“When you have a baby, watch out. Your parents will no longer be the logical people you’ve always known. You’ll barely recognize them anymore.”
I don’t remember which friend gave that advice to my wife and me, or how many other people have heard it from us. But it’s a fact, Jack.
I have caught my mild-mannered mom donning a baby blanket as a cape and prancing around the house as “Super Mimi.”
I have seen my father-in-law the financial planner down on all fours, letting my boys take turns riding ’im cowboy.
I have watched my wife's mother take my son outside in his galoshes to splash in a mud hole she encouraged him to dig in her otherwise neatly kept back yard.
I have heard my dad ask me over the phone, an hour after my son should have been in bed, “Can you call back in 15 minutes? I promised we’d play one more game of Candy Land.”
And I think it's all great. No, make that: grand.
This week, when so many Americans travel such long distances to share a turkey with their families, I’m exceedingly thankful to live just 1.5 miles from my in-laws and only 89 from my parents. It’s like having a holiday once or twice a week. For us, that’s one of the very best things about living in Atlanta.
Of course, that’s not the experience everyone has in Atlanta, city of transplants that it is. For some of our friends, visiting the grandparents means flying (or, worse, driving) to places as far-flung as Buffalo and San Antonio. That’s a lot of rivers to go over and woods to pass through.
I know the feeling. Early on, both my wife and I had to put our tearful mothers on an airplane to fly an ocean away from their only grandchild. Every once in a while, I wonder what we would have missed if that were still the case. It wouldn’t have been only the blanket-as-a-cape and the granddad-as-a-horse, the galoshes and the board games.
We probably wouldn’t have heard our 4-year-old declare, “Mom, Dad: You can leave now,” as he settled in for another sleepover at his grandma Dearie’s.
We might not have visited during the time in each of our sons’ lives when they mispronounced their grandfather’s nickname “Duga” — the etymology of which stems from his own inability as a child to say the name of a cat called Sugar — as “Doo-doo.” And watched him wrestle with the prospect of being called “Doo-doo” the rest of his life.
We may not have heard our oldest boy delight in “going to the country” when he visits my parents in Whitfield County and proclaim himself a “country boy” as he chows down on biscuits, bacon and eggs.
In short, we might not have witnessed the way that unique relationship that skips a generation develops, while we’re young enough to remember being the grandchild and yet old enough to have an inkling of the fun of being the grandparent.
Like my wife, I have just one grandparent of my own still living. Until recently, I could still visit her at her own home, the only place she’d lived since I was born, the only place in the entire world where I’ve been going for my whole life.
I can still go, but she won’t be there. My family could no longer give her all the help she needed to stay, and she moved to a retirement home a few months ago.
It was a real loss, for me as well as her, and at first it made me think about how much has changed, for me as well as her. It’s been a long time since she could pretend to wear a cape, lead me to a mud hole, or bake biscuits. And I’m no longer the smooth-faced, tow-headed little boy who used to conspire with her to buy just one more toy from the dime store before Mom and Dad came to pick me up.
But it also made me realize what’s still the same, that trying to elicit one of her short, high-pitched laughs, and succeeding, is one thing about us that hasn’t grown old.
Watching my boys build that magical bond with their grandparents gives me hope they’ll feel something similar 20, 30, 40 years from now. That’s a mighty grand reason to be thankful.
