Grandmother in training

I have been experimenting with some new Gioconda pastel pencils that I bought and children have been the result of the doodles. Children have been on my mind for a few weeks in one form or another since learning that I will become a grandmother in January. I don't think that the news has sunk in entirely yet and likely won't until I see the baby and see my daughter in her new role as a mother.

The news comes with mixed emotions for me. It makes me realize my own mortality and how time slips away so quickly. It revives fears and inadequacies in my own parenting skills. It stirs up fears for the future for both my children and my children's children. It makes me recall my own childhood and the trip down that lane isn't often one I care to revisit.

So much has changed since my children were babies. I have changed too. Childbirth physically hasn't changed but, even in the last 30 years has become a thing of medical intervention with monitors and wires and procedures and specialists, with every parent to be sporting a 'first' baby picture of a blurry fetus swimming in a sea of amniotic fluid. However did the population grow to its current number before intervention I wonder, rolling my eyes.

What kind of grandmother will I be? A long distance one most likely, as my daughter is several thousand miles away from me. The advent of internet and telephone will have to be the medium for connection and will have to be worked at to ensure any relationship exists. Distance doesn't diminish emotion or caring or concern. It probably enhances them if anything.

So I will likely be the grandmother bore with a fistful of photos and a host of baby stories to share to those interested or not interested. I will draw my grandchild and knit for them and send unsuitable presents and spoil them when I do see them. I will be the grandmother that is not traditional and I will also fit the traditional mold.

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