Okay, so right after Brooklyn was born I felt like I should write a heartfelt, touching, tear producing post about the instant joys of becoming a grandparent. But as wonderful as this week has been, the truth is, I felt a little numb, almost like I was stuck in a dream and any minute I’d wake up, and poof! Meagan would still be pregnant and we’d still be waiting for a baby. I was feeling kind of bad about the way I felt, like I was already failing as a grandparent until Doug expressed the same feelings. I’m not sure why it affected us like this. We’re guessing it may be because we’d been waiting for Brooklyn since the kids lost unborn baby Kiley last spring. Basically this child has been anticipated for eighteen long months, during which time we also lost my mother to a terrible, year long illness.
Years ago, Andy once told me how to remember which direction tightens and which one loosens things; righty-tighty, lefty-loosey. Now when I go out to water my flowers and I turn the hose spigot on and off, I often say it silently to myself, righty-tighty, lefty-loosey and I’d begun to wonder if it was possible for our emotions to turn on and off in the same way. I suppose I was expecting a lightning bolt of happiness to strike me the moment I held Brooklyn for the first time at the hospital, that my newfound love for her would wake me up, would fill me up and make me believe that I actually deserved to be happy. But Doug and I both left the hospital the day she was born in a bit of a daze.
Today we had to go over and babysit Brooklyn so that Andy could take Meagan to the doctor’s for complications from the epidural. At one point, I took the baby into her room to change her. After she was cleaned up, I swaddled her in a blanket so that only her head was peeking out and I picked her up. She started to fuss so I began rocking gently back and forth and talking to her in that instinctive, sing-song mommy voice women seem to be born with. Brooklyn quieted down. She began to study my face carefully and then she smiled, the sweetest, purest little smile and that was my moment. It didn’t happen in a brightly lit, crowded hospital room, but alone in the silence of a darkened nursery. And it was not so much a bolt of lightning, but a gentle lefty-loosey, a gift from the tiny pink lips of my first grandchild that went straight to my heart.
That’s a photo from my wedding day, thirty years ago today. I pulled it out of an album, scanned it, and then adjusted the color, taking out the yellowed tone of the old paper with a simple click of my mouse button. I still have my wedding dress, I don’t know why, it was certainly nothing fancy. I bought it off the rack, I couldn’t see spending a lot of money for a dress I’d wear for only one afternoon. I’ve moved it many times over the years, from house to house and closet to closet. Like the photos from our wedding day, it’s yellowed and a bit faded and I don’t know how many times I’ve picked it up and began to stuff it in a bag for donation, but I could never quite bring myself to do it. My mother saved the dress she wore that day too, she loved that dress. Near the end of her life, after illness caused her to lose enough weight so she could fit into it once more, she asked me to find it just in case an occasion came up for her to wear it again.
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bookbabie 