Sunlight spreads across the checkerboard tiles in the kitchen, and so do many other things: wooden spoons, a rubber frog, Tupperware, a couple of puzzle pieces, some plastic letters, elements of the obstacle course of the active toddler.  Did you know that the wheels on the bus go round and round, all through the town?  They do, over and over again, sung by the robotic voice of some plastic magnetic thing on the refrigerator.  Oh, and old McDonald has a farm.  The hokey pokey?  That’s what it’s all about. 

This soundtrack, I know, will continue into perpetuity, first the nursery song, then the pop song, the rock song, the earworms of motherhood that emanate from the toy radio, the computer, from behind a closed bedroom door with a placard that says Please Knock.  I have been here before.  Sort of. 

A little hand rests lightly on my leg, a pale starfish of almost no weight, so that I might not know it was there were I not looking down at it as though it were the Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Sistine Chapel ceiling.  Look at those fingers!  Those tiny pillowy knuckles! When Shakespeare wrote, “What a piece of work is man,” he must have been looking at a baby, I think to myself, which makes pretty clear that some crazy switch has been flipped in my brain.  The wheels on the bus go round and round. 

“Nana,” he says softly in a high voice that I know from experience will someday be deep and sonorous.  But not now.  Now it is sweet and light, like something produced by one of the small woodwinds.   

“Yes, sweetheart,” I reply. 

“Nana,” he says again. 

“I’m here.” 

“Nana!”  This time demanding, slightly petulant.  And that’s when I notice that he is looking at the fruit bowl on the table, and when I realize that he is not crooning my name at all, my new name, of which I am so proud. 

He just wants a banana and the full word is too much for him at this moment in his development.  Nana denotes a piece of fruit, not this woman who follows him around as though he were a drum major and she a marching band.

These are useful moments, when we are made to understand where we really rate in the topography of family, if we are smart enough to pay attention and humble enough to accept the verdict.  I know you don’t want to consider this if you’re in the same position I am, and I keep hearing that there are people who pay the notion no mind, but we grandparents are secondary characters, supporting actors.  We are not the leads.  Mama.  Daddy.  These are the bedrock. 

We know this from past experience, our own experience.  We were mother and father, most of us, before we became grandmother and grandfather.   And because of that it is sometimes hard to accept that we have been pushed slightly to the perimeter.   We are now the people whose name comes in the smaller print in the movie credits.  It’s not that we are unimportant, as anyone who has ever had a grandparent knows.  After all, secondary characters are what fleshes out the plot: what would “Great Expectations” be without Miss Havisham,  or “Romeo and Juliet” without the nurse. Mrs. Hudson may not get as much time in the stories as Sherlock Holmes does, but a reader is always very happy to have her show up.

 The central figures of my childhood were my mother and father, but an essential part of the plot were my pink-skinned grandmother and gruff and demanding grandfather (Quindlen) and my dark and somber grandmother and gentlemanly grandfather (Pantano).  They illuminated the story of where I had come from.   Arthur’s grandfather and I, my daughter-in-law’s parents: it will be the same.  We provide color, texture, history, mythology.  But we are not central. 

Mama means Mama.  Daddy means Daddy. 

But Nana might just be a piece of fruit. 

Later on he will be able to say “apple” and “tractor” and even, rumor has it, “pterodactyl,” although at the moment the last is such a welter of undifferentiated consonants that it would take a linguist, or a parent, to figure that out.  Soon he has mastered the word “banana,” and when he does, Nana becomes notably me.  “Nana, please,” he says when he wants something, often something he is not permitted to have.  He is always happy to see me.  He is not leveled by the leaving.  On the evenings when I give him his dinner, his bath and his bedtime stories, he sometimes cries as I put him in the crib because he realizes this means I’m all he has.  “Mama and Daddy will be home soon,” I say, the magic words. 

His grandfather is Pop.  For a while there was one word:  Nanapop.  Sometimes there were three:  Nanapopgus.  Gus is a Labrador retriever.  That certainly puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? 

It’s a complicated relationship, being a good grandparent, because it hinges on a series of other relationships.  It’s an odd combination of being very experienced and totally green:  I know how to raise a child, but I need to learn how to help my child raise his own.  Where I once commanded, now I need to ask permission.  Where I once led, I have to learn to follow.  For years I had strong opinions for a living.  Now I need to wait until I am asked for them, and modulate them most of the time.  Probably I overreact.  One day I sent his parents an email about a school: you should consider this for Arthur.  I stared at the sentence, and then changed it: you might want to consider this for Arthur.  Better to suggest than to command. 

Because being a grandparent is partly determined by the relationship your child has with you, partly determined by the one a son or daughter has with his or her spouse, partly determined by the relationship you have with the person your child has chosen to have a child with. 

It is determined by history, too, sometimes by what passed between you and your son and daughter many years ago, the things that have left an afterglow, or a scar.  It is often determined by a relationship that most grandparents think they have mastered or at least successfully deconstructed: that is, being a parent.  Ah, how we have convinced ourselves that there is no unfinished business, when adding another generation to the great human chain often excavates, not so much the future as the past.  It is interesting to discover how many people are disconcerted, not because their parents are bad grandparents, but because they are better grandparents than they were mothers and fathers.  Or, as one woman said to me of her father, “He never took me to the movies,” which might have seemed shabby and small to me had I not once bristled at the news that while my father never once turned the boat around when I was seasick, he was more than willing to do so for his grandchildren. 

Most of us entered the parental enterprise with one of two impulses, to be as much like our own mother or father as possible, or to be unlike them in every conceivable way.  And then we have children and discover what a difficult, circuitous and ad hoc road our own parents traveled, and often our mind set changes.  Or at least our behavior does.  How many woman have I known who vowed to be nothing like their own mothers and who found themselves slipping into old patterns in the press of every day?   Conversely, I wanted to be as much like my mother as possible, which was often preposterous because I had a job other than childrearing and she did not. 

Eventually you discover that, at some level, you’re just trying to get through the day without a trip to the emergency room.  For me it was all a little like writing a novel.  If I focused on the fact that I was producing an entire book, I was sunk.  If I thought of it as a couple of good paragraphs a day, I managed to soldier through.  If I focused on the fact that I was building a human from scratch, my head would explode.  If I did one breakfast, one bath, one book, one bedtime, I was okay.  I was supposed to have a philosophy, an ethos, abetted by endless thought and patience.  Instead I had Sesame Street and occasional McNuggets.  In the words of the lyrics in the musical “Dear Evan Hansen” about mothering, “I’m flying blind, and I’m making this up as I go.” 

But being a grandmother isn’t like that.  You’re not making the cake, or even the frosting; you’re basically in charge of those little sugar flowers at the corners.  And the role has changed so much since my own grandmothers were filling it.  Being a grandparent is actually a fairly modern invention; for millennia humans simply didn’t manage to grow old enough to make it that far along the generational continuum.  The big breakthrough was in the last century or so, when older people began to live longer and children to survive their childhoods.  The research that discovered people didn’t become grandparents until fairly recently in human history also describes the value of the relationship: that sense of continuity, extended family, stories and legends passed down through the decades. 

One of the quotes everyone seems to like about the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren is that they share a common enemy; I don’t like that one, and I don’t find it apt.  We have a common nexus.  There’s no moment more eye-opening for a little kid than when you need to explain that Pop is Daddy’s Daddy.  It’s mind-boggling, the idea that Daddy was ever a little boy, that he was ever anything other than the towering colossus that casts a long shadow over life, that there was a time when Mama was a little girl instead of the source of all things.

Being Nana isn’t, as some people have suggested, my reward for the thankless job of raising my own children.  I really liked raising my own children, and my reward for that is them.  I’m not delighted to be able to allow my grandson to do things at my house that he’s forbidden at his own; it was kind of cute, the way my father loved to ply my three with Cocoa puffs and Yodels, knowing there wasn’t a snowball’s chance of eating those things at my house, but I’m not inclined to follow his lead. That way is dangerous.  In the way siblings fill the job not already taken—“oh, you’re the responsible, reliable one?  Yippee! I’m going to have me some fun!”—so grandparents have a natural tendency to segue into that space not occupied by children’s mother and father.  But since it is in the very nature of good parenting to be responsible and reliable, what that can sometimes mean as a grandmother is positioning yourself as the fun one.  Which may be fun for you, and fun for the grandkids, but not so much fun for mom and dad.  Hence, the persistent grandparent mythology that the job is inherently to indulge and spoil, which casts Nana, not as the bad cop and not even as the good cop, but as the getaway driver. 

One of the other tropes of the role is that there’s a bit of a conspiracy between grandparent and grandchild.  I think this is ill-advised.  There are not that many things I’m sure of, but I’m certain that if you say to a six-year-old, for instance, don’t tell Daddy we stayed up until 11 watching that movie I loved when I was a kid, before you can say “We’re back!” that child will start a sentence, “Nana told me not to tell you that….” This is not conducive to an atmosphere of trust.  And trust is essential, not just to your relationship with your grandchildren, but with their parents. 

A good deal of being a grandparent is making it up as you go, particularly because of your peripheral place in the family dynamic. Care must be taken, boundaries respected. For the sake of amity I’m more invested in fitting into our grandson’s routine than in busting him out of it, in having him be, not a wedge issue, but yet another bridge between his parents and me. I don’t want to tell my son and his wife what to do; I’m not sure I know.  I look at my kids and I have some vague sense of what paid off, what worked and what didn’t and what mistakes I didn’t make.  But it’s very vague indeed.  Many years ago someone handed me a brace of humans and said, essentially, do your best.  And I did some of the time, and some of the time, truth be told, I did my average, and occasionally I was kind of a bust.  But if you sat me down and asked me why they turned into responsible and likeable adults, I’m not sure I could answer in any coherent way. 

I do know that a whole lot of love, in the words of Led Zeppelin, is always a good thing, and between the aunt, the uncle, the grandparents and all the friends there’s no question that Arthur will have that.  Certainly he has a Nana who has wholeheartedly embraced the role. I have become a woman who prepares to put on jewelry and then thinks to herself, no, those are bad Nana earrings, a clear invitation to a tug.  There are all these tee shirts for sale, with Nana slogans: My favorite people call me granny, Promoted to grandma, spoil them and send them home.  But who needs a tee shirt?   Everyone can see you coming a mile away, the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair pushing a stroller.  Waitresses totally have your number: oh, he’s so cute.  Look at how well he ate his lunch (all the potato chips, a corner of the sandwich.)  So so adorable.  What a big boy. Just flip a large bill on the table and call it a day.  Did you ever think you would once again be saying to the hostess, we need a high chair?

I’ve never worried about feeling old because I’m a grandmother.   I just feel blessed, which is apparently a common reaction, since a lot of those tee shirts on offer say Blessed Nanny.  I love this new stage because it gives me a second chance, to see, to be, to understand the world, to look at it and reimagine my place in it, to feel as though I’ve made a mark.  They call them descendants, but I don’t care for that term.  Descend?  No.  They’re elevators, really, rising above the blind spots of my generation and even those of their parents, going onward and upward

‘It’s the best,” my best friend said when it happened to her. 

“The best,” said a woman across the table at a dinner party. 

“The best,” said a stranger in line at Target. 

At a certain point you realize there’s a higher level of agreement about grandchildren than there is about the benefits of democracy, or chocolate.  Over and over again, when people learned that our son and his wife were expecting, or had a newborn, or that they were bringing the baby over: it’s the best.  Everyone talks about how great it is, but I’m not sure it’s possible to really feel that until it’s actually happened to you, until you’re really in it, which is probably a tiny bit of useful protection for those people for whom it will never happen, for one reason or another.  And it’s a little challenging to suss out why exactly it can be so magical, since at some level it’s about the oversight of children, which grandparents have experienced because they’ve already had children or they wouldn’t have grandchildren. 

All I know is: the hand.  The little hand that takes yours, small and soft as feathers.  I’m happy our grandson does not yet have sophisticated language or a working knowledge of personal finance because if he took my hand and said, Nana, can you sign your 401k over to me, I can imagine myself thinking, well, I don’t really need a retirement fund, do I?  And, besides, look at those eyelashes.  Or the greeting.  Sometimes Arthur sees me and yells “Nana!” in the way some people might say “ice cream!” and others say “shoe sale!”  No one else has sounded that happy to see me in many many years.  

I remember sitting on the porch in a rocker and watching Arthur toddle across the lawn, his fat thighs parenthetical, his arms raised in that triumphant gesture that looks like a celebration but is clearly meant mainly to steady a still unsteady walker.  It was as though all the dust motes dancing in the summer sunshine coalesced around him, so that he had a nimbus of light, like the Christ Child in a Renaissance painting.  And, by the way, that simile is purely intentional.

Why the depth of feeling?  Babies do tend to bring that out in most of us, even when they are not related to us directly.   There’s the theory that we respond viscerally to entities with big heads, big bellies and big eyes, which also explains why audiences were enamored of ET, that there is something within us that cries out to preserve and protect them.

But in terms of this specific baby, I often think of a  poem I encountered for the first time when I was babysitting for a couple whose children, I realized, were adopted:

Not flesh of my flesh,

Nor bone of my bone,

Yet somehow miraculously my own. 

Don’t ever forget for a single minute

You didn’t grow under my heart, but in it.

It’s different with a grandchild.  He hasn’t grown under your heart, but he’s part of your flesh, only secondhand.  Your baby’s baby.  It seems absurd when the baby is bearded, bass-voiced, big-footed, smarter than you are.  And yet there’s something about having this little boy that makes you look at the big picture, turn the telescope around so that you’re suddenly aware of the continuum, not only of your own life, but of where you’ve come from and where you’re going. 

And, above all, becoming a grandparent offers a chance to love in a different way, a love without the thorny crown of self-interest.  I wish I could say I loved my children that way, but it wouldn’t be true, and it wouldn’t be true of anyone I know, either.  There is always that part of you, that shamemaking part, that sees everything from toilet training to college honors as a reflection on how well you’ve done your job.  The mother who sits in the darkened auditorium mouthing the actor’s lines because she has been running lines with the actor for weeks is not a disinterested party.  The curtain call is, in part, her triumph. 

I can tell you that unequivocally because I was that mother.  Still am.  Some years ago a man who has worked with their father witnessed our three grown children together at a hockey game, laughing and talking and getting along, as they now tend to do.  That man wrote the loveliest letter about how terrific it was to witness this.  That letter is in the box on my desk where I keep special keepsakes.  It might as well have at the top, in red marker: A plus.  Good work. 

The great thing for me about being a grandmother is that no one is grading me in that way.  My grandson doesn’t reflect on my performance except that his existence is, in some manner, a reflection of my own.  It’s pretty immaterial to me, at what age he learns to read, whether he has a good throwing arm or an eye for color and form.  I am much more capable of seeing him as purely himself than I ever was with his father, his uncle, or his aunt.

I’m tempted, writing that, to think reflexively that that is a healthier way, to be, to care, to love.  But that’s exactly the response I’ve learned not to have to being Nana.  No best way.  No right answer.  What gives me pleasure is that this boy is surrounded by so many different iterations of love, and when I think back on my own family that was the buoy.  It’s like a meal, isn’t it?  Your parents are the protein, the chicken and the fish or maybe the tofu.  Your aunts and uncles are around the edges, vegetables, salad. We grandparents, if we play it right, are dessert.  Not the main course, surely, but something very sweet, that most people really like and want a piece of. 

One day, when this boy was an infant and was being tetchy, I took him from his exhausted parents and muttered into the flower cup of his little ear, “You’re going to the Nanaville Correctional Institution.”  Inmate no. 000000001, I called him, and I was the warden.  He was incarcerated more than once during his infancy. It was mostly wonderful, for me if not always for him.  

Nanaville has morphed now, from a tiny prison to a small town.  Every once in a while we go there, my grandson and I.  Population two, I say, although someday soon it will be three, and then maybe four or more. 

Our grandchildren will likely come to think of Nanaville as an actual place, the place where they sometimes stay.  They will probably sometimes still come to think of it as being taken into custody as well, being remanded to Nana and Pop for a meal, a movie, a trip, a day or occasionally a week when their parents are willing, or busy, or maybe just want to have a life for a while. 

But I think of Nanaville as a state of mind, a place I wound up living without ever knowing it was what I wanted, needed or was working towards.  People ask me sometimes how I came by my profession, and one answer lies in a moment when my eighth grade teacher, Mother Mary Ephrem, looked up from her desk and said to me, “You are a writer.”  A declarative statement carries a powerful, almost undeniable sense of conviction. 

“You are a grandmother,” my son said one day in April, and I became something different than I’d ever been before.  But becoming a nana is something even different than that, because it is being a grandmother in my own way, figuring out my rightful place in this new territory, with these new people.  I am the mayor of Nanaville, and I vow to carry out my duties well.