I want a grandmother!

I’m just a couple weeks shy of 47 and I want a grandmother. I need a grandmother in my life. On this Friday summer night when all the world has gone mad, I want a grandmother!

The only grandmother I knew was my great-grandmother Mama Katie. In the short seven-ish {give or take some months} years that I knew her, she left a lasting impression on me. Her life and legacy continue to testify powerfully through my father and his family and you can read all about her in my book Lines in the Sand.

Both my paternal and maternal grandmothers passed before I was born. {Dad’s mother, only weeks after his birth, passed away. Mom’s mother, when Mom was only 19.} Their absence left a void I would liken to a hairline fracture. Painful, but I could live with it. Pictures and stories filled in the gaps of time lost and somehow helped throughout the years. But then November 2009 came. My grandson arrived, granting me the blessed title of Grandmother. The earth shifted swiftly and the fracture became a gulf I hadn’t anticipated. I found myself desperately needing a grandmother. How was I to be a grandmother without having had the example of one? My ache was surely a 10.0 on the Richter Scale.

Realization came in spite of my ache. My mother is a grandmother. I’d watched her grandparent her grandchildren for years, including my own daughters. I had role models. Still, time has only deepened my sense of loss of a grandmother of my own.

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Precious items, this old powder box and make-up decades old, earrings and miscellaneous jewelry, my mother passed to me that once belonged to her mother. Her stories, and they are many, I’ve heard over and over. Still, I long to extract more from her powder box as if to solve a mystery.

Here I am nearly seven years later, a grandmother to the sweetest little grandson ever, still parenting a not yet ten-year-old daughter. And I am aching to the core of my being, longing for a grandmother. Pardon the melodrama, but I want to rock back and forth in a fetal position and cry like a baby.

Seriously.

Hear me—I am blessed. I am blessed and I know it. I am blessed to have an amazing mother, mother-in-law, and aunts. These women are phenomenal. But pardon me—I want a grandmother!

If I had a grandmother right now, I’d curl my 46 year old self up in her lap and I’d ask her to sing to me, to rock me to sleep. I might even have her make some sort of chocolate dessert. Oh, who am I kidding! I would! I so would!

Joe informed me tonight before he dozed off, that he will find me a grandmother. He will! I’m not certain if he’ll be looking on some website or what. I mean. Maybe you should hide your grandmothers?

But I’ve been thinking what I might hope she would be like. I am certain that I would want her to have some of the characteristics of the grandmothers I never knew. This proxy grandmother might be something like Ms. Clara from War Room. I need her to be firm. I need her to be kind. And I need her to have strong faith. Strong coffee helps, too.

Tonight, I am needing a grandmother. The void is a chasm and I need a grandmother to knit her way across it.

And I’m praying I’m getting the grandparenting right for my grandson. Because this world, it’s gone mad, y’all. I know our God is greater. I suppose I’m just needing a grandmother to step in, remind of simple yet powerful Truth, sing me a song or two, and maybe braid my hair.

And then bake some cookies.