Understudy

She’s had me up and out the door before sunrise for the past four mornings, barely able, despite my insistent imploring, to suppress her growls of excitement as I get dressed in the sleeping house. The blast of cold air out the door threatens to take my breath away and the first few steps up the incline get my heart beating. I’m moving briskly in hopes of warming from the inside out.  When I realize she’s lagging and I don’t hear the tinkle of her tag on collar, I turn around, catching the view down the sweeping hill of the street, our bright orange port-a-potty a beacon in the early morning light. It’s a Christmas card moment, not really.

   

Our home this year is not what anyone would call a Hallmark image. We’re surrounded by the mud we pulled out of Mother Earth to carve a new foundation.  We’re locked solidly behind the confines of an unwieldy construction fence, lovingly referred to as our gated community. I did consider a wreath for the port-a-potty, planted right next to the dumpster on what’s left of the front lawn. Our highlight reel is slim because the messiness of real life is leaking out everywhere.

Transformation is painful; there is very little shiny and sparkly we can hide behind. Up until two days ago the house was devoid of anything resembling Christmas.  We couldn’t even dig up an ugly sweater from the depths of our overstuffed closets.  This is the second consecutive December my carefully curated collection of ornaments and adornments remain incarcerated in a storage pod. Now I’m wondering if I will ever need them again?

I’m grieving the old ways while at the same time taking steps to move forward.  The line between tradition and nostalgia can be a fine one. Somehow exchanging gifts in my son’s home, watching my grown children unwrap slippers and socks moved from easy laughter to awkward theatrics in the span of a year, my cheek stinging from the slap of reality:  These aren’t the gifts the mom gives anymore. And, I’m really not the mom anymore; I’m the grandma.  I don’t know how to do grandma.

It hurts to bring the fixings for ice cream sandwiches with the boys’ favorite homemade chocolate cookies and leave the gathering without enjoying them, but it’s not my kitchen and I am a polite guest now, not the host. Even if I were the host, the family home the boys knew and loved is now inhabited by the strangers I sold it to and any place I choose to live going forward will never be the hearth for them.

We are, very publicly and literally, creating a new home for ourselves with this construction project; and the ah-ha moment for me over this holiday is that my boys are doing the same, just more subtly.  How the holidays get celebrated isn’t up to me anymore.  And I will make more than one blunder, disappointing myself in the process, before I come to terms with the new normal.

I realize this is all goodness. I am very blessed to have grown children who are bold enough to live life on their own terms, moving out of state, having a baby. These are proud moments, and at the same time crushingly humbling.  The choices they are making for their own lives inevitably put me in new roles I didn’t ask for and am potentially unprepared to take on. But I guess I need to jump in, too.  The only alternative is unmet expectations and perpetual disappointment, and I won’t have that. 

  

We walk in the door to my son’s home Christmas Eve, and she is so excited to see us she can hardly contain herself, the morning walks of the previous few days fresh in her mind.  She jumps up on the loveseat, wedging herself between us, reveling in the displaced love I compulsively shower upon her to excess, while at the same time she shoots the evil eye to her parents and the newborn babe on the couch across from us. She’s struggling with the change, too.

This is part of my new role, to be ready to step in at any moment I’m needed, to make sure the tried and true, those who have come before feel as loved and attended to as the shiny and new. And I'm more than qualified. Motherhood is the training ground for every grandma, in more ways than I could ever have imagined.