Finding My Place

Her mouth is crammed with too-big teeth. Several are crooked and overlapping. I want to fix that and other things but it’s not my place. So I focus on what I can control but the circle drawn is nearly too small for me to stand. I have to look past things that I would fix if I were her parent, pretend those things don’t exist or don’t matter, and just simply hope for the best.

It isn’t my nature. So it is a strain.

Being a grandparent is not always so easy. Oh, we all joke about it. How grandchildren are all the fun and none of the responsibility and that is true a lot of the time, or can be true. Depending. I have been teaching myself from the beginning to know my place but the boundaries of my place have been fluid at times. So I’ve had to manage the elasticity, sometimes being more parent-like than grandparent-like and then backing off to bake brownies and pay for special camps.

I go to the band concert and applaud nicely with the other grandparents, all of us there to make the occasion richer. I have to remember I am there for enrichment. Other people are in charge of sustenance, of making sure that she has the right shirt on and gets there on time. One of them is related to me and the other isn’t anymore, hence the difficulty. Life is well only half the time.

It’s taken years but I’ve figured out that my job is to be the constant. I can’t control anything in her life but myself. I can be relentlessly constant. I can scramble her eggs, insist that she shower, answer her questions, read the stories she writes, and choke back judgement and my overwhelming urge to fix her. My job is to love her. When she is old enough, she will decide what needs fixing. I guess.

There is more at stake than her crooked teeth.

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Photo by Drew Hays on Unsplash