Thoughts about my granny

Funny how things catch you unawares sometimes...

I was happily sitting in the sun with my magazine this afternoon -- a rare thing as I always think there's probably something more important I should be doing. The girls were in the pool and Daniel was playing WII, so I decided to take full advantage of Having Time to Myself. I started reading an article in the Woman & Home about a woman who was using some of her granny's kitchen utensils and how it made her wish to have her time with her granny back again, not as a young girl because her head was full of other things then, but as an adult. She wants to show her granny the rhubarb patch at her house, ask her how to keep the birds away from the gooseberries, things like that.

And then I was crying. Just like that. No warning, no previous thoughts of my granny. Strange how it can just be there under the surface and something like this brings it all bubbling (literally!) out.

My granny died when I was 17. And I dealt with it at the time, but what you don't get until much, much later, is that you don't get any of that time back again. You don't get to go back and ask your granny how to crochet Barbie bikinis, or how to make jam or why it's important to always rinse the rice 3 times before you cook it. My granny loved me as only a granny can love a child, without having to worry about how they are going to turn out one day, how they do in school or what they wear. They can see past all that, maybe because they have already raised children from childhood through to adulthood. They know that just because you choose to wear bright blue stockings with your tackies, or hide behind an over-long fringe all the time, doesn't mean you're going to turn out a social misfit and/or an axe-murderer. They see the big picture, and can slip you chocolate and a hug when you need it.

I suspect that perhaps I was crying about my mother, actually. The missing link, the link back through to the women in our family. My mom died 14 years ago, and if I let myself think about it, I miss her more and more as I get older. I look at my children, my daughters especially, and it seems that the line backwards stops with me; the chain is broken. And I feel stupid crying for my mom, when I am a grown woman, and she died such a long time ago. My mom and I fought a lot when I was growing up and she died just as we were starting to get each other (or when I started growing up, perhaps), and before I even got married or had children. Girls need their moms around when they become moms themselves. Even if it's just to chuckle to themselves when they see the grandkids giving their mom hell. We probably wouldn't have seen eye-to-eye about a lot of things, I am not kidding myself about that, but I so wish I could still phone her up. I want to ask her for her sherbet recipe, or tell her that we have a fig tree or complain about how my kids never clean up after themselves.

Perhaps you never get too old to need your mom. I am sorry that my mom died before I knew that, and before she knew that I knew.