I was doing all right without being a grandmother.\u00a0 Friends close to my age who were going to have grandchildren already had them.\u00a0 The time had passed when, if my one and only child was going to reproduce, she would have.\u00a0 In my family, the women have been\u00a0grandmothers by their late thirties and early\u00a0forties.\u00a0 My daughter was already 40.\u00a0 We had no reason to believe she’d have a baby.<\/p>\n
I did what people do.\u00a0\u00a0I accepted it.\u00a0 Not every woman will be a mother.\u00a0 Not every mother will be a grandmother.\u00a0 All of this to say that after enough years go by, you’re sure that ship has sailed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When you don’t think you’ll have grandchildren, there’s nothing to prepare you for how the news will feel.\u00a0 It’s like having someone hand you a check for a million dollars – except that if someone gave me such a check, I wouldn’t spend time saying things like “Who, me?”\u00a0 and “Would you look at the name on that check and make sure it’s mine?”\u00a0 I’d grab the money and run.<\/p>\n
My daughter came for a visit in the spring of 2004 and handed me a check for a million dollars.\u00a0 It took a few seconds to get past the disbelief.\u00a0 I asked questions, I’m sure, just to hear the news again.\u00a0 Yes, she repeated, I’m pregnant.\u00a0 Are you sure?\u00a0 Yes, we’re sure.\u00a0 Tests?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 You’ve seen the doctor?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 And everything is good?\u00a0 Yes, everything’s fine.<\/p>\n
Here are some of our begats:\u00a0 My daughter, Cathleen, married Edan, who came here from Israel several years ago.\u00a0 My mother, Cathleen’s grandmother, was a good-looking, curly-headed woman with big eyes and full lips.\u00a0 Edan’s grandmother on his father’s side, I’m told, looked much like that.\u00a0 Since Edan looks like both his grandmother and Cathleen’s grandmother, it seems logical their union could produce a curly-headed girl with big eyes and a great smile.<\/p>\n
Caedan Ray will be three years old on Monday and I’ll be in Los Angeles to join her parents and her pre-school friends (she calls them “all my kids”) to share birthday cupcakes.<\/p>\n
If you’d told me five years ago that I would be packing tonight for this birthday trip, I wouldn’t have believed you.\u00a0 But if you tell me now that my Thanksgivings will forever be more meaningful because of a silly little girl born in 2004, I won’t question it.<\/p>\n