Kidding myself: An awkward age

This weekend I had the delicious opportunity to hold some babies.  Is there a more lovely feeling than the warm trusting weight of a 3-month-old wee one, curled in toward your neck and sleeping on your shoulder? It blisses me out. Sigh.

Not once but twice (twice!) the following conversation happened with two different people:

Young, mid-20-something mom walks by and notices me holding baby: "Aww. Look at you! Practicing to be a grandma?"

Me: ...

Okay, so let me just say up front that I am absolutely looking forward to being a grandma. Someday. I think it will rank right up there with the most fantastic and wonderful of gigs--in the dim, rather distant future.  But just because I have an 18-year-old daughter doesn't mean I'm actively practicing to be a grandma or that it's even on my radar screen. (Hear that, Lauren*?)

On the other hand, I am newly 42 which is very much an awkward, generationally ambidextrous age. I get it. Some 42-year-olds are grandmas, after all. Biologically it's possible. Others (including several of my friends) are still having babies themselves. 

It wasn't out of line to say. They were being friendly. It just surprised me! Aren't I just a little past mid-20-something myself? 

No, for me it was an abrupt paradigm shifting moment, like those optical illusions where some people see the young lovely woman and others see the old hag**. Our ward, for example, is pretty brim full of young moms and pretty scarce on the ones at my stage. Suddenly, I realized how they must see me! I think of myself as their peer but they must think of me pretty much as their mothers' peer! OY. 

. . .

*of course, the irony here is that I made my own lovely, young mother into a grandmother when she was just shy of 48. So I'm one to a talk, huh?

**I'm definitely not implying that grandmothers look like old hags. Just using it as a vivid demonstration of the shift I experienced...

Let this be heaven

My grandma woke up with this poem running in her head and recited it to us at breakfast on Sunday, before we walked down to Wildwood sunday school under the trees. 

Oh, God, let this be heaven—
I do not ask for golden streets            
Or long for jasper walls
Nor do I sigh for pearly shores       
      Where twilight never falls
Just leave me here beside these peaks      
       In this rough western land,
I love this dear old world of thine—       
      Dear God, You understand.

Oh, God, let this be heaven—
I do not crave white, stainless robes      
       I’ll keep these marked by toil.
Instead of straight and narrow walks      
       I love trails soft with soil;
I have been healed by crystal streams,     
        But these from snow-crowned peaks
Where dawn burns incense to the day      
       And paints the sky in streaks.

Dear God, let this be heaven—
I do not ask for angel wings      
       Just leave that old peak there
And let me climb ‘til comes the night—      
       I want no golden stair
Then when I say my last adieu      
       And all farewells are given
Just leave my spirit here somewhere
Oh, God, let this be heaven!

~HR Merrill,  1930s
Wildwood cabin resident
BYU English and Poetry Professor
(this hangs in my grandparents' cabin) 

Amen. This canyon might not be everyone's idea of heaven, but it's mine. What's your idea/hope of heaven's geography?

Magical machine

I kind of love Mondays. As much as I adore the weekends, it's a lovely moment when everyone is off to school and work, the house is quiet, and I start trying to conjure order in our weekend-blitzed house.

Usually, this means laundry: gathering, sorting, loading, unloading, folding. That makes it sounds so busy, so work intensive, doesn't it?  But my great grandmother Elsie's laundry day was exponentially more taxing. With 9 daughters, a husband, and herself in one household, her laundry piles must have been massive. She soaked, scrubbed, twisted, wrung, and ironed at least 45 dresses and dozens of underclothes, sheets, towels, etc.  Hers, no doubt, was a very active and exhausting laundry day.

This morning as I waited (waited! luxurious extra time!) for the washing machine to do its thing, I came across this TED clip by the marvelous Hans Rosling (one of my personal heroes: co-founder of Doctors without Borders Sweden  and Gapminder, public health guru, and no one makes data more clear--I salute you, Hans!). 

We do take it for granted but I think Rosling's right: this was a game changer for women. Let's hear it for all the books read, children played with, and interests pursued while the magical washing machine chugged away. 

Folding these mounds of clean clothes doesn't seem like such a drag today, you know?

Work wagering

Our family has a (possibly apocryphal) story about my great-grandmother Elsie. She had nine daughters and, naturally, it was essential that everyone chip in and do their part to keep the household going. One morning she discovered that one of the daughters hadn't done her work. Known for her spunk, my great grandma marched over to the school where they were gathered for their morning assembly.  She wrote a little note and it was passed from hand to hand all the way up to the front where the principal read it aloud: "Please send ____ home to come complete her unfinished work." (Someone in the family please correct me...this is the gist of it but I don't remember the particulars.)

. . .

Well, this one's for you, Elsie:

Yesterday I discovered that certain smaller people in the house didn't do their prep-for-guests jobs that they were asked to do this weekend. Now, maybe they wagered that, since it's kind of important to have clean bathrooms for guests, I would just go ahead and do their jobs for them.

They wagered wrong!

Nothing a little sign can't fix.

I don't think they were sufficiently embarrassed though, at least not enough to commence cleaning. I may have to resort to marching to the school... So basically what we have is a work standoff. Who's going to blink first?

What works in your house to get the crew working?

Clap your hands if you believe in parents...

A professor in one of my developmental psych classes once commented that one of the things that separates us from other species is our ability to tell stories, to learn vicariously from each other without going through the exact experience ourselves. Huh. I'd never thought of it that way before.

But it makes sense. When I was a girl, I loved hovering near the grown-ups at gatherings at the cabin, soaking up their stories about life and, especially, families.

I've been thinking a lot about that lately.

I'm especially intrigued by parenting stories--in hearing the different ways we make it work in all of our vivid uniquenesses and uniting similarities. I love reading about how others approach their relationships with their kids & the lessons learned in raising them. I started asking other parents how they did it, collecting their answers and using them to recharge when my child-raising battery was low. In that spirit, I've hatched an idea.

Here it is:

A new site {inspired by both This I Believe and the poet Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet} centered around parenting beliefs, where parents can post a letter/essay about a lesson learned or belief or philosophy they've gained about parenting: just a brief sliver of perspective to share with others who are also traveling-trudging-skipping-strolling on the parenting path. These will be published online weekly or so, depending on when letters come in.

So {ta-da!} here's the link:

<<Letters to a Parent>>

The first letter is the one that got this whole idea cooking: actually, it's a transcript of a talk given by my great-grandmother Brockbank about parenting. I think you'll love it.

***

p.s. If you'd like to write a letter/essay for this project (please do!), e-mail me at basic.annie@gmail.com. It doesn't have to be anything long or grand, just a real and honest piece of your wisdom (can be inspiring, funny, irreverent, moving...whatever you feel) that you're interested in sharing. In addition, if you know anyone that you would like to nominate to write a letter about their approach to parenting that would be wonderful, too. Feedback, ideas, and suggestions highly welcome. And, pssst. Spread the word.