At 74, living alone in Brighton after being widowed 24 years ago, I’d happily filled the space in my life earmarked “grandmother” with work and travel.
While all my friends’ children had started producing babies years before, my own three, in their thirties and forties, hadn’t. Each was in a thriving, creative career but for different reasons hadn’t found the right life partner. So I had decided a long time ago that I couldn’t hang around waiting for them to provide me with a job description. I just hoped that I’d still be physically and mentally fit enough to assist in baby care duties should that ever be required.
Perhaps my lack of grandparenting ambition was also down to the fact that my own parents — distant emotionally and, in the end, geographically — had not been very present in my children’s lives. I vividly remember one particularly fraught phone call with my mother. When I nervously suggested that she could come and stay for a couple of days and give me a hand with my three, as my husband worked and lived in Germany, she responded with, “I’ve had four children, I don’t need to look after any more.” Not for me the hands-on mum who would offer regular pick-ups of her grandchildren from nursery or school. One time, when my husband and I lived in Milan and my eldest, about three at the time, had bronchial pneumonia, the doctors advised us to take him away to cleaner air. I immediately thought of my parents in the old family home in Hampshire and asked if we could come and stay for a few days to give his lungs a rest. My mum told me it wasn’t convenient as “Daddy says we’re going to do up the kitchen”.
Things weren’t much simpler on my husband’s side. His father had died at 38 of leukaemia and his ailing mother lived even further away, in the Highlands.
My relationship with my parents, particularly my mother, had always been difficult to navigate. Being told I was mad for 17 years and would end up in the local “loony bin”, as my mother put it, didn’t help. I was regularly thumped for arguing and “talking back”, while there was an absence of praise for my achievements, just condemnation for my perceived failures. All that, along with far too few expressions of unconditional love, took its toll. Despite my highly developed sense of fight or flight, even the locked bathroom door could be broken down by an enraged parent.
Luckily I met my husband at 17 (spot the link) at a musician friend’s all-night party in Reading. A few months later, dropping out of my A-levels, I escaped on the back of his Vespa to work in hotels in Cornwall for the summer before art school. It was to become a relationship of reassurance and security in which my pluses and minuses were equally acknowledged and accepted for 32 years, before he died after three years of leukaemia.
Until recently I have carried my negative interpretation of my childhood around like a dusty, out-of-date but often referenced misery memoir of many volumes. I have done years of therapy, including the Hoffman Process, which tries to teach you how to not repeat negative patterns of behaviour inherited from your parents. Through this, I did finally see that mine were probably only doing their best in spite of their own cold and unsupportive childhoods — it wasn’t because I was an unloveable or unlikeable child who failed to sufficiently please. Nevertheless I still felt only sadness, loss and rejection. I refused to let go of the narrative I had constructed and continued to repeat it at every opportunity. It was my memory, my experience, and I wrapped it around me like a carapace.
But then last spring my eldest and his partner came down to help me move into my new home. I was returning to Brighton after 17 years in Cornwall, Hackney and Seville. Busy directing operations and wondering how on earth we were going to get a monster purple velvet sofa into the “cosy” living room — answer: through the bay window — my son called me to one side and announced that he and his wonderful girlfriend, who was standing proudly by his side, were expecting a baby at the end of the year. I stared open-mouthed at them and felt like the rug had been swept from under my feet.
Grandmother? Me? What, now? When I’d just moved in and only had two bedrooms? I never imagined it would happen and had learnt to accept that, respecting and appreciating my kids for who they were and not considering that they hadn’t filled a supposed gap in my own life. But now a reality I had longed for but pushed far out of my mind, replacing it with work, was confronting me on my (literal) doorstep. As I stood there, gazing at their beaming faces, I realised how ready I was to welcome this new part of my life. How much I loved my son and how happy I was that he had found a woman who loved him so very much too. I hugged them both, searched for a tissue in my apron pocket and cried.
A few days later I calculated that my first grandchild’s due date fell when I was to be away for work, writing about going on a cruise for the first time. Perhaps work would take precedence once again. But, as ever, life works in miraculous ways. Before I set sail for the Caribbean, he was born early but safely in the same hospital where my son’s father had died 24 years earlier. Suddenly there was a new life, a new generation to protect and nurture. I wanted to be the grandmother I had always wanted for my children. I wanted to be available and supportive, in whatever way was most needed. I wanted to be fun!
It was realising this that made me think again about my mother. One morning, registering the tower of to-be-read books beside my bed, I remembered how my mother and I would go to Basingstoke library together each week and take out piles of books. Then I thought about how we’d sing along to songs on the BBC Light Programme’s Housewives’ Choice every morning as she taught me how to dust. How on family Sunday outings in the Austin A40, stuffed to the roof with the labrador and maternal grandparents, we would picnic on cold lamb chops and afterwards search for shells along the beach at Eastney. How we’d share evening cinema outings to watch Elvis Presley musicals. Her mothering wasn’t all bad, especially in the early days, and so maybe she and I were not so different after all.
Indeed, I realised I had much of my career to thank her for. After her death I had discovered her war diaries, notebooks and account books hidden away in the loft. There were letters from my father when they were first married, replies to party invitations for her 21st — the sort of pen-and-paper stuff that I also hoard so obsessively. These tangible memories became a major influence on my establishment of the workshops and retreats I run, during which I encourage people to write down their lives. Reading my mother’s writings gave me far more empathy and understanding of her as a woman and told me so much about her daily life and loves. They included the fascinating details of her life in 1947, when she met my father, the details that we all forget if we don’t write them down.
• How to be a good grandparent without falling out with your children
My mother, Audrey Kilford, née Bright, was creative. A talented seamstress and knitter, she enjoyed baking and cooking proper dinners from scratch, making wine from dandelion heads. She loved dancing, was vain and a terrible flirt, was never happy with her hair and hated her teeth … just like me. Perhaps we clashed so dramatically as I got older because we were so very similar and she saw the opportunities that were offered to me but which the war and her parents’ financial situation had denied her.
My daughter asks me so many questions about her grandparents, her great-grandparents. Am I going to continue focusing on what I lacked from them rather than what I have so demonstratively gained when my new grandchild is old enough to ask me those questions too? With my grandson’s birth, I saw the future and the past come together and our family legacy as something to acknowledge and celebrate, not continually analyse and grind over, poking the pain with a pointy stick! The joy he has already brought us all has taught me so much about my own generational responsibilities as a matriarch, as a storyteller.
Nervously enfolding my grandson in my arms for the very first time two days after he was born, I felt so privileged. He was a gift I never expected. I realised that he has softened my heart and allowed me to embrace the gentleness and wonder of our family life. His birth has given me hope and an opportunity to write a new chapter with a new job title. Nan, nanna, nonna, granny, yiayia, abuela, I don’t mind what I’m called. Maybe, finally, a “grown-up”? I’m well aware that it’s a job description that comes with rules and regs. “The ability to bite one’s tongue, learn that early,” a friend advised. This little man has already given me so much. Every morning my son or his partner sends me a video of him. I love seeing him grow and his newborn baby hair disappear! I could watch his expressions changing for hours.
Like so much that has happened since my husband died, this baby’s birth has shone a light on his loss for us all. He would have been the very best grandad but now I will make sure Jerry’s memory, as well as my mother’s, lives on as something to cherish.
And who knows, hopefully one day I will have a new grown-up man in my life too, who can enjoy watching my new grandson grow up with me. I haven’t given up that hope yet.
At Easter my new little family is coming to stay. I will get down the Moses basket in the linen cupboard, line it with the fleece I bought for my daughter 36 years ago, and for which I bought special shampoo from New Zealand, and I will place in it the patchwork quilts made by a dear friend for my son 45 years ago. And when my first grandchild arrives I shall most probably cry. Thanks, Mum — after all, you made me!
