Your Mom (Not Grandma)

     “Is that your mom’s painting,” my nine-year old asks barely glancing at the watercolor landscape of the Point Reyes lighthouse outside San Francisco, the one my mom, his grandma lovingly painted to commemorate another one of our mother/daughter adventures up the PCH. He doesn’t mean to but his words hurt me – reminding me of loss. Not just mine but his and his brother’s. Because no matter how many times I correct him to say Grandma Cathy showing him pictures of her in her floppy Disney hat with her name embroidered on the brim and her arsenal of cameras, purses, and fanny packs overwhelming her short, round body, she will only ever be my mom.

     Dead before he was twelve weeks along, the secret of his presence in my body frozen on my lips never uttered because I was told not to tell before I was three months pregnant, I didn’t even get to say the word grandma to her.  She never cuddled his sweet milk and Baby Bee smelling body to her expansive chest rocking him in the glider I bought with my inheritance wanting to pretend it came from her.

     I try really hard to show both my boys pictures of her even if they remind me of the pain I’ve buried. I tell anecdotes of her ability to fall asleep anywhere or how she travelled the world visiting the pyramids of Giza and dating a man with six passports before he dumped her for the heiress to the Goodyear fortune. But they half listen and rarely connect this person they’ve never met as someone related to them. They only know their Grandma Josie, their dad’s mom who spoils them with the junk food, video games, and hugs.

     Yet, I see her in my six -year-old’s flair for art. He's the child she longed for just one generation too late. He'd have gladly accepted her gifts of watercolors and sketch books filling them with more than scribbled margin notes about how I had no talent so lay off the art supplies. They would have created wonderfully imaginative, funky junk sculptures together from his hoard of toilet paper rolls and discarded wrappers. She hoarded too.  He even moves like her a deliberate pokiness, going at his own speed.

     But she’s also in my nine-year-old and his love of books. Brat that I was, I'd complain to her face that books were not appropriate birthday gifts, so where was my Barbie. But he snatches them out of the gift-wrap and dives in openly soaking up their worlds and knowledge the way I did in secret when she wasn't looking. He's cuddly like her, but also possesses her hang-dog expressions and ability to make me feel guilty.

     Why is that seeing her personality reflected back in theirs both warms my heart and pricks it at the same time? Probably because the boys and I both got cheated out of these moments.

     And I know how hard it is for them. My own Grandma Marguerite died when my mom was sixteen and was stuck in my memory as her mother no matter how many stories and photos she shared.  My mom probably felt the same way when I said “your mom” before she corrected me to Grandma Marguerite. And I wonder if she cried in private the way I do wishing there was a key or magic spell between the worlds, some Harry Potteresque ring where I could call her up for just a second so they could meet and hug and know the wonder of themselves, the people I love and loved the most.

     But I can’t create connection where there is none. I can just continue to recant my stories of her reminding them of the woman who would have loved and spoiled them with gifts and tight hugs against her ample, squishy, motherly bosom.

     Yet I know part of her still lives in my parenting style, the good: my zany antics of dancing in the kitchen and playing dress up and caring more for having fun than if I look stupid to the other parents at the park. The bad: her paranoia of public toilet seats and dirty cups; her obsessive checking to make sure the door is locked three times before leaving the house. After all, I am the woman she made me to be – her love and compassion and sense of fun and adventure and creativity all live in me.

     But be sensitive when a mom loses her mom, because she’s not just mourning her own loss but her kid’s loss too that she mourns. The loss of Grandma to Your Mom and all the connections in between.