Columnist Adair Lara is the author of The Granny Diaries (Chronicle Books, 2007), a satiric guide to grandparenting. She is a former San Francisco Chronicle columnist, and lives in San Francisco with her husband, three blocks from the grandchildren.
Honestly, how pathetic are we? Uprooting our lives to follow some little kids around?! I'm talking about what I call the "trailing grandmother." The grandkids tug on her across the miles with an invisible rope, and so she says goodbye to her friends, her job, and her life and goes off to rent an apartment as close to the children as she can get.
This is never one's original life plan, of course. These are mature, independent women who were going to write that book or open that tea shop in retirement, or buy a Harley and hit the blue lines on the map with a battered copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in hand. Women who would take night classes and learn to say no in new languages. Their children had grown, and they were ready to give birth to nothing less than themselves.
But then their children gave them grandchildren.
Leaving on a Jet Plane
Take my friend Donna, for example. She had a thriving practice as a psychoanalyst amid the concrete canyons of New York City, where she had raised two children. She had no plans to ever live further west than the Hudson River.
Then her daughter, Samantha, moved across the country to Palo Alto, California, and gave birth to Donna's first grandchild, Lydia. Donna flew out and held the sweet weight of the new baby, burying her nose in the baby's neck. "I don't want to love you," she told the baby. "If I do, I will lose total control over my life." Her daughter had had a C-section and needed help, and Donna stayed the whole summer. Then she went back to New York, and tried to lose herself in her patients' interesting problems, the meetings of her book club, and a project to remodel her den.
| Would you move across the country to be with your grandkids? |
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Yes; if they moved far away, I'd follow 63.1%
No; I love 'em, but my life is here 36.9%
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She got back on a plane not when she missed her granddaughter, but when she discovered to her horror that she was beginning to
not miss her. "At about six weeks, I would kind of go numb," she told me. "It no longer mattered as much – I could wait even longer before I saw the baby again, and not even mind."
Donna did not want to slide back into the person she had been, a person not in thrall to an infant. She hated that feeling so much that when she began to feel it, she turned on the computer and made plane reservations. "I came out almost every month from Manhattan," she says. She knew the pilots by name and could expertly fold a toy baby stroller into an overhead bin.
Two years of that. Then her daughter had a second child, Carson.
Enough. Donna realized she couldn't fly across the country a dozen times a year for the rest of her life. She took stock of her options. "I decided I had to make the move while I was still young enough to rebuild a practice," says Donna, then in her early 50s.
Was the daughter overjoyed? Mother-daughter relationships are more complicated than that. Samantha was thrilled that Donna, her children's grandmother, was coming, but less thrilled that Donna, her mother, was coming.
New Coast, New Rules
"I was forbidden to live in Palo Alto," Donna recalls, the hurt of that still evident in her voice. "My daughter said, 'I don't want to run into you in Whole Foods.'" She was also warned that she should not expect to be included in everything the family did.
Still, feeling she had no choice, Donna packed up her life and moved it to the West Coast. She bought a house in Burlingame, 15 minutes up the highway, a high ridge away from the unseen Pacific. Happily, she soon had a busy schedule filled with new patients. She saw her granddaughters – three of them now – often.
Now her daughter, when she delivers the kids to their attentive grandmother, says, "I wish you lived closer, Mom. What was the matter with me?"
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