My Mother Became a Grandmother. Now I Understand Her.

Yahoo

11-05-2025

When I became a mother, something was restored between my mother and me. This is partially owed to a deeper understanding of the sacrifice and commitment it takes to merely keep a child alive in the early days of their life. Getting up through the night to make sure they're still breathing, monitoring the distance between their head and the edge of a coffee table, and not looking away, not for even a second, when any body of water is near.
But I was also introduced to a version of my mother of which I wasn't acquainted. She became supple in grandmotherhood. Less explosive, less cruel. Even though we live across the country, my daughter has a special bond with my mother. My daughter calls my mother Mama and it is the only word in which I can hear that she has roots in Texas as she elongates it, let­ting it savor on her tongue, Mawmuh. When I hear her laughing in her room, unable to catch her breath, I know she's on the phone with my mother. In the summers and on spring breaks, there is no place my daughter would rather be than beside my mother, starting each day with walks along Buffalo Bayou and watching the Mexican free-tailed bats emerge, hundreds of thousands taking flight above the water at dusk.
Whenever my daughter and I visit Houston from our home in New York City, my mother picks us up from the airport. Our first stop is my grandmother's little blue house, tinted by the dust of the earth. The floors are cracked from the hurricane waters that disintegrated the tile. We peer through the screen door to see my grandmother sitting in her favorite chair, her readers pushed to the cliff of her nose as she works her crossword, while Steve Harvey's voice blares from Family Feud on the TV. At the sight of us, she gasps at the growth of her great-granddaughter before taking her into her lap, kissing her and telling her how much she loves her. I watch something unfurl in my mother's body and a smile of restitution takes shape, because my grandmother never said this to my mother when she needed it most. I recognize that smile because I wear it myself.
Since my mother is retired now, she is able to engage in leisurely activities with my daughter that she never could with me. Back then, if she wasn't working, she was sleeping in preparation to return to work the next day. I don't suspect that my mother is conscious of the ways that she has failed as a mother, just as her mother did in many ways, or perhaps she is resigned to the inevitability of failure in motherhood as I have. I don't suspect this to be my mother's intention, but the yearnings of my childhood are satiated by the ways that she loves my daughter.
It's something like a primal instinct, to go scavenging for ways to repair a fractured relationship with your mother. Desperately seeking soft moments so that you may extend forgiveness, even when she hasn't asked for it. The mother love is like that, insistent on finding a way, like water, always in pursuit of the lowest place to settle. Sometimes, morsels will do.
I contend with the discomfort of holding pleasure and resentment at once. I see my mother's capac­ity for patience and understanding of the limitations of a child, and sometimes I become sullen. Why couldn't you give that to me when I needed it most? At the same time, I wonder if I am too scorned to accept it should she offer it to me now. And perhaps her ego is too fragile to risk extending it, only to be met with rejection. Sometimes it's easier to begin anew than to change direction. So my mother offers what she has left of love to my daughter, and I watch from the side and convince myself that it's enough to mend our fractured past.
Something seems to soften inside of you when you become a grandmother. I imagine that once you've raised your own, lived to witness them become parents, you are then somewhat relieved of the daily mundane responsibilities that wears one thin. Grandmothers can simply love without aban­don, without fear of making them irresponsible, making them weak, making them rotten.
As a young woman, I began spending time with my grandmother without my mother, and in our intimate moments, I asked her questions that my mother would deem disrespectful to an elder – I asked her about her past. What her life was like as a cotton tenant in Louisiana, why she chose to migrate to Houston, what my mother's father was like and why she left him, why she left all the men she ever had children with and could only marry a man with whom she had none. My closeness with my grandmother is partially because I am seeking to find myself through her and partially because of who she gets to be with me. Exercising a part of herself that's been locked away as a means of defense. She, too, had never been told that she was loved, but she knew it's embrace from her grandmother who died when she was a teenager. And my mother was told for the first time that she was loved by her grandmother, who raised her, shared a bed with her, asked her about her dreams and told her that her life was worth something. Only with time do we begin to understand that our mothers didn't give us what we needed because they didn't quite have it to give yet. They couldn't tell us what we needed to hear because it had gotten lost in their throats somewhere.
So when my grandmother tells my daughter that she loves her, she really means she loves me, and she loves my mother, and we each consider this sufficient.
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