Adair Lara - The Granny Diaries: An Insiders Guide for New Grandmothers

an insiders guide for new grandmothers

by Adair Lara

ILLUSTRATIONSbyPATRICIA STORMS

Text copyright
2008 byADAIR LARA

Illustrations copyright
2008 byPATRICIA STORMS

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Lara, Adair.
The Granny diaries / by Adair Lara;
illustrations by Patricia Storms.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-0-8118-5732-1
1. GrandmothersHumor.
2. GrandparentingHumor. I. Title.

HQ 759.9.l37 2008
649.10853dc22

2007027413

Manufactured in China

Design byJAY PETER SALVAS
This book was typeset in Adobe
Caslon 11.25/15 and Gotham 9.5/15

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

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I want especially to thank my daughter, Morgan, for giving me grandchildren so fast, and for letting me write about them, and Ryan and Maggie for changing me from a self-respecting detached and ironic adult into a love-struck grandmother who carries in her purse a tiny Phillips-head screwdriver just for installing batteries in toys. I want to thank my co-grandmother, Barbara Anderson, for being such a good sport about my remarks on paternal grandmothers. I also want to thank my friend Linda Kilby for her stories and my editors at Chronicle Books, Kate Prouty and Jodi Warshaw, for able and deft editing. I want to thank my mother, Lee Daly, and my mother-in-law, Shirley LeBlond, for showing me how to be a grandmother. And my husband, Bill LeBlond, for taking this journey with me.

All that matters is what we do for each other. Lewis Carroll

The reason grandchildren and grandparents get along so well is that they have a common enemy. Sam Levenson

I was in the labor and delivery room at Kaiser Foundation Hospital on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco. My daughter Morgan, twenty-four, and her soon-to-be husband, Trevor, twenty-six, were about to produce a miracle, a small and tender human being who would need bathing, onesies, all-terrain strollers, instruction in voting, anda grandmother.

I was so full of feelings: grateful to be there, proud of Morgan, pumped up with my own status as the mother of the most important person in the room, and, above all, eager to meet the baby. Morgan had said that everybody had to leave when the baby cameshe wanted only Trevor in the room (and the ten or fifteen hospital staffers who wandered in and out). But people can come and go during labor, she added kindly.

My head whipped around.

People?

Its a new shock to be called people by someone you have given birth to. But I said nothing. I had decided to be an exemplary, noninterfering

grandmother. Here was my first opportunity to display my tact. Of course, sweetie, I said.

Morgan was attached to a fetal monitor that showed not only her contractions and the babys heartbeat but also those of the women in three other rooms. Its like watching a horse race, said Bob, Trevors dad. He and Trevors mother, Barbara, had hurried down from Davis, an hour east of San Francisco, to wait with the rest of us. Barbara stitched on a baby quilt in the corner, and Bob paced. Jim, my ex and Morgans dad, came in and out, bringing Trivial Pursuit cards, Morgans constitutional law textbook, a fresh T-shirt for Trevor, and whatever else the kids had decided they needed from home. Bill, my husband, was out in the hall with three days worth of New York Times.

The doctor came in. It was almost time.

The other three grandparents went outside to join Bill. Should I go? I muttered to Morgan, and she shook her sweaty headI should stay. Yes! I exulted. I felt guilty staying when the others went outbut how could I miss this? Besides, Morgan might need me.

It was time for her to push. My arm aching, I lifted Morgans head, pillow and all, to help her bury it in her breastbone. (The labor nurse said it would help her push the baby out.) Trevor was on her other side, wearing the Hughes Construction baseball hat that never left his head. Hed refused to leave the room, even to move their Subaru from the red zone hed left it in.

The three of us would watch a contractiona jagged mountain forming out of straight linescome up on the monitor; then Morgan would take a big breath and push, while Trevor and I counted aloud to ten. It was a new feeling for me: watching my child give birth to her child. It made me feel connected to all the people whod ever lived on earth.

When she pushed, I did too, until my own muscles ached. I last felt that ache in another San Francisco hospital back in 1978. When they placed Morgan, my first child, in my arms, pink and perfect, I thought that only professional ethics (not wanting to make the other new parents feel bad) kept the doctors from commenting on her unearthly beauty.

And here I was, twenty-four years later, when my first grandchild, Ryan Adair Anderson, arrivedblack-haired, black-eyed, and perfect, her slanted eyes upside-down smiles. Through my tears I managed to find my camera and snap a digital image of her at the moment of birth.

That picture shows a wet little scrap of a thing, but just by arriving, Ryan profoundly altered everybody in her family forever. Morgan became a mother, Trevor a father. The other five of us became grandparents.