Clinically speaking, it's a fascinating observation. On one hand, the fact that they won't easily offer hugs and instinctual displays of affection to the people who love them the most drips with sad and frustrating irony. On the other hand, it's perfectly understandable in the lost, found, "who's here to stay and who's not" self-preservation of their psyche. I think if you and I didn't have permanent parents nailed down until we were six, seven or eight, we'd be a little wary of offering too much automatic affection to the next set of "loving" arms that may or may not be there the next day, or the next year, or the next parental era.
I think in their world, they count their blessings but cover their bases. Trust but verify, Reagan used to say about the Soviets.
"We'd like to cozy up to you, Grandma, but until we're just a little more comfortable with the great, complicated math of our ever-changing parental (and grandparental) trajectory, arm's length is all you're going to get. We've had parents before. We've had grandparents. And some of them vanished." That's a daunting hurdle for a seven-year-old to jump. In their world, hugging is vulnerability. Trusting gets you hurt. Sometimes the leap of faith to love again is enormous.
J1 & J2 have four people they call "Grandma," in any of its preferred variations.
They have "Mom-Mom," their biological, maternal grandmother; a person who would not normally come with the package in a closed adoption, but through the easy transparency of Facebook and the tight, know-it-all close-knittedness of our small Las Vegas Jewish community, was a person who easily identified us as "the guys who were adopting her grandkids," even before they came to live here.
There's "Mama," Adam's mom, who also lives here in Las Vegas, but like "Mom-Mom" above, far enough away from our house in a different part of town where visiting easily and regularly is not a quick, spontaneous hop in the car, but more of a "figure this out and plan for a day" scenario. Lovely women both, but in a world where homework reigns and bedtime comes at 7:30, visiting either of them after school or day camp in the midst of ongoing therapy, lots of friends and play dates (thank goodness), and all the other first-grade, second-grade hullabaloo requires a circle on the calendar and the logistical organization of an advance team.
There's "Grandma Judy," my mom, who lives the farthest away, clocking in at 1,700 miles back in Wisconsin. The kids visited her once in her home state and she's been out here twice since the adoption, once for our wedding, once for an extended winter getaway, so quite naturally in her book, when she can be with us, the kids do get her in more concentrated doses, but week by week throughout the year, she definitely gets the short end of the stick when it comes to available face time.
And there's also "Grandma Kayzee," who ironically, is probably the grandma we here at home base think of least and our kids think of most. She has been all but marginalized into the non-existent "past-is-past" history of our grown-up, collective, post-adoptive minds, but ironically, she's still probably the 1 out of 4 our kids most easily identify as "Grandma." We'd all do well to remember that. She was their live-in grandmother in foster care from ages 3 to 7, the time when memories most easily solidify. The fact that they had her so long and lost her so easily is probably another one of those "arms length" factors they feel instinctively as they learn to trust and depend (or re-depend) on their three emerging or re-emerging grandmothers.
In other words, Grandma's Three, if they're not quick to hug you and kiss you, or run into your arms, I know your plight, I feel your pain, but it's nothing unique you can claim as your own. It's the same casual dismissal Adam and I have faced ourselves for 14 months. In the great emotional-neediness of our newly-combined lives, there's a hard but necessary pecking order. The kids come first because their needs are enormous and all-encompassing, and all the rest of us line up for diddly. On even the best day, you take what you can get and you smile. You watch them hug others, effortlessly and easily, and no offense, but you sort of have to suck it up and move on. Your love for them is endless and pure. Their love for you is cautious and new.
Adam and I survive their slights and casual dismissals on a daily basis, so when you tell us out loud it makes you sad that the kids won't hug you as easily as they hug others, believe me fully, I'd change it if I could, but for now, it's all they are able to do, and you have to be patient, and with no doubt at all, you are empathetically understood in a way you can't imagine.
It's hard to teach adopted children to love and trust again. Whether it's love for parents or love for grandmothers, no one gets a Fast Pass in the Disney line. Their hugs for you will come with patience. Their love for you will come with time.
And even with that gentle admonishment laid aside, I find myself living in a beautifully-realized paradox. It's up to me, as a not-yet-fully-trusted father, to teach my children how to love and trust their grandmothers.
How magical it will be for them if someday, without hesitation, they forget the pain and forget the past and once again open themselves up to the delicious lifelong luxury of running and jumping into the arms that will always hold them the closest.
Because by any definition, that's what grandmas are put on our earth to do.
# # #
Dear Justice and Justin,
The older I get, and the more I appreciate the stories of people's lives being far more interesting and compelling than my own, the more I realize what an opportunity I missed by never sitting down with my Grandma Hannah and asking her to tell me the stories of her life the way I'd ask her now.
Because of that, my memories of my grandma are beautifully perfect the way cotton candy is; sticky and special and sweet to my senses, but with no real substance, the way I'd want her to talk to me today. It's a shame she died while the only person who fascinated me was me.
That was my loss to be sure, because I could have had full, memorable, melt-in-the-mouth memories for the ages, but cotton candy is all I found time for.
Not that it makes her any less perfect. When I remember my Grandma Hannah now, the stories themselves are spun in fragility; delicious, fleeting nibbles of life, on the tip of my tongue, but gone just as quickly as fatherhood and life continue to consume me. It's hard to find time to remember how much she loved me. And I don't know. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be. Maybe that's what makes her memory - when I do stop to remember her - so continually treasured.
And I guess that's why I wish you could find it within yourselves to emerge like butterflies and love your own amazing collection of grandmas just a little bit more and a little more easily. I understand the road you've traveled and I don't want to rush you, but on the other hand, opportunities to live and love truly are time-dependent, and the fully-loved little grandson who still resides in my soul remembers how special this was and doesn't want you to miss any of it. "These are the days to remember," Billy Joel said in a song once. "And they will not last forever." So, soak them up, my children. All of this, everything they offer you, never comes again.
If I go back as far as I can, really push my memory into almost magic, I can remember being not much more than knee high, looking up, eager in anticipation, watching my Grandma Hannah making me bread and butter with sugar on top. To her, that was a perfectly nutritious lunch for a child, in a time and an era when restaurants still let you pour your sugar from a big glass jar on the table with a hole on top and a saltine cracker inside to keep it from clumping. I remember my grandma mixing her own cream-and-sugar coffee at a level of sweetness that stunned even children. Waterfalls of sugar. Endless cascades.
I remember the cozy comfort of my grandma's bedroom on Pine Street, where the air was always sleepy and dozy with eucalyptus and menthol, where Vicks and crumpled Kleenex lined her bedside table. There was no night light in my grandma's bedroom. It was just me and her and the pitch dark moon. Dogs might bark, thunder might rattle, but everything was perfect. I was safe and scared at the same time, and it was my favorite place to be.
Cuddled up to her for warmth and security, I remember her low, dramatic tone as we laid there I'm the dark on Pine Street, me at six and she still young, making her nearest grandson and most frequent sleepover guest giggle in the night with "Where was Moses when the lights went out?" Her drawn-out answer to her own funny question, coming immediately after, like a ghostly moan..."In--the--dar-r-r-r-k!"
I remember walking hand in hand to Central Lanes, pancakes at Earl's, darts at the C.Q., and the two of us alone, me all of 8, watching Richard Nixon resign the presidency and giving us the peace sign goodbye from the TV in her living room before he got in his helicopter and flew away from Pine Street for good.
I remember "rambunctious" and "heavenly days!" and words and phrases that were especially hers. "Sakes alive" and "go outside" and "I'm not asleep, I'm just resting my eyes."
When Auntie Erin was born, I remember it took her the whole first week to quit telling people Grandma Judy named her Urrin. She had a hard time wrapping her tongue around that one. You would have thought E-R-I-N was the most rare and elusive new spelling in the universe. But with a little practice and a grandmother's love, she got it.
I watched her in different times at different houses be a grandma for the ages, first for me and your Uncle Smedley back when he was still just Todd, then for all the rest of my cousins...Jenny and Sara (who shared her with Auntie Erin when she was little), then Adam and Andy at the apartment over Aunt Barbie's, and then finally for Darcie and Courtney.
I remember being older then and even more full of myself, but still having the half ounce of wisdom I needed to stop and watch them when I could, as Grandma Hannah came to the end years of living on her own, still active and happy with a room full of Barbie dolls and a fridge full of Kool-Aid, making Courtney and Darcie laugh like so many of us before them, not watching them with envy, but taking a rare, reflective moment in the self-centered whirlwind of my early adulthood, to truly notice and appreciate the luck those two girls shared, catching Grandma Hannah at the end of an era.
To the two of you, Justice and Justin, I'd say what I'd say to anybody when it comes to grandmas. I wish I had mine back again. I wish she'd lasted longer. My life became infinitely richer and evermore blessed with the happy memories I have of Hannah and Gussie, Elsie and Ellen, Stella and Marie, the great grandmothers of my life.
So if yours are still here -- and thank goodness they are -- enjoy them as much as you can. Learn how to hug them and love them without fear. They are the rocks of your history, but beautifully, strangely, they are still just cotton candy...incredibly sweet, fragile and fastly consumed, gone in a heartbeat while the music's still playing on the midway.
So, open up your arms and hug a little more.
Treasure her while you can...that sweet, fleeting heartbeat called Grandma.
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