimp.

"Hurry up! Scat! Go!" she ordered, when my mother lingered too long saying good-bye.

Once, when her brother Will was about 4, we drove down from Vermont. To distract her brother, Katherine read the entire "Goosebumps" series aloud. 

"Keep reading!" Will and I demanded, when she paused for breath.

Over 32 years we've seen dolphins, herons tall as toddlers, miles of fish flipping and dying in the sun from strange tides; we've searched for gold doubloons following a tropical depression that carved away sections of sand dunes; we've spied sea turtle eggs, gathered shells, made mermaids' purses from seaweed. We've jumped the waves holding hands and squealing. We've watched the Space Shuttle, felt the earth tremble, stopped our ears against its mighty roar. We've breakfasted with Mickey. We've balked at Space Mountain.

There was the time when delectable orange blossom perfume wafted in through the car windows as we approached Indian River County.

"Welcome to Florida," I told my daughter.

"This isn't Florida," she stated.

"Why, yes it is, Sweetie," her dad and I laughed. "See - palm trees, orange groves..."

She shook her head.

Only when we pulled up in front of her grandparents' place did she agree. She crossed her 7 or 8 year-old arms, leaned back, and announced, "Now, THIS is Florida." 

And not everybody's Florida, to be sure. Not most people's.

*

In about a month, this daughter and her husband will be having their first child, known fondly to us all as it swims in its mother's womb as "Baby C." My aspiration is for Katherine and her family to find their own place where new experiences and memories will blend and tumble and roll like surf.

Hello?

My son Will is a busy man. I imagine him happily ensconced in the warmth of a gigantic snow moving machine in Burlington, Vermont, music blasting when a small fluttery disturbance in his Carhart jeans alerts him to an incoming call. He slides his cell phone from his pocket, glances down expectantly, then frowns. Takes a slug of coffee. Calls from me - especially if it's the third or fourth call of the morning and it's only 6:45am - are not relished. I'm not a dazzling 20-something. I'm his Mom.

Chances are quite strong that they are, in fact, dismissed. A chirpy message from me might go something like this: Hi, Will, it's Mom. Again. So, ah, what's new? How are you? How's work? What are you doing for fun? (Giggle.) Are we supposed to get more snow? Well, that's about it. Call me when you get a chance! Okay, love you lots!


When he does return a call, usually after I take a stab at inducing a sticky blanket of guilt, he often cannot keep the beleaguered, annoyed and long-suffering tone from his voice.

Yeah, Ma, it's Will.

Hi! How are you? What's new? How's work? 
 
Deep sigh.

Nothing has changed since our last conversation. Everything is the same. It's cold. There's snow. I get up, I go to work, I come home, I go to bed, then I do it again.

So, nothing is new? Not one thing? 

Deep sigh.

If something were new, you'd be the first to know.

(I'll bet.)  

Is there anything else?

I guess not, it's just I wish you would tell me one tiny snippet about your life is all.

I don't have any snippets. I don't have time for snippets.

Deep sigh.

You are 24 years old! You must have time for a snippet or two. Giggle.    

Are we done talking about snippets, 'cause I gotta go.


Okay, bye, then.

Bye, love you.

Love you too.

When I learned how to text, I sent him a message: M txtng!  His retort was swift: Don't.

Yesterday, I noticed his name on my Facebook page, in the bottom right corner under Chat. I pounced. I had been thinking about my sisters, and wondered if he had any strong feelings about his two sisters. He is 13 years younger than one, and 8 years younger than the other.


Do you feel you are close to your siblings? I typed. They weren't mean to you growing up, were they? (The way I was to mine.)

I smiled to myself, picturing the aggravated scowl on his scruffily bearded, handsome face. I could even hear the prolonged sigh.

Where is this coming from?

Just thinking about sisters - mine, yours, and writing about it. They adored you, didn't they?


I don't wanna be in it. And yes, they adored me. Gotta go. Love you.

Wait! I typed hastily.

A small automatic message appeared in the message box: Will is offline.