I remember the year I thought it was all over.
My kids were old enough to all be in school, and I was packing up some of their baby toys for donation, crying over doing it, as if I hadn’t just been cursing the consistent state of the toy room.
For all I knew, that thing could have housed squatters.
For years I had done daycare to make staying home with my girls a possibility, but now the last of my daycare kids was about to start preschool, and I wondered where a house with no more little kids in it was going to leave me.
I cried a lot that summer. A LOT. Enough that people called to check on me, and my friends always had concerned looking eyebrows.
My entire identity was wrapped up in things like peanut butter and jellies, and making sidewalk chalk paint out of cornstarch and food coloring in muffin tins.
I was moving on, sure, but it was by being shoved, with both hands gripping so tight to the past that my knuckles were white.
Admittedly, I was kind of a disaster.
Then the call came:
The mother of my last daycare baby told me she had just found out she was pregnant, and said that she really couldn’t imagine anyone else watching her new baby, since I’d basically helped raise the last one.
She begged me to agree to taking on just one more baby.
So, I said yes; Yes to starting all over again, yes to the toys and bottles and diapers.
A few months after that conversation, I was being handed a brand new, bald-headed baby named Dutton.
Once Dutton was of preschool age, though, I faced the exact same predicament of wondering what I’d do next, and how I’d ever survive without things like board books, and so many plastic animals strewn across my floor it was like an obstacle course just to walk to the bathroom.
The look of a house with children in it meant something precious to me I struggled to explain to my neat-freak husband.
I never minded an oddly placed sticker, or toddler palm prints on my mirrors.
They were merely signs of living the only life I’d ever wanted.
I know there are women out there who dream of having a high-powered career, and things like wearing a pant-suit, but these primary colored views and a life of singing songs and rocking little ones to sleep had been all I’d ever dreamed of.
When I was a child I didn’t just play with my dolls, they went everywhere with me.
I would pose them under the big oak tree up the road, and make them take family pictures.
(A phase I should have appreciated more, as none of THEM complained or rolled their eyes when I made them do it, unlike every one of my teenagers)
I was first to volunteer to babysit, should anybody need one.
I can remember one job at 12 years old that involved three kids, and me making dinner with a stove, running a bath, and swaddling a newborn.
I felt fully capable of stirring with one hand and filling a sippie with another.
I was just made for it.
I laugh thinking about asking MY 13 year old to do all that now for $2.50/hour.
She’d demand $100 and some sports equipment.
She’d call me 6 times freaking out about how to tell if mac and cheese is done, or to complain that the toddler just coughed directly on her.
Not everyone is the same. I understand this.
Having little ones filling my home was always the main goal in my mind, however.
I simply never considered the fact that there would be an “after.”
But, no sooner had my tears dried from Dutton’s last day with me, and the final toy been stored away…No sooner had I resigned myself to what I thought was for sure my final “now what,”
than did my oldest daughter come over to my house one day and hand me a very light looking Target bag.
She told me that she had picked something up for me.
At first I thought she had bought me a new bottle of vanilla, after me asking to borrow hers at least 3 times, I thought she’d grown tired of it;
But, inside that bag was a gift I wasn’t expecting:
A single pregnancy test with two pink lines.
I was going to be a grandma.
You’ve never seen such celebration. I think I kind of scared her.
Now, nearly two years later, and I think everything before was just a dress-rehearsal.
I’m not just any grandma, I’m “Grammy” to the Incomparable Mavis.
Grammy is the name I hear being said by a tiny voice that is coming walking across the gravel between our two houses multiple times a day because she begs to see me.
I’m not just her caretaker three days a week while her mom works, I think even her mom would tell you that I’m her favorite person.
She reaches for me from anyone else holding her, including her parents.
She asks for me following any minor inconvenience.
Today I sit looking around a house that is, once again, littered with toys, books, sippie cups, and diapers.
I smile remembering how worried I was about what I would possibly fill my time with, and how my life would look once my girls were grown, and I contemplate the way all of life feels like it was a circle.
To look at Mavis’ face is even like looking at her mother.
It’s like I got to start again, like no time was ever lost, like I got to go right back to holding my very first baby: Back to the beginning.
These days the feelings are gone of being frustrated with a messy toy room.
I no longer mind to read the same book 10 times in a row.
A perfectly clean house is not the goal here.
I think this is why so many grandparents seem like they’re a pushover: They’ve simply experienced having it, then losing it for a little while, and the sadness of that makes them softer.
They’ve had just enough time to miss it all in between.
They’ve seen who they knew themselves to be threatened.
When that grandchild comes along, they cling to not only the actual baby,
but they cling to a piece of life they loved, an identity, and some of their fondest memories.
Right now my own mom is on a trip across the country.
She’s been gone for just a week, and yesterday my youngest daughter smiled a half-smile at me and said that she wanted her Buddie to come back home soon, because she needed her feet rubbed with lotion.
I shook my head, thinking about how she gets pampered by my mom, and knowing for sure that my mom would do it like she always does.
She’ll do it because it’s who she is, just like me: It’s a piece of her identity to dote on the grandkids.
I’m sure there will be a time when these days are gone for good, and there are no more plastic horses or board books shoved in every corner,
but these days I treasure the sight of them so much.
They symbolize the best part of me, and I thought I’d lost them.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
