She never got to be the grandmother she wanted to be.
By: Iva-Marie Palmer for YourTango.
My mum never got to be the kind of grandma she wanted to be, but she was the mum I needed her to be.
“I ordered you a sun dress. You’ll love it! I wore sun dresses the whole time I was pregnant with you and your brother,” my mum said. She proudly spoke of her mythic low weight-gain pregnancies. “I walked right out of the hospital in one.”
I bristled. My first instinct was to reject the gift, unseen, arguing many of my mum’s unasked-for favours. The irony was, her hope that I wouldn’t pack on too much pregnancy weight was right there with me.
The women in my family aren’t good dieters — daily deprivation of favourite foods is a sure-fire hit off the madness pipe — so I’d never take off the excess pounds.
I bit back my worries and my protest, but I’m sure I had an edge in my voice when I asked if the dress was returnable. They say you always hurt the ones you love, and I’m pretty sure the phrase originated with mothers and daughters.
I didn’t want stress; I was finally pregnant past the seventh week, heartbeat heard and all. Two years of trying and two early miscarriages led to finally deciding that if I wasn’t meant to carry a kid, we’d adopt one or my husband and I would be child-free people who went to Hawaii all the time and had really nice furniture.
It was my mum who helped me make peace after the second miscarriage when I cryingly drove to work. She told me, “If it doesn’t happen, so what? You can still have joy.” She didn’t say how I’d do that or why she believed it, but it was enough for me.