Grandma's Back

Suddenly, Everything's Different

In my haste to get down to North Carolina for the birth of my grandson, I forgot my laptop.

I know what you may be thinking. Big deal! Your first grandchild? And you’re whining about forgetting your stupid laptop? Borrow one, or use your phone.

Of course, you may be much more understanding about this than I am imagining, and one of my most notable failings is to always assume the worst. But for those of you tending toward the big deal! end of the spectrum, let me explain.

I am a writer and creature of habit in equal measure. As such, it is my writerly practice to observe and analyze events, thus explaining life and what happens during the course of it to myself and anyone willing to read it. It is also habit to sit at my laptop every morning to write. Unable to do either, I found myself living a life of unexamined random and often hugely significant moments. Untethered by my grounding routine, stuff just kept happening, like my daughter’s sudden entrée into labor and finding an authentic New York bagelry in downtown Carrboro, North Carolina. Then my grandson Henry was born and came home healthy and honestly, what else matters?

Today I had to leave that beautiful newborn to return home to my laptop. As a writer and creature of habit, I am relieved, but as a grandmother, I can hardly bear it. This metamorphosis was what I needed to trace and reflect upon, and in the absence of my familiar crappy HP, I find myself on the other side of the event, bewildered, like I’ve been roused from a coma. I am not myself, and while I felt acutely every step of this initiation as it happened, the life-change passed without me contextualizing it into timeline and narrative.

I am no less a writer, no less a creature of habit, but you can now add to those identifiers grandmother. While I am happy to be reunited with laptop and routine, I must now plunge directly into the gut-wrench I feel at leaving sweet Henry, apple-cheeked, unguarded, teeny body stretching and balling up, and watching my daughter and son-in-law fall so deeply in love with him that they will never, ever unlose themselves.

Maybe I was not able to write about everything I discovered as it unfolded, but now, retrospectively, as writer, creature of habit, and grandmother with a laptop, let me tell you about the part of my heart I am missing.