Long-distance Grandma

Betty White of “Golden Girl” fame claimed her mother always used to say, “The older you get, the better you get. Unless you’re a banana.”

I’m pretty sure I’m not a banana: I’m a long-distance grandma. I wonder, though if I am getting better at being a grandmother. If practice makes perfect, probably not. “Motherhood is not for the fainthearted,” claims Danielle Steele in The Gift of Motherhood.

I agree.

Spiders, frogs and the contrariness of teenagers do not provide an improving ground for the cowardly. I always had a shimmering vision, though, that, with my grandchildren, we would take day-long walks along Kingsport beach, laughing at the cliff swallows, chasing hermit crabs and blinking at the sandpipers winking in and out of sight. Everything would be more fun, happier, more relaxed than with my own boys.

Then my granddaughter was born half a country away, in Winnipeg, long before I was finished raising children of my own. Part of the cost of spreading my family out over so many years is there aren’t a lot of years between the next two generations. It may be a cost I didn’t mind paying in the midst of piles of diapers and the explorations of adventuresome toddlers, but I have to admit to a definite longing to take my grandchildren on my lap and tell them stories.

Now there is a new grandson I’ve never laid eyes on. Oh, I get pictures, but when toddlers are under three, it’s the way they climb on a sofa or pick up their toys that makes them recognizable to me. I know what his voice sounds like over the telephone, but I couldn’t pick him out of a crowd, even if he were calling, “Nana! Over here, Nana!”

A friend gave me a book, The Long Distance Grandmother by Selma Wasserman. It has chapters named “The Telephone Connection,” “The Postal Connection,” “Writing Stories for Grandchildren Who Can Read.” Mrs. Wasserman recommends that these connections not be used for reprimands, for pressuring children into more desirable modes of behaviour or dwelling on the purchase of new toys.

Instead, she gives lots of examples of things a grandma can say or write to open up some real communication, suggestions like a letter to a toddler that contains his name (printed in different colours or directions) or a handprinted and simply drawn storybook that shows grandma caring for her cat.

Mrs. Wasserman even copes with writer’s block! “The secret key,” she tells us, “is to sit down to write.”

Well, other writers have told us the same thing. Have you heard these? “Apply your bottom to the seat of the chair.” “Place the pencil on the paper and keep it moving.” “The right time to begin anything is likely 10 years ago.”

And Winston Churchill’s “If you’re going through hell, keep on going.”

So, long distance grandparents of Kings County, let’s keep that connection singing!