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My old school friend, visiting from England, dropped a bombshell on us recently when she announced that she is soon to be a grandmother. The news induced an out-of-body experience akin to the one in the movie Father of the Bride, in which the daughter tells her parents she’s engaged and all the father can see is a five-year-old girl telling him she’s getting married.
Looking at my friend when she revealed impending granny-hood, I had a flashback to her as my teenaged friend. There she was, coming to school with a wet ponytail from early-morning swimming training: the girl I sat with in maths class, sharing a book in that sunny spot under the slanted window that looked up to the sky.
I remembered her generously opening up her weekly pay packet from her job at the bakery to buy us lollies after school on a Friday. She was my accomplice in sending out anonymous Valentine’s Day cards. Some years later, on holiday from England, she took me into a Laura Ashley shop to try on a dress and asked me to be one of her bridesmaids. She was the radiant bride, the first of our group of friends to tie the knot, and the first to have a baby.
All those events flashed before my eyes and seemed just a moment ago; yet there she was, telling me that that first baby of hers was about to be a father himself.
My friend has always been a trailblazer but the notion that a schoolfriend might soon bear the title “grandmother”? It’s confronting.
It is confronting like the first time you realise you can no longer swing across monkey bars or when you realise that foods you once enjoyed – chips, rice, pasta – now make you feel ill. It is akin to discovering that your eyes with contact lenses won’t focus on anything up close, so you have to wear both contacts and glasses to read a page. In other words, hearing that one of your school friends is about to become a grandmother makes you feel old.
Most of us have a subjective age in our head: that is the age we feel and how we see ourselves. Mine has never shifted from 23. That was my age when I travelled through Europe before starting full-time work. I suspect that when my children reach that age it will push my subjective age higher but, for now, I stay at 23. My friend’s advancement to grandmother status conflicts with how I see her and myself.
Another difficulty is that my perception of “grandmother” aligns with the Looney Tunes version – that small, white-haired old woman who owned the constantly battling Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird. My friend is nothing like that.
The grandmothers who’ve been in my life and in my children’s lives are not conventional grandmas. They declined that title and chose their own names (Dearma for one, Mardi for another). Dearma was diminutive with a big personality and could effortlessly command a room, comfortable in the chaos of a big family. I remember her in her 80s, elegantly dancing with a great-granddaughter outdoors, surrounded by family, with a backdrop of scrubby Australian bushland behind them.
My mother (Mardi to her grandchildren) has long hair which she often wears up in a high horsetail. In the wheelchair, she nods regally to all passersby and writes poems illustrated with her skilful, quick sketches to record family events. “Grandma” just seemed incompatible with Dearma and Mardi’s eternally independent and youthful spirits.
Others may feel differently, perhaps seeing “grandma” as a hard-earned designation, a title that is precious and to which few in any family can lay claim. Even so, if I am lucky enough one day to have grandchildren, I don’t think I will want to be called Grandma or some version of it. Maybe I’ll be “Lissa” or make up a title, as my mother did.
What I can be sure of is that I won’t be conventional in that next phase of life, if it arrives. I suspect I may grow my hair long and deposit earthworms into the hands of unsuspecting grandchildren to teach them about nature. I would send them to sleep with made-up adventure stories in which they possess magic powers. I would try to make games of the mundane to liven up getting dressed and to make more palatable boring food. Without a conventional title, I may feel freer to ad-lib and be creative and young-spirited with them while still offering them cupcakes hot out of the oven, as I suspect titled grandmas do.
Melissa Coburn is a freelance writer.
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