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Grandmother Roots
I never really had a grandmother. They don’t seem to run in my family. My father’s mother died on my first birthday. However, she had been engulfed by dementia long before my parents had married. My mother’s mother was a fierce woman who had emigrated from Italy at the turn of the century. It was rumored that she didn’t particularly want to leave Italy, and as such, she bore no small amount of resentment towards America. She refused to learn English and as a first-generation American, my mother refused to teach her children Italian. If I wanted to speak to my grandmother — I needed an interpreter. My mother’s mother died when I was eight years old.
My own mother died at age 55. She left behind my twelve-year-old self, but also three grandchildren aged two and under. Children who would never remember her. Children who never got the chance to call her “Grandma” out loud.
And then, suddenly — it seemed — I was a grandmother. I had no roadmap, no fond memories of Life as a grandchild. I had to make it up as I went along. I became the grandmother I had always wanted — for myself and my children’s children.
We usually become grandparents later in Life. I was fifty years old when The Oldest Magical Creature turned me into Nana. And just like that, I was someone new. Nothing else in My…
