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Riddle me this, Batman
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Riddle me this, Batman
  See if you can solve the following mystery before I tell you the answer in the fifth paragraph: I sat down to write this column on Saturday, put on the reading glasses I use at my computer, and couldn’t see a thing – the lenses of my glasses were smeared with a substance that, for reasons that will become clear later, I suspected was mashed banana.  I cleaned my glasses on my shirt-front, put them back on, and could see even less. Ah, I thought to myself, I didn’t rub enough to remove the banana, I only smeared it around. I repeated the procedure with my glasses and shirt-front, put the glasses back on and found them still more smeared. I removed my glasses and looked at the front of my shirt. It was covered with mashed banana. If there was a way to score your responses, I bet we’d find female readers guessed it first. I bet by the third paragraph they were thinking, “Oh, she must have a toddler in the house.” That’s right, our 2-year-old grandboy, Ian, is back at our house, bringing sunny smiles, giggles and messes. The boy is a banana fiend.  I find I am much better equipped to deal with the messes as a grandma than I was as a mom: I recently told my friend Mary that Ian had already christened our brand-new, lovely sofa with chocolate milk and apple juice. She remembered, and so do I, that familiar lament of young mothers everywhere (we both had boys but I’m guessing girls are just as messy): “I’m never going to have anything nice!”  This is usually thought, rather than said aloud, on the occasion of your children destroying the third cherished object of the day, or when facing the harsh truth about grape juice and red Kool-Aid® (they’re never, ever coming out of the couch/rug/shirt you liked so much), or trying to work a wad of Play-Doh out of the carpet. It’s a very silly thing to say or think. As Mary points out, if you have children, you already have something nice. Messy, frequently annoying, sometimes expensive, but very nice.  Mom would have been grouchy after blotting up chocolate milk from the new sofa, and probably would have made up some unenforceable rule, like, “No more drinks on the sofa, ever!” Grandma just says, “Be more careful,” and thinks about the best time to rent the steam-cleaner: After a certain number of spills, or not until the sofa starts to get crunchy?  It’s all in your perspective: When you’re a young mother, sometimes you feel as if what’s happening in your life at the moment is all there is, or will ever be: You will never get to sleep through the night, have a clean house, be able to read a book or take a bath all by yourself. You will always be mucking about with dirty diapers, picking children up, getting them drinks, telling them not to do whatever it is they’re doing that threatens their safety or the structural integrity of the house. When you’re a grandma, you realize how short childhood really is. You know that in a heartbeat, they’re not babies anymore; then they’re not toddlers anymore; then they’re not little boys or teenagers anymore; and then they’re not there anymore. Grandmas know they’d better enjoy a child’s dependency while they can. It can be tiresome, but there are these moments: When a child discovers something for the first time and stares at it in wonder; when he learns to do something by himself and glows with pride; when he runs to you smiling and hugs you around the neck; when he gets tired and lays down with his head in your lap; when he wakes in the morning, gets out of his bed and comes and snuggles into yours.  Hang onto those moments. Dwell on them while you’re cleaning the crushed Cheetos out of the chair seat; when you’re picking the hard candy out of your hair; when you’re retrieving the small cars from the narrow crack between the range and the countertop. And repeat, calmly, to yourself, the grandma mantra: “This won’t last forever.”  |
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