When my granddaughter, Ryan, was 2 (she's 5 now), I'd take her on my bike the few blocks from her mother's house to the Montessori House of Children School, her nursery school. There was a lot of worried chatter from the child-seat behind me: She reminded me that coats go in the cubbies, asked if I'd remembered my bike lock this time, and reminded me to walk the bike at busy intersections.
One day when I took her to the half-day program the school offered during Easter vacation, Ryan's name was not on The List. "We're full," the teacher explained.
All the way back home, Ryan asked me about The List. Why wasn't her name on it? Wasn't she supposed to be there? Why did they make a mistake?
"I forgot to call them," I admitted. I felt terrible. Ryan is not the sort of child who takes not being on The List in stride. My job as her grandmother is to help shrink the world to a safe place, where rules are kept, people wear only their own shoes (a pet peeve of hers) and little kids are not turned away from the place where they are supposed to be.
Ryan likes things to be regulation. (We call her "the hall monitor.") The other day, I gave her a blank notebook to fill with her fantasies, drawings, whatever. She loved it. She immediately drew a series of boxes down the page, and copied "Make Bed" next to one of them (she had made me write out the words for her). Then she checked the box smartly, with a satisfied air. "Her first spread sheet," her uncle said, admiringly. As early as one-and-a-half, she'd take shoes right off my feet and give them to her mommy. At two, she'd hold up a green Cheerio and say, "We're not supposed to have this color." (I noticed that she ate it, though.)
Now her parents have divorced, and more than ever, she needs rules.
And yet the grandmother that was delivered to her, me, is a slipshod sort of grandmother, absent-minded and casual, the kind of person who gets honked at; who dashes out of the nail salon with the polish still wet, often followed by cashiers insisting that I take my change; who tends to regard signs as suggestions and to go in through the "Out" door. I take the wrong cart in the supermarket and don't realize it until I get to the checkout line and wonder why I am buying two six-packs of Belgian beer.
Instead of my showing Ryan proper values, like a good grandmother, it's the other way around: She has struggled since the age of 2 to show me that having a least of modicum of consistency would not be amiss.
"Can I have some Pepsi?" she'll ask me, and when I say, "Pepsi is not for kids," she'll ask, "Then why did you give me a capful of it before?"
She looks to me — as she does to all adults — for steadiness and consistency. So did her mother as a little girl, though I was kind of easygoing and lax then, too: Sometimes I took her and her brother out of school to go bike riding in the rain.
This is a second chance to get it right. Because Ryan is watching, I try hard to be the person she is determined that I should be. I take the supermarket cart all the way back to the cart corral, instead of lodging its front wheels over the nearest raised curb. I buckle her up when we are going around the corner, and then buckle my own seat belt as well. I park properly, too, because she knows about the white lines in parking lots and is naturally anxious that all cars, especially mine, fit in them neatly.
On good days, I realize that she and I together make a balanced whole, that like any good team we balance each other out, enlarge each other. She raises my standards, and I try to relax hers. I persuade her that the blue cup will do as well as the yellow, and show her that sand falls right off when it dries. I get her to put on an occasional pair of jeans instead of a dress, and persuade her that if one washable tattoo is nice, four are even better. She shows me how to color within the lines and I show her how to scribble all over the page, and there we are, our hands moving together, touching.
To read what one grandfather's grandkids taught him, click here. Elsewhere on Grandparents.com, learn how birth order affects your grandchildren, find our guide to your grandchildren's education, find surprising suggestions about what young children need to become brilliant, and discover the best ways to praise your grandchildren.
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