Hey Grandparents--The Village Isn't an Address. It's a Decision.
You’ve probably seen the post by now.
The one going around about the kind of grandmother a woman intends to be someday. Dinner on the table after a hard day. Baths and bedtime covered. Bring those babies over and go get some rest. No, you don’t have to explain yourself.
My feed has been filled with it this past couple of weeks.
Women I love shared it, and I understood exactly why. It names something many of us carry--
I don’t want my children to ever feel alone.
I read it twice. Both times, my eyes stung.
Before I say anything else, I want to honor the woman who wrote it. You can feel her whole heart in those lines. She isn’t judging. She is living the hard days, it seems, without enough hands or help. And she has decided—out loud and in public—that her children will never have to wonder about her.
That is a beautiful promise to put into the world, and I’m glad she did. I hope she gets every bit of the life she is describing.
But somewhere during my second reading, something else settled in beside the ache. Something smaller and a little defensive—which is usually my signal that something has found a tender place and pressed on it.
Because I still work.
Not a few hours here and there. Fifty-hour weeks are the norm. My calendar is filled in thirty-minute blocks by people who have never met my grandbabies.
I am not the Gramma who lives fifteen minutes away with the porch light on.
I am the Gramma in the "boss clothes" as my 7 year olds say. The one that lives one or two hours up the highway, with a laptop bag always in the back seat.
And what I felt while reading that post was the old, familiar question underneath it—the one that doesn’t get asked aloud but nags at me anyway:
Does it mean less if you can’t be there like that?
Here’s where I landed when I reminded myself to S.T.A.Y.--
I was reading the post as though it were about proximity. But maybe it was more about willingness.
Every line was another way of saying, "You will not have to wonder about me".
And that—the not wondering—is available to every one of us, whether we live down the street or down the interstate.
So let me tell you what willingness looks like from where I sit.
It looks like climbing into the car at least every other week after a week that has already taken nearly everything I had. It looks like setting a 6 a.m. Saturday alarm for bitty-league basketball because there is a very small cheerleader on that sideline who will be scanning the bleachers for my face. It looks like a soccer field in the cold. A living-room dance party with the furniture pushed back. A spa day at the kitchen table with nail polish, a folded towel and a very serious little esthetician.
It looks like getting down on the floor and crawling—actually crawling, at my age and with MS to boot—after our tiniest one, chasing her all the way to the toy room just to hear the cackle she lets out when she looks back and sees me coming.
It looks like using paid time off—the good kind, the kind other people use for real spa days—to be the fill-in babysitter, or to give those littles a whole day that belongs only to us.
And it looks like this, which I want to say plainly--
I would walk out of the most important meeting on my calendar in a heartbeat if one of them needed me. Not eventually. Not after I forwarded my slides to someone.
In a heartbeat.
I won’t pretend it costs nothing. There are Friday evenings when I answer emails for most of the drive, grateful for the hotspot in my car.
There are Sunday nights when I arrive home tired in a way sleep doesn’t quite touch.
But I have never once driven home wishing I had stayed home.
Nick is retired now, which means he gets something awesome--some of the ordinary hours. The unhurried days.
I watch our littlest boy look for Pop when we walk through the door. Not for the treat or the toy. For Pop’s presence. You can tell that he knows the shape of him and feels safe in his arms.
I feel two things when I see that, and only one of them is envy.
The other is something closer to gratitude—and maybe a little bit like a promise. Because that boy is learning what it feels like to have an extra person in his life who is simply and reliably--there. All my grandchildren are lucky to have other grandparents in their lives as well who also provide a similar kind of connection and care. Again--a little envy, but mostly gratitude for them from my seat.
This Gramma is doing her best. And I am building the strongest village that I can possibly build.
It may not always look like the village we picture—the one with a porch, a casserole and a fifteen-minute drive. If that is the village you can give, I guarantee your children and grandchildren thank God for you. I was blessed to have parents who built that kind of village when I was raising my own children. If you can offer it, keep offering it. Take the babies. Make the dinner. Tell the parents to go take a nap.
What a gift.
My village looks different.
Mine has a full tank of gas, a Friday-night departure and a woman determined to make it there before bedtime.
It is built on the certainty that when the phone rings and I hear, “Hey, Mom, I need…” I will drop what I’m doing and come as quickly as the law allows.
If you’re a Gramma who still works 9 to 5 (Rest in Peace, Dolly)—if you’ve scrolled past that post with a lump in your throat, wondering whether you’re doing it wrong—I want to be the one who tells you this--
The village isn’t an address.
It’s a decision.
You make it over and over—in traffic, in your calendar and in the hundred small ways you rearrange your one life around theirs.
They will not remember how far away you lived.
They will remember that you came.
With love & light (and a dose of highway miles),
Heather
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