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A Grandma's Situation
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By the Rev. Diane C. Smalley
As I was rushing to find seats in a very crowded fellowship hall, I heard a child’s voice behind me softly, but urgently calling, “Grandma, grandma … grandma … grandma!”
For a moment I was distracted by the voice, but quickly composed myself, and eagerly looked around the room for three vacant seats. But the child’s voice, which seemed close, erringly close, startled me because I knew I was moving too fast for that same voice to be so close. But, there was that whisper again, “Grandma, grandma … grandma … grandma!”
As feelings of irritation surfaced, I remember thinking, “Why doesn’t that woman answer that child?” Annoyed by the child’s whispered urgency, I stopped in my tracks so fast that the two children following me … almost tripped over each other. Trying to catch them, I nearly fell into the lap of a very large, and equally shocked man. Reality hit me; I was the woman who did not answer the child. The children, frantically trying to keep up with my pace, were new additions to my family. The soft voice was my teary eyed nine-year old. I was "grandma."
Days earlier, I had become the permanent guardian of one minor male child and share the guardianship of a female child with my daughter. Two children, a boy just reaching his teenage years and a girl who was barely nine years old, were now living with my daughter and me. The two children, born in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, were about to take me, my silver hair, my “just got on e-mail recently” lifestyle on a journey that prepared me to learn to Text quickly, and become so technologically savvy that I would eventually Twitter and have the skills to change my photo on Facebook often. Oh, yeah!
I have learned to monitor BET, learned to go to movies that teenage girls love, learned to listen very intently to rap … until I could hear the words and then reprove the artists, learned that I had to swoon over Maxwell as much as I had over Marvin Gaye, learned that Beyonce may not do for me what Aretha did, but Beyonce does for my teenage granddaughter what Aretha did for me, learned to love band concerts in high school auditoriums with high school sounds and smells, learned to not panic at the price of jeans with holes in them, learned that I would probably be the oldest "mom" at parent/teacher conferences, learned that my teenage grandson (who is now 20) would surf the internet for porn sites without parental controls, learned that my teenage daughter’s poses in pictures on Myspace bordered on dangerous and deadly, but that merely deleting her Myspace site, without conversation and agreement, was even more dangerous and deadly, learned that my granddaughter (who is now 16) did not esteem herself smart and pretty and worthy, but did complete applications to model on the internet … and that I would have to confront the man who called her to set up an interview, but above all, I learned that I had to be constantly present in their young lives in ways that I had forgotten, or never knew how to be, and would have to learn.
My granddaughter helped me write this article, and offered suggestions and generally made sure that I told the truth without sharing too much information. How did we learn to relate to each other in ways that my daughter and I never have? My granddaughter has learned to trust that I will not judge her, that I expect her to make mistakes, that I may make mistakes, too, that I understand her need to change the color of her nail polish every other day, that I get it when she wears lipstick that shines, smells and tastes like fruit; that I am interested in her life, her gifts, her dreams, her aspirations, that I am a child of the ‘60s who is willing to learn from a child of the ‘90s. |
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