“Being a nonna has given me joy and fresh eyes. My grandchildren are my antidepressants. When I am with them, I laugh and I look. We inhabit moments together. When we see a hummingbird or pick raspberries, I am as happy as they are. Our mutual affection has taught me about pure and nearly perfect love.”
Mary Pipher, from the Introduction

“Only by growing old can we witness our grandchildren growing older. It’s an existential trade-off. We lose years, they gain them.”
Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Making Memories

“Not speaking your mind is the number one commandment for would-be beloved grandparents. Silence on certain issues is not just golden; it’s essential. Ah, my poor tongue is sore from being bitten.”
Anne Roiphe, Grandmothers Should Be Seen and Not Heard

“In the eyes of our grandchildren, we are the past come to meet them, a living link ready to connect them to a larger lineage—their own history, ours, the history of the planet. We are the doorway to the vast continents of time that existed before they were born, and that will exist after they too pass.”
Susan Griffin, Everything That Goes Up Must Come Down

“I think I’ve been ready to be a grandmother since I knew what grandmothers were. Mostly what I liked about my grandmother was that she was revered. So far as I could tell, it was like being queen of England, minus the inconvenience of having to wear a crown.”
Elizabeth Berg, How I Got to Be Queen of England

“Over time grandmothers, whether loving or absent, attain near-mythic status in the memories of their grandchildren. Yet for the most part a grandmother isn’t around long enough to know the children of her children beyond their young adulthood. So I can’t help wondering: how will I be remembered? Which of my quirks and character flaws will become family legend?”
Barbara Graham from the Preface

“Indeed, the kind of love this new one resembles is that most universal and best-documented of genres, teen love: the same giddy absorption, the same loss of all sense of proportion, the same transcendent idiocy, when a mere glance from the beloved in the school cafeteria could send us into fluttery spasms.”
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Now You See Me, Now You Don’t

“Years ago, when I was in college, I met a mother of three grown children, an artist, unusually independent–minded among the women of my mother’s generation. ‘I want to be a mother,’ I told her when she asked about my plans for the future. ‘Good idea,’ she said, ‘as long as you know that from the moment a baby is put in your arms, his wings are growing and it’s the wings you’re in charge of protecting.’
Susan Shreve, If You Knew Harry…

“I have much to share with my grandchildren, for they have access to my acquired, often hard-earned experience, as  well as the pleasure, passions, and pain that accrue over many years. I don’t mean that I lecture or even try to set a good example; but I do show them a life lived in abundance with its losses, mistakes, timid falterings, blatant excesses, and modest triumphs.”
Kate Lehrer, The Age Thing

“In the end we grandmothers have always wanted the same things. We want our grandchildren to grow up happy and safe and to live good, long lives. We want our spiral helix of talents and quirks, bones and wit, to tumble on across time.”
Mary Pipher, from the Introduction

“You don’t have to get all gussied up,” I told her. “He’s a hospice rabbi. He’s used to seeing people in their bathrobes.”

“I’m not people,” my mother said, propped up on the hospital bed that had just replaced the single bed in her apartment. “And I don’t parade around in a bathrobe when company comes.” Even now, at 95, impossibly frail and tethered to an oxygen tank, Irene looked glamorous in her blue silk nightie with the ivory lace trim.

“He’s not company,” I protested halfheartedly, though really there was no point in arguing. My mother, the former belle of Pittsburgh, would die before she let any man see her undressed without her “face” on.

Which is exactly what would happen, but we didn’t know that yet.

Two weeks earlier—before the buildup of fluid in her lungs started squeezing the breath out of her—Irene had called me on the phone sounding frantic. Hearing the wheezy panic in her voice, I panicked, too. Could this possibly be it? I wondered. After years of serial near-death experiences, could my mother—the woman who joked that she was too mean to die—be on the brink of disproving her point?

No, she was not. The lady had more important things on her mind than life and death.

“Barb, help me, please,” she implored over the phone. “I’m absolutely going out of my mind. You’ve got to tell me: the bronze silk or the leopard chiffon?”

The retirement home where she lived was holding its annual black-tie ball that night, and Irene was in knots over what to wear. Forget that she was wobbly on her feet, even with the walker. Forget that she had lung cancer. The lady was a coquette—adored by men, envied by women—a flirty knockout with a smart mouth. I counseled the leopard chiffon.

Irene’s cancer diagnosis had seemed to come out of nowhere two years earlier. She’d been admitted to the hospital for chronic, unremitting back pain when a routine chest X-ray revealed a few suspicious-looking spots on her right lung. The biopsy confirmed adenocarcinoma.

My mother, then 93, chose not to treat the disease—or think about it. The tumors were small, and she didn’t have a cough or any other symptoms. “I’m going to put it out of my mind,” she announced, taking the Scarlett O’Hara approach. “Then it won’t bother me.”

Other family members—doctors—were less optimistic. “Chances are, she won’t make it to 94,” her first cousin, a Boston internist, told me privately. This man, along with Irene’s nephew, a Pittsburgh doctor, was devoted to my mother. Both men had been making pilgrimages to her “deathbed” for years. They came rushing to her side after the emergency colostomy, the bleed on her brain, the hip fracture—and always left astonished by her ability to bounce back.

“I’m afraid this time it’s for real,” Jerry, the Boston cousin, predicted sadly.

“She doesn’t have long,” Ken, the Pittsburgh nephew, agreed.

They should have known better. This was my mother they were talking about.

A CT scan taken six months after the initial diagnosis revealed no change in the size of the tumors. Another scan taken six months after that was even more striking.

“I’ve never seen this before, and I’ll be damned if I can explain it,” the oncologist said. “The tumors appear to be shrinking.”

I was stunned. Boston and Pittsburgh were stunned. Irene seemed relieved, but not as surprised as the rest of us.

Most people—except for certain family members and service professionals trying to please her—found Irene charming.

It wasn’t her fault, really, that I was impervious to her charms. Or that she, for most of my life, seemed unimpressed by mine. We were so different, both products of our times, as well as our singular quirks and talents. I often felt as though we were mismatched, like two landmasses that don’t fit together—say, Greenland and New Jersey. Irene longed for a daughter who would be just like her: a princess to her glamour queen. But I was an arty, waifish girl who rejected the whole package. I shacked up with a stoned cowboy in hippie outposts from Boulder to British Columbia. When my man and I stayed in one place long enough to have a phone, I kept the number unlisted so she couldn’t call and tell me I was ruining my life.

That was in my twenties. By my midthirties, I had dumped the cowboy, had relocated from the woods to San Francisco with my young son, was earning a living (more or less) by my pen and had married Hugh, a man my mother approved of only grudgingly but later grew to adore. My parents were living in Florida then, and we saw one another infrequently. Within a day or two, Irene and I would start to drive each other crazy, so I kept our visits brief.

I never dreamed I would become my mother’s caregiver. My mother never dreamed that she would need a caregiver, or that my father would die and leave her to fend for herself—or, worse, leave me to fend for her.

Taking care of a sick, aging parent is not a job you can train for. The training happens on the job, by the seat of your pants, and you are always one step behind, playing catch-up to the latest crisis. The only predictable thing about the job is its unpredictability. And in my case, the stubborn resistance of the caretakee.

Irene hollered and called me a bully. She accused me of turning her into an invalid and fought me over everything: the aides, the walker, the grab bars in the shower, the little alarm button she promised to wear around her neck but left in the bathroom the night she fell and broke her hip. The clincher was when she moved, at my insistence, from Florida to a retirement place in Washington, D.C., where I live now, so that Hugh and I could look after her. Once she arrived, Irene started addressing me as Mother in a tone so sarcastic, she sounded like me dissing her when I was a teenager.

My friend Mary Pipher, the author and psychologist, once told me it’s human nature to love what—and who—we care for, but Irene? I was skeptical, to say the least. Although I never doubted that I would be a dutiful daughter, I wasn’t so sure I could let go of the defenses that since childhood had been hardening inside me like bad arteries. Compassion, yes, but love? I was determined to ease my mother’s suffering, but could I unblock my heart? I worried that I’d be an outlier, the rare exception to Mary’s Law of Human Nature.

My mother was a party animal and had been a celebrated hostess among her set in Pittsburgh, New York and Palm Beach. Although for years she’d been threatening supernatural retaliation if I dared to include her age in her obituary—if she died—I’d thrown a bash for her 93rd birthday. She hadn’t been doing well (this was shortly before the cancer diagnosis), and I was afraid that she might not see 94. But by the time 94 rolled around, her force of will seemed to have driven the cancer into retreat, so I decided to hold off on giving another party until the Big 95.

Plans were under way when the cancer finally caught up with her. Her right lung filled with fluid, and she was having trouble breathing. The pulmonologist recommended draining the fluid so she could make it to the party. The procedure nearly killed her. She begged me to cancel the event, but I refused. Family members, including my son, Clay, were flying in from around the country. Anyhow, this was Herself. The smart money said she’d rally, and sure enough, on the night of the party, the Belle of Pittsburgh showed up looking like a million bucks in the bronze silk.

I think my mother had the time of her life at that party. After the toasts, she confessed that she’d always been jealous of her own mother, envious of how much everyone who’d known Bessie had adored her. If Irene had the looks, my grandmother—also a beauty—had the charisma.

“I finally know how my mother felt, and it’s wonderful,” Irene said, glowing, her paper-thin skin practically translucent. “Because tonight I feel that way, too.”

It occurred to me that this might be the first time in her life that my mother felt worthy. Good. Deserving of love, just for herself—not for her appearance, her zip code, her fine antiques, the rich and famous people she met, the five-star hotels she stayed in, her Chanel suit or any of the rest of it.

I’m pretty sure Irene knew there would be no 96th birthday fête. Still, she went right on as before: getting her hair done, complaining about the food at the retirement home, barking at the help for multiple offenses, agonizing over what to wear to the home’s annual gala. She called me for advice, and this time she actually took it. She went with the leopard chiffon.

The real clue that she knew she was dying came in the form of a card she gave me on Mother’s Day. On the front was a watercolor of children in old-fashioned bathing costumes splashing in the ocean. Inside, she wrote, “Happy Mother’s Day! I know why Clay has turned out to be such a wonderful person. You have been a great mother. I know this is true because you have been a good mother to me. I thank you for your caring and helping me in every way. Thank you, dear Mother.”

This was the first time my mother had addressed me as Mother without a soupçon of sarcasm. It made me wonder if she’d been expressing gratitude, in her backhanded, wisecracking style, all those other times. Or if somewhere along the way, her tone had shifted, and I simply hadn’t noticed.

Six weeks after the debilitating lung procedure—and two days after I’d asked the nurse if they were going to kick my mother out of home hospice care because she was doing so well—the phone rang early one evening. It was Irene, sounding scared. “Can you please come over and help me,” she said. “I can’t stand up.”

From that moment on, everything happened so fast. Stepped-up visits by the hospice team, delivery of the hospital bed, the start of morphine. Irene hated it all, except when Boston Jerry, Pittsburgh Ken and Gary, the hospice rabbi, appeared at her bedside.

My mother had met with Gary several times before, and she’d grown to rely on him to help soothe her restless, fearful mind. (Plus, Gary was young, handsome and Jewish, so she also liked flirting with him.) One day I sat in with the two of them for the first time. When Gary asked her what it was about me that she was most proud of, she paused. “Who she is,” she said finally. “Just. Who. She. Is.”

A dear friend once wrote, “You learn the world from your mother’s face.” That day I learned my goodness from my mother’s face. I told her that I loved her and that I would miss her. This time there was no holding back, no going through the motions, no saying the words I love you with half a heart.

Each day a little more of my mother disappeared. First her sight, then her hearing. She started reaching into space for things that weren’t there, and one afternoon she fell into my arms, weeping.

“I can’t see. I can’t hear. This is no way to live,” she sobbed as I held her and tried to comfort her. As if in that moment she really was my child and I was her mother.

Except, in point of fact, she was still my mother. Still Irene. Still the Belle of Pittsburgh. As soon as the tears had dried, she began fretting over what to wear the following morning when Rabbi Gary was due for his next visit.

“He’s a hospice rabbi,” I told her again. “You don’t need to worry about putting on makeup or getting dressed.”

But as long as she had a shred of consciousness left, my mother could not let herself go. What’s more, I think she secretly believed that if she had the wherewithal to pull herself together, she would be able to, if not outfox (in her case, outdress) death, then at least delay it.

And so the next morning, instead of greeting the rabbi in her bathrobe, Irene insisted on getting dolled up. She couldn’t stand or walk on her own, so Dawn, her Jamaican angel aide, carried her to the bathroom and helped her with her makeup. But that was as far as my mother got before her energy simply gave out. She toppled over into the easy chair by the hospital bed, her mouth slack, eyes shut, softly snoring.

I knew how much she wanted to see Gary again, so I tried to rouse her, without success. The rabbi talked to her, too, and said a blessing, but she didn’t respond to him either. My mother seemed to have slipped into a realm that was beyond sleep but this side of death. After several minutes, Hugh, together with Dawn and Gary, lifted her onto the hospital bed. She never awoke again.

In a way, her retreat could not have been more perfectly Irene. My mother used up every last atom of her awe-inspiring, superhuman energy reserves to make herself look pretty for the rabbi.

As I kept vigil at her bedside over the next week, I realized that it didn’t matter anymore what she and I called each other. Mother or daughter, those roles were done. Finished.

She was just Irene, a woman being swept away by the current that sooner or later takes us all. This was her story, her passage, and I was her witness. It was the first time I really saw her as a separate person—rather than one who existed only in relation to me—and somehow, during the hours I spent by her side not trying to do anything except be present, something came unhooked. All the things we fought over—my ripped jeans and wild hair, her ridiculous pretensions, my bad boyfriends and so-called irresponsible ways, her yearning for a daughter who would reflect her back to herself, my longing for a mother who would see me as I really am—seemed as insubstantial as a wisp of smoke.

Gone.

I buried her in the leopard chiffon.

Keep reading on AARP…..

A friend of mine recently returned from abroad after a ten-day visit with her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter. ‘Were ten days enough?” I asked. ‘Not enough with my grandchild.’ she said. ‘More than enough with my kid.’

That’s the weird thing about this stage of life. Because we and our kids have a long backstory, we may have issues with them, tender spots, flashpoints that can set each other off. But our grandchildren see us fresh and we see them as a living, breathing opportunity to correct the mistakes we made the first time around. We reach over the heads of our children and hold hands with our future. My mother never lived long enough to do that, or to plan adventures, or teach her grandchildren to paint. My kids never got to hear her stories about me, what I was like when I was their age, how I gave up my thumb, when I ran away from home. I never heard these stories myself. My mother’s death obliterated not just her life, but my history.

That’s probably the biggest reason why I value memories so much, why I want to make new ones with my grandchildren but also to bequeath to them—and to their parents—the old ones. My husband and I are the repositories of our son’s and daughters’ pasts. Our memory is our children’s biography and our grandchildren’s legacy.

In June of this year, I turned sixty-nine. The “nine” of each decade has always been harder for me than the round number because it means I have to get ready to exit the ten-year cycle it took me nine years to get used to. Being a time-obsessed person, I have already begun preparing myself to leave my sixties behind and enter this bizarre-sounding new place, my seventies. The next birthday will be traumatic, no question about it. But as I lurch toward that previously unimaginable number, I hope to console myself with the following thoughts:

First, if I make it to seventy, I will have lived seventeen years longer than my mother. I need to focus on that fact so that when the day comes, I will feel grateful to be alive rather than pissed off at my age. Second, at seventy, if my health holds out, I could be looking at ten more years of adventures with the grandchildren and, assuming three per year, thirty more Grandparents Weekends. That’s worth seventy birthday candles, if you ask me. Finally, here’s the clincher: Only by growing old can we witness our grandchildren growing older. It’s an existential trade off. We lose years, they gain them.  Someday I will be addled or decrepit and unable to organize adventures. But at that point it won’t matter. If all goes well, my grandchildren will be too busy making memories of their own. And every now and then, in the midst of some perfect pleasure, maybe they will smile at their kids and say,  “You know, this reminds me of something I used to do with my Grandma.”

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.

But I didn’t remember what a whole day with a child was like. The first day I had Theo to myself in New York lasted months. (This, even though with my own children it seemed as if the whole of their childhoods from start to finish had been over in a heartbeat.) We played ball and dropped by the sandbox at the playground. We went to the Natural History Museum, then rode the carousel horse in Central Park and, fearing that Theo might slip off, I wrapped my arms tight around him—and together we slipped off onto the rotating wheel.

I skipped the  description of the carousel ride when I returned Theo to my daughter. “He was wonderful,” I said, taking off his jacket and hat. “Smiling his great big smile at everyone who peered into his stroller.”

“Hmm,” Elizabeth said when she picked him up. “He seems to be missing a shoe.”

“A shoe?” I asked, completely unaware that Theo had spent the afternoon with only one shoe. “It must have dropped off in the museum.”

“Did you put the A and D ointment on his diaper rash?” she asked, scrambling through the diaper bag.

“Of course,” I replied. “I changed him at the coffee shop.” And then I remembered that the A and D had dropped out of the diaper bag and I’d forgotten to pick it up when we left in a hurry because Theo was crying his heart out.

Almost thirty years had passed between my last baby and this one, and I was foolish enough to expect the full measure of motherhood to dust my shoulders like snowflakes once again.

(Adapted and excerpted from “If You Knew Harry…” in Eye of My Heart)

“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.”

This exchange took place over the holidays while my son and daughter-in-law took a much-needed overnight break, and I was minding Isabelle and her two-year-old sister, Azalia. By and large, the girls did what I said—which was (mostly) in line with their parents’ way of doing things—and we had a wonderful time.

But over the course of the two days that their parents were away, I wondered—not for the first time—about a grandparent’s rightful role as disciplinarian.

Is it our job to enforce the parents’ rules at all times when we’re with our grandkids, or is it kosher for us to be a little lax and loose?

What’s the ideal balance between being a fun grandparent and a no-nonsense grandparent? My own grandfather was a total pushover, and I adored him. My nana was a little stricter but always loving, and I adored her, too.

To help me answer the question for myself, I reached out to some grandparent friends.

“Sometimes the girls and I do wicked things, like eat dessert before dinner,” says Victoria. “It’s fun and we all feel a little sinister.” But, she adds, the nine-year-old twins, who typically spend the night with her once a week, are extremely well behaved. What’s more, the same rules apply under her roof as in the girls’ own home. Says Victoria: “I have enormous respect for my kids as parents, and I’m happy to abide by their rules.”

Sounds perfect, right? If only all grandparents were on the same page as their adult children. But alas, often there are differences.

My friend Elaine is exasperated by the way her daughter and son-in-law are raising her grandchildren, 4 and 2. “They negotiate everything,” Elaine despairs. “The kids have so much power, it’s scary. Honestly, a two-year-old doesn’t need ten choices for lunch. Both kids seem overwhelmed by all the decisions they have to make. What they really need are clear limits. So they act out, and push and push to find out where the boundaries are. When my husband and I are with them, we simply don’t negotiate and the kids seem relieved.”

The situation is even more complicated because the childrens’ parents disagree about so many things, says Elaine. “If I were to interject myself into the conversation, I would have to take sides and that would be hurtful to everyone. So I bite my tongue.”

Another tongue-biter I know is my friend Brenda. Brenda’s son is separated from the mother of his child, who has full custody. “I can’t say a word,” Brenda says, “because I  basically have no leverage. I’m just grateful that my son’s ex allows me to be a part of my grandson’s life.”

Obviously, so much depends on the relationship with one’s adult children and their partners. My friend Florence, who has a solid connection with her son and daughter-in-law, admits that she takes small liberties with her five-year-old granddaughter. “I tend to let her stay up a little later than usual or watch one more video than she can at home,” Florence says. “I believe that as grandparents we have that perogative. I think of myself as a kind of fairy grandmother. I can give my granddaughter things no one else can give her. But even though I’m sometimes more lenient than her parents,” she adds, “at other times I’m more strict. As long as we don’t go too far, grandparents have the flexibility to bend a bit in both directions.”

Carmelita Thomson, a psychotherapist in Eugene, Oregon, and the grandmother of five, advises grandparents to follow the lead of their adult children. “It’s not our job to set the rules, even though we may disagree with them,” she says. “Still, it’s normal for grandparents to want to jump in and offer advice. After all, we don’t stop being parents. But in general, it’s best to check our impulse to chime in, even when we’re sure we know better.” Of course, she adds, “when we’re alone with the kids, we have to make decisions and take on more responsibility. Sometimes, the parents may not like what we decide.”

Reader, I confess. I did not serve Isabelle gelato right before dinner, but I gave her two heaping scoops for dessert.

This post appeared on Grandparents.com

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.

We inherited those rites (and all their proscriptions) when we inherited our ancestors. I come from an unbroken line of caste-observant Hindu Bengalis who have followed unvarying rules on choosing names. Women were named after goddesses of wisdom, prosperity and righteous ferocity; queens from the epics known for wifely devotion and self-sacrifice; sacred musical instruments; sin-dissolving rivers and waterfalls. My name, assigned to me at my formal namkaran (“naming”) ceremony at an auspicious hour on an auspicious date is a variant of Sarswati, the Goddess of Learning.

But on that April day in 2004, a China-born American baby girl, adopted by an Iowa-born father who is half Bengali, a quarter Anglo-Dutch and a quarter French-Canadian, and a Chicago-born mother who is part German and Irish, was formally named Quinn Xi Anand Blaise (in her Chinese orphanage, she’d been named “Qin”) without any direction from priests, pastors, swamis and monks. We were celebrating mixture, not purity; improvisation, not uncompromised ritual.

The new parents—our son Bart Anand and his wife, Kimberley Ann—shuttled  between their ground floor apartment and the roof deck, soothing over-excited children, seating heat-exhausted senior citizens in the only sliver of shade, setting up a “station” for the naming rites and games at one end of the deck and buffet tables for a pot-luck lunch (designed to please carnivores, herbivores and vegans) at the other. The day’s festivities ended with my hosting a dinner in Bart’s favorite neighborhood Indian Bengali restaurant, owned (of course) by a Bangladeshi Muslim. In my mother’s girlhood, a Brahmin eating food cooked by a Muslim would have been punished with permanent caste-expulsion. The Sunday brunch following the naming ceremony featured (of course) lox and bagels.

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.

My grandchildless friends think the reason I make the trip so often is because of where my son and his family live: Paris. Yes, the City of Light is a definite plus, but to be honest I don’t see all that much of the city when I’m there, unless you count parks and playgrounds. As far as I’m concerned I would see the kids no less (and probably more) if they lived in Paris, Texas.

I realize that I’m a jumbo jet kind of grandparent, but does my yearning to spend so much time with les petites, to know them intimately, make me a helicopter grandparent too?

I certainly didn’t inherit either the helicopter or jumbo jet gene from my own parents, who saw my son once or, at most, twice a year when he was small. When they did visit, it was for a few days and they decamped to a hotel. They didn’t seem to feel the same urgency I feel to be a consistent presence in the lives of my grandchildren.

I didn’t know what to expect before I became a grandmother five years ago, but I certainly didn’t anticipate falling so hard. After all, I’m a happily married working woman who prizes her independent spirit. I have a life. I never would have predicted that I’d feel like a teenage girl with her first crush—even now, five years and a second granddaughter into this granny business.

I long to be with them, even though after several days I feel so exhausted I can hardly remember my name. And it’s nothing short of a miracle if I don’t come down with one of the viral bugs that seem to proliferate around them like mosquitoes in a swamp. Still, I wouldn’t trade my time with les petites for anything—and I have plenty of company.

“I never thought I would want to be as involved as I am,”says my friend Mary, the grandmother of a one-year-old. “I’m a little surprised by how deeply connected I feel. Before the baby was born, I thought there was nothing more boring than listening to a grandmother go on and on about her grandchild,” she adds. “But now, no matter what my granddaughter does, I think she’s the smartest and cutest kid who ever lived, and I’m the one who needs to shut up and stop talking about her so much.”

Many people I know feel the way Mary and I do. And it’s not just the nanas. “Although I expected to be involved, I’m joyously surprised by the transformative experience of being a grandfather,” says Porter Shreve, a family therapist. “I’m discovering that I love to play and do silly things and just be in the moment with the kids.” This was not the case, he notes, when he was the super responsible father of four, at a time when men’s roles were far more narrowly defined.

Of course, grandparental love is hardly a new phenomenon. Still, the intensity of the ardor—as well as the planning that often goes into it these days—seems to be getting cranked up a notch among boomers.

I’m not the only one of my grandparent friends who has to travel—roughly 45% of today’s grandparents live more than 200 miles from the grandkids, a number that seems to be rising. Take my friend Karen, who lives in Maryland and has grandchildren in both northern and southern California. Karen boards a plane to see one set or the other every four weeks, and because she works full-time, her visits are limited to three-day weekends.

“It’s completely exhausting, ridiculously expensive and I use up all my vacation time, but I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she says. “I want the kids to know me and I want to know them. Before they were born, I worried that I lacked the grandmother instinct. I had no clue that I would feel so passionately.”

Another friend, Ellie, thinks that one reason why today’s grandparents are so kid-oriented is because many of us—especially boomer women—spent our own children’s early years focused on our careers. “I was distracted when my kids were growing up and I refuse to let that happen with my grandkids, says Ellie, even though she continues to work full time. “When I’m with them, I’m in heaven. I don’t want to be anywhere else. With my own children I always felt so torn.”

Then there’s the relationship thing. Unlike our parents’ generation, today’s grandparents are much more psychologically inclined. Many of us have been in therapy. We tend to be introspective and talk about stuff.

“Grandparents now put a lot of thought into the role and their relationships with their adult children and grandchildren. They want to do everything right,” says Martha Horne, a social worker who teaches a class called “Grandparenting Theory and Practice” at OLLI, a lifelong learning center in Washington, DC. Horne’s classes are well attended, and she’s been amazed by the number of men who consistently turn out.

It makes me chuckle to think of my own parents or grandparents signing up for a class in grandparenting. Like parenting, grandparenting was just something they just did, without too much heavy analysis. Then again, maybe they didn’t have to think about it all that much back in the day when most families resembled Team Ozzie and Harriet—a couple of kids, and four (if they were lucky) grandparents. “Now with divorce, blended families, multiple grandparents, and people living all over the globe, things can get quite confusing,” says Horne.

What isn’t confusing is the love part. The ardor. The need to connect in real time and space. Which is why I’m about to spend yet one more miserable, sleepless night scrunched up like a sardine as my jumbo jet hurtles its way across the Pond.

Read more: http://www.grandparents.com/