Relationships
Overtaken By Joy
A lunch date gave me a glow of happiness for days.
This is a story of reconnecting with a beloved child whose company I had been missing.
When my granddaughter was 3 years old, I spent a summer living with her family, caring for our little one, so her parents could both work free of the worry over expensive and hard-to-find childcare. My granddaughter and I bonded deeply that summer and eventually we moved to her city to be closer. But by the time she was 11, I could feel that bond slowly eroding, and worried about further erosion coming when she becomes a teenager.
Having had my children late in my third decade puts me on the old side of being a grandparent to my two dear grandchildren. I was never a young granny who was able to romp and play with them. Adding more difficulty to our ongoing relationships, we had a life interruption of two years when the pandemic kept us mostly separated.
All this resulted in me no longer feeling as emotionally close to my grandkids as I would prefer. Especially my quiet by nature granddaughter. Sometimes, after our lives started normalizing a bit with vaccinating and booster shots, my partner and I would pop over for brief visits and she would scarcely look up. She might not even greet us if her attention was absorbed in some activity. It isn’t uncommon, of course, for kids to be oblivious to an “old person’s” desire for company and attention. They lead their own, quite busy little lives!
But it hurt.
I decided I needed to try something different, to break this pattern that was making me feel a bit sad and lonely. So I scheduled a date to take her to lunch, just the two of us. I called it Ladies Lunch Out. I took her to one of her favorite restaurants, with perfect weather, and a shady table on their patio.
She was excited and thrilled at being treated like a big girl, a near teenager (typical of a child, terribly impatient to grow up). In fact, the first thing she explained to me as we sat down was that she was now past the age for the kids’ menu.
Delighted that my approach was already working, I told her to order anything she wanted. I let her recommend almost all the choices from our menu. So as she wished we did the full treatment. Appetizer, entree, dessert. We took full leftover boxes home!
The food was not important but the mood set was. By giving her the respect of trusting her choices and giving her the control she morphed before my eyes from a silent, paying-no-attention-to-grandma-preteen into a bubbly, smiling chatterbox. I could scarcely get a word in, so I concentrated on asking open-ended questions.
She caught me up on all her doings, her friends, her exciting camp summer coming up, how she wants to eventually be a camp counselor, and so on and so on. It was pure delight.
She talked about so many things like her lucid dreaming (clearly she understands the concept), her favorite book among those she recently read, her new group of five school friends, her analysis (including how she could graph out year by year increase) of the concept of ultimately “Being Cool” which she believes will become automatically conferred upon her when she hits 13.
Best of all, she volunteered that she did remember my summer stay with her when she was three, and she relayed a few details about things we did that convinced me she really remembers. That felt sweet too.
I felt like someone plucked me out of the desert of no granddaughter interaction and plopped me down in a rich oasis of fun and sharing! Honestly, I couldn’t have asked for anything better.
I am still basking in the glow. It may never fade entirely.
