Grandkids

I tapped into a very distinct memory the other day. It was when we was in our first home together over 30 years ago now, a tiny little house in Amagansett. I was rocking my first born baby about 2 in the morning - she was only a few weeks old. I distinctly remember looking down at her tiny perfect face and being so overhwelmed with love for this child, and then just as suddenly being struck with a new thought: Is this the way my mother felt about me? Did she love me with this same kind of intense and heart-wrenching love that makes me now know that I would do anything for this child? Wow. I had no idea!

For years I thought there was no other love like that - the love I felt for my children. And this coming from someone who is still very much in love with her husband, and has a big wonderful extended family that I love very much as well. But what I feel for my kids, well that cannot be matched can it?

And then I had grandchildren.

The confounding thing about grandchildren is that we have very little control over much that happens in their lives - we must sit back and watch our children do all the parenting and make all the decisions about what they are taught and what they can do. As much as we would love to wrap them in a bubble and protect them from everything we cannot even be there to protect them from the everyday dangers they face. Their parents have to assume that burden. But when I look into the faces of those kids I feel the same intense emotional connection that I did to my own babies - a primal, protective urge that is so strong it nearly bursts out sometimes. It has in fact - at those times when I've pleaded out loud to one of their parents "She can't do that can she?" or "Do you let him play with those?" Usually I can suppress those kinds of words but sometimes, it just happens. And its not because I think any of them are bad parents, quite the contrary. So far they've all been top notch in the parenting department. It's got more to do with not being in control of something so important to me than anything else.

Anyway - the thing that set all this thought process off was a few days ago when I was going to baby sit for the kids and my daughter said, innocently enough, "I feel better about having them with someone who loves them almost as much as I do!"

She really has no idea....