The Original Nana: The Sweet Influence of Grandmothers

Today, I miss my mother-in-law.  It’s Passover and I miss her.  She was the only person on earth who ever loved my husband more than me and because of that, she was formidable in all ways.  First of all, she was completely, totally, through and through Jewish.  I could feel her heartache looking at me across the room — oh, I was nice enough, but….you know, she had really hoped…where were all the nice Jewish girls?

Instead there was me.  And my 11-year old daughter.  And then there were the Nica kids – one, two, three.  And she became everyone’s Nana.

And if she ever had any reservations about how we built our family, she never said so.  Instead she looked like this the night Jhosy landed at Mitchell Field.

She started a new tradition of big family seders — and I mean, massively big, with cousins no one had ever met before, a dozen courses, and girls hired from the neighborhood who would clear the dishes for us.

She set it up so my husband and his cousin would lead the seder – practicing for the tradition that we would carry on for the sixteen years since she died.  Someone still searches for the afikomen and we all wait for Elijah.

And so I’ve been thinking about my mother-in-law today.  How she accepted me.  How she made my daughter her granddaughter.  How she never missed a beat with our crazy Nicaraguan adoptions.  How she piled on the Barbies.  And bought gifts in really big boxes.

I thought about her while I was cooking the brisket for tonight — which, for you amateurs out there, is not so easy — and I felt a whole lot of gratitude and awe.

My mother-in-law taught me something that I didn’t know I needed to learn — how to be generous – with money and time, and approval.  When I think of her — that’s the word.  Generous.

We all aspire to be better, smarter, richer.  I’ve been working on being more generous.  And being a better Nana.  Fortunately, the original Nana left pretty good instructions.