Not quite what I expected

After walking, shaving and cleaning up after a group of visiting dogs, entertaining two little people, tending a small homestead (garden and chickens, with work depending on the season) I typically find myself at the end of the day wondering how I came to be exactly where I am. I am so totally not the person that I expected to be just a few short years ago. That was when I had a full time job, paid someone to do something with my hair occassionally, and wore nice clothes and dress shoes five days a week. In those days, sweats and sneakers were for my paid gym membership; these days, they're what I live in. I've long given up on using highlights to hide the gray in my hair and the last trim it had was self inflicted. I realized recently that while I'm not the person my working self would have expected, I'm probably much closer to the person I would have envisioned when I was still young and idealistic. That came as a shocker, let me tell you. If, during my working days, I had thought about being a grandmother,(which let me assure you I had not until the December day my daughter announced her pending motherhood about one month before I became unemployed) I would have expected a different role. I'd have been the cool grandma with gifts and fun outings. Instead, someone else gets that role and I've become a third caregiver, behind the two parental units, of two family treasures. Instead of buying them neat things, I shop on Ebay and devote hours of my time to such fascinating passtimes as building block towers to be knocked down by crawling infants, coloring with broken crayons, changing diapers and potty training, knitting hats, stockings, blankets and sweaters while they sleep, watching Baby Einstein and Your Baby Can Read videos, and memorizing the dialogue of Dora the Explorer. We do crafts, play for hours on the porch, and take long walks with a jogging stroller and an assortment of neighborhood dogs. I introduced the toddler to the real origin of eggs, and hold her up to watch the daily battle as chickens and squirrels compete for corn. I'm fairly certain I've spent more time with them than I did my own babies, because face it, babies are like puppies, cute, but it's largely a stage to outgrow. What's been really surprising is that sometime after number two came along, when I accepted that this was what God had intended for my life, and when number one began without any encouragement to call me "Ma"(my daughter had been calling me Mimi in an attempt to guide her), I suddenly felt at home in the role. Perhaps it was partly due to her choice of Ma and my love for my own grandmother. Perhaps it was because, as I'd told someone, I would feel like a grandmother when she had a name for me.

No, I couldn't be the spoiling grandmother. Instead I had to have rules and boundaries; real meals and nap times and more time than money. But they've got another wonderful grandmother who does the things I would have expected to do and then some, and between the two of us I think we've got the grandmother skill set fairly nailed. But even with my acceptance of my role, I hadn't recognized that where I was going was really the place I intended to go decades ago. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I washed my face, noting the silver streaks pulled back to an untidy bun of hair and realized that this is much closer to the older me I would have wanted to be. When I was young I was artsy and unhampered by the mores of my peers. I liked to be with dogs and be outside and away from everyone. Now, after a quarter century of working in newspapers with constant deadline pressure and the need to be "on" every time I left the house, it doesn't matter any more because it never really mattered to me. I'm back outside the mainstream, spending my mornings, a chunk of my afternoons and some of my evenings (in other words, the time I'm not with my granddaughters) caring for a kennel filled with other people's dogs. I fall in love with the dogs and the people have become my extended family. I do all my yard work, raise a garden and have a small flock of chickens. Sure, a cow and some ponies and goats might complete the picture, but I'm making a gradual transition here. In the late evenings, I knit or crochet, or sometimes do cross-stitch. I'm thinking about taking up painting again. My husband is my partner as we work on our house and outside projects. He still thinks I'm sexy, and no one else really matters. If, when I was a teenager and thinking about life as a grownup, I had really thought about being 50, this might have been pretty close to what I pictured. It's not quite what I expected a few years ago, but I think it's what I really wanted all along.

Giving Away Christmas

Most families, for better or worse, wind up with holiday traditions. They may be Aunt Ava's fruitcake, Cousin Bill's bad behavior, or the holiday ham. Sometimes they are family gatherings that we either anticipate eagerly or dread, or attend with some mixture of both.

When a tradition becomes ingrained, we tend to forget that it hasn't always been that way. Change, when it comes, is with a degree of discomfort. This year marks such an occasion for our family.

Growing up, our family gathered every Christmas Eve at the home of my dad's aunt and uncle. It was a buffet affair with loads of food and four generations of relatives scattered across two floors of the brick ranch home. The women folk had the kitchen and the upstairs area; the men gathered in a smoky room in the basement with a fireplace and a Christmas tree and we children -- siblings and cousins to varying degrees -- roamed the house in a wild mob. It was a terrific holiday tradition. Right up until the year when the great-aunt's recently divorced daughter brought two men from the halfway house where she worked to the family gathering.

(It was the '70s and there had been no interracial family gatherings. After that year, the family quit gathering there at all -- wandering in for some half-hearted holiday hello on Christmas day instead. Last year there was a mixed race couple at the family reunion and I laughed remembering how poorly our family would have accepted them three decades ago.)

Christmas day meant being dragged from our toys to visit the grandparents -- fun with the cousins, but an anxious desire to get back to my holiday goodies. We had lunch at my maternal grandparents' home then, midafternoon, went to my paternal grandparents before returning home to enjoy our loot stuffed with food and exhausted from our early morning.

When I married, Christmas Eve was for visiting my new in-laws. Once again it was three generations of one family under a roof and, when my children came along they joined their cousins with the same wild enthusiasm I once had. Divorce ended that tradition and my mom adopted Christmas Eve as her time. For 20 years we've gathered at her house for our holiday dinner. We spent Christmas Day at home, visiting my grandparents, or perhaps visiting another in-law.

This year, however, that's changing. I'm giving Christmas away, in a sense, although I'm sure that to some folks it may seem I'm taking it. Disrupting the long running tradition, Christmas Eve festivities will be at my home. Although there are a number of reasons, the easiest is to say that now I'm the grandmother and as my daughter said, "Christmas Eve meant going to Grandma's house." Grandbabies don't have to travel so far to a house where they're less comfortable, the burden of cooking for everyone won't be on my mom, hopefully the younger generation will feel less rushed with work and children.

At the same time, I'm giving what has always been my time away. While I look forward to parents, children and grandchildren gathering at my house Christmas Eve, I'm less excited about the gift giving Christmas morning being just hubby and I. For 26 years I've had children under my roof unwrapping their presents on Christmas morning, or I've been anticipating their arrival and a holiday meal.

This year I'm giving them the holiday to celebrate under their own roofs at their own pace. My son will be spending the day, barring any changes in the next few weeks, with his grandparents where he lives; my daughter with the babies at her home with her husband, who will probably have to go in to work later in the day. Neither of them will be expected to come to my house, although I'm not promising I won't show up at theirs.

For the most part, we love to hold on to our holiday traditions, but there comes a time when every family has to make adjustments for distances, deaths, divorces or new generations. In a few years, a new tradition is formed and, although those old memories are still treasured, new ones begin to pile up as well. This year, those new memories begin for us.

No bucket list for me

There are times in your life when you make a mental list of the things you want to do before you die. They call it a bucket list, and sometimes people who learn they are terminally ill make such a list and try to check off the items.

Often the list includes places to visit: New Orleans, the West Coast, Alaska and Bermuda, Europe or even Africa. Other times it would be specific activities: fly a plane, skydive, scuba dive, rappel or rock climb. It would be that book they meant to read, or write. The old friend they wanted to track down, the lost love that they wanted another chance to romance.

Nope.

While some of those things, like rock climbing, the West Coast, or writing a book, might be things I'd like to do at some point, if I were terminally ill, I wouldn't be rushing off to do them.

I'd be doing exactly what I'm doing now.

Standing at the Dobson Christmas Parade with my daughter and granddaughters, I soaked up their smiles and giggles like a dry sponge thrown in a bucket of water. And it's not like it's an infrequent opportunity that I treasured because of the rarity. After all, next to the girls' parents I'm their chief caregiver. I spend most of my cell phone minutes talking to my daughter in the morning. We frequently get together on the weekends and holidays.

But the fact of the matter is that these moments, no matter how many or how few, are irreplacable. If I were dying, I wouldn't be sad that I'd not seen the Pacific Ocean, I'd be sad that I didn't get to spend more time with the little people that have turned my life upside down the last two years.

Although they are small now and probably won't remember these long afternoons at my house, they will grow and I want to be a part of the memories they carry forward. While my "Ma Mary" has been gone for almost six years, she lives on in my memory and in the stories I tell my grandchildren. Being a part of the legacy that forms a child is the closest to immortality that we can find on earth.

As far as I know I'm healthy and may someday get around to doing more of the things I'd like to accomplish, including taking a vacation with my husband. But if that were to change, don't look for me to take off for an Alaskan cruise. I won't be trying to check off items on a bucket list.

I'll be right here, filling my bucket with drops of precious memories.