Grandparent Confidential

As grandparents, it’s hard to forget time: that damn ticking clock. Which is why most of us feel such a sense of urgency—and sometimes, panic—about spending time with our grandkids. We know we won’t be here forever. We want to make sure they’ll remember us with love. Letty Cottin Pogrebin captures this sentiment brilliantly in this excerpt from her essay “Making Memories” in Eye of My Heart.

We may think our experience as parents makes us grandparent-ready. Susan Shreve discovers otherwise in this excerpt from her wise and charming essay “If You Knew Harry…” in Eye of My Heart: A Grandmother’s Learning Curve

The first rule I made for myself as a grandmother was to follow my daughter’s rules. Which is not to say I didn’t have opinions and that I didn’t express them. But I knew I’d be much more likely to have Theo to myself if Elizabeth trusted me, and I was willing to do just about anything to gain favor as a responsible, dependable, dutiful grandmother.

“My parents always let me eat gelato before dinner,” insisted my five-year-old granddaughter, Isabelle. This annoucement followed the news flash that her parents also let her watch as many videos as she wants whenever she wants, and they never ever tell her to pick up her toys.

“Really,” I replied, trying not to crack a smile. Of course I knew perfectly well that the truth was being stretched and I was being tested. “That may be,” I added, “but when I’m in charge, you have to listen to me, cupcake.”

In this excerpt from her essay “Gained In Translation” in Eye of My Heart, novelist Bharati Mukherjee brilliantly captures the complexity and wonder of our fast-changing global world.

On an unseasonably hot April morning in 2004, we gathered on the roof deck of an apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for the naming ceremony of a fourteen-month old baby girl.  “We” were her family and her parents’ friends. Relatives had flown in from California, Oregon, Wyoming, Minnesota and Michigan; one had come from India. There were Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists among us—the usual modern American mélange. Each of us had memories of christenings or naming ceremonies as practiced in the culturally homogenous families of our childhoods.

Most grandparents will do anything to nourish, delight and generally entertain our grandkids. But sometimes we simply run out of steam, like Abigail Thomas in this hilarious excerpt from her essay in Eye of My Heart.

I can’t believe I’m packing again. When I board the plane in a few days, it will be the fifth time this year that I’ll be making the long-distance haul to visit my granddaughters.

All I can say is: Yipee for frequent flyer miles or I would be forced to swab the decks on a transatlantic freighter—and I’m not all that great with a mop.