One morning, while brushing your teeth with your sonic toothbrush, you decide to march in place. Does this facilitate the job at hand? No it does not. But it’s worth it, you think, if it will help ward off impending decrepitude.
You regard the puffy-faced visage in the vanity mirror, now speckled with a fine, white mist. You shower, then blow dry your hair, bending from what was once your waist so your lank locks touch your pasty white shins. This is said to maximize hair volume. While doubled over, you practice sucking in your marsupial pouch—the 30-year artifact of your ancient pregnancy. You have reached the age when underwear (white, mercerized cotton) fit better worn backwards.
You are going to be a grandma. Or as another matron (“Old Ironsides,” Margaret Thatcher) once announced after the fact, “We are a grandmother.” And you’re not prepared.
By now, you should have attained higher levels of dignity, equipoise and charitable giving. You should be a more careful reader of the editorial page. And it wouldn’t hurt to start renting films like “Hotel Rwanda” and “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Instead, you’re a slacker. You don’t balance your checkbook. You have no annuities. You no longer have a husband. And on certain summer nights, when the warm air enfolds you like silken cashmere, you still long for that crazy, teenage feeling. You have no business being a grandma.
Above all, you have no role model. Your own grandparents died before you were born. Maybe you will be the only grandma you know how: one modeled after your own mother, 10 years gone.
By that mold, you would be the homemade doughnut-making, museum-and-surplus-store visiting, berry-picking, sneak-in-a-fun-life-lesson grandma. The kind of grandma that gives hardcover books (gems like “The Phantom Toll Booth”) inscribed with wry homilies. The kind that takes her grandchild along when she does Meals on Wheels. That could be good, you think.
So now you wait. Maternity, you notice, is not what it used to be. You are flummoxed by the accoutrements and technology now required to pull this thing off. Ultrasound scans occur approximately every two weeks. Birth plans (documented if/then scenarios) spell out the conditions of everything from approved spectators to preferred pain killers and playlists. Yet in spite of all the orchestration, the humbling mechanics of parturition have stubbornly resisted all evolution.
