Barbara Graham’s essay about the birth of her granddaughter, Isabelle Eva, and the changes it made in her and her family are not only the subject of this wonderful essay but also the inspiration for a whole anthology of writings by women writers on grandmothering, Eye of My Heart published this year by HarperCollins. Last week, we posted an interview with Barbara about editing an anthology with many writers (27 in this case) and this week we post the seminal writing that ushered her into the project.

Our Baby, Not Yours
By Barbara Graham

Two o’clock on a Monday afternoon. I’m on deadline, but instead of working I check my e-mail every two seconds. Then I stare at the phone, as if I can somehow shame it into ringing. I feel like I’m back in high school waiting to hear from The Guy. But this time the object of my devotion isn’t some dark-eyed bad boy; it’s my baby granddaughter, Isabelle Eva. And the guy I’m dying to hear from is her father, my son and only child, Clay.

I am 58 years old. I have been a grandmother for 12 days. I’m stunned by the swell of feeling: not the love part, which I expected, but the urgency, the hunger to hold Isabelle, to feel her body next to mine. This is love beyond reason and I’m fuzzy on protocol. I don’t know where I belong in the new order. In fact, no one seems to know how the pieces of the expanded family puzzle fit together — neither Clay nor his wife, Tamar; not Hugh, my husband and the baby’s step-grandfather; not the rest of the grandparents. We’re as clueless as a bunch of earthlings who go to sleep in their own beds and wake up on the moon.

One thing is certain — we’ve entered a new phase. One moment she wasn’t; then she was. This impossibly fragile yet lusty creature who is blood of my blood and more than my blood. Hugh and I each got to hold her soon after she was born and often in the days that followed. And since I’m the only grandmother who lives in the same city — Washington, D.C. — I took on the role of chief caterer. Ours is a family that prizes — no, actually, demands — good cooking, even in the most extreme situations.

While Tamar struggled through a difficult labor, Clay, a food photographer, required a pizza margherita from 2 Amy’s, the best pizza joint in town — almost as much as his wife needed an epidural. Still, after two weeks of whipping up one culinary triumph after another, I need to get out of the kitchen. It’s also time to find out how I fit in when I’m not playing top chef.

Even more important, Clay and Tamar need room to find their own way. A few days before Tamar’s parents left, Clay whispered to me over the phone: “It’s nice to have grandparents around, but we’re ready to be on our own with our baby.” Though he was referring to his in-laws, I knew his comments were directed at me. Our baby — not yours.

 It strikes me that not only was a new baby born 12 days ago, but a new family as well. The transition from childless couple to family of three has solidified them as a separate unit in a way that marriage alone did not. This new chapter, though natural and appropriate, feels different. What shocks me the most is that in the midst of my joy over Isabelle, faint traces of loss waft in and out of my consciousness like secondhand smoke.

When Hugh tells me to pay attention to what Clay is saying and “dial it back,” I know he’s right. Besides, viewed through a wider lens, I’m incredibly fortunate. Clay and Tamar decided (with no prompting from me, I swear) to move from Paris to Washington to live near us when the baby was born. This is my dream come true. What do I have to be so anxious and insecure about anyhow? (Hint: Plenty, but I don’t know that yet.)

When four o’clock rolls around and I still haven’t heard from Clay, I redirect my attention to real estate — the ideal landing pad for an obsessive mind, like a heat-seeking missile in search of an alternative target. Hah! I’ll show them, I think. I’ll rent a house on Maryland’s eastern shore for the last week of August. Clay and Tamar, desperate to escape the pea-soupy swamp of Washington, will jump at the offer to join us. Seven days of unrestricted access to Isabelle! If this is as sneaky on my part as it is generous, so be it.

I wonder if my besotted state is normal. I’m not sure, since I’m the first among my boomer friends to become a grandmother. I know my Nana adored me, but was she positively blotto? My own mother wasn’t exactly a role model in the grandmotherly love department, especially when Clay was a baby. When I called her in Manhattan from the hospital in Vancouver to tell her the news of his birth, all she said was, “Clay, what kind of a name is Clay?” And the look on her face, preserved in photographs, when she visited my common-law husband and me in our run-down farmhouse was one of undisguised horror. (Okay, so there was a dead cow lying outside in the barnyard and a multigenerational family of mice sharing our kitchen.) Still, there was a baby. My baby.

By late Tuesday morning, I start to panic. It’s been more than 36 hours since I’ve had any contact with Clay or Tamar. I decide to launch a verbal weather balloon. “Hi, just checking in,” I say breezily when I get the recorded message on Clay’s cell phone. “Do you want anything from the farmers’ market?”

Food prevails, and within minutes Clay e-mails me back. Yes, he’d love some baby romaine, baby arugula, and zucchini blossoms.

Tamar is napping when I deliver the baby vegetables, and Clay asks if I’d mind holding Isabelle while he prepares dinner. Oh no, I say, I don’t mind. So while he slices and dices, I rock her in my arms. This is how it works, I think, starting to grasp that being a grandmother is a lot like being a relief pitcher.

Which is how it goes during the week we spend together at the shore. They’re with her until they want to do something else, and then she’s mine. At which point I turn into a character in some kind of wacky operetta — I can’t stop singing. One of the best things about being a grandparent, I decide, is getting a free pass to act like an imbecile whenever you’re with the baby. And, as it turns out, I get to act this way a lot. Clay and Tamar take frequent walks and spend most evenings sitting out on the dock, talking. At one point I overhear them whispering about someone named Julie.

As far as I know, the only Julie they’re in touch with is the realtor who sold them their house. Lately, they’ve been complaining about the pressures — financial, practical — of maintaining it. And so I’m uneasy. I’m trying to unscramble the signals so that if and when my heart is broken, I will be prepared.

I don’t have to wait very long. And I am not prepared at all.

A few days after we return home, my son, Clay, invites me to go for a walk.

“For the first time in my life, I feel responsible for your feelings,” he confesses after opening pleasantries.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” I know how hard it must be for him to say this. “You are in no way responsible for my happiness.”

“It’s just that, well, you have a strong personality.” He pauses. “Plus, I never expected the grandmothers to be so involved.”

Another time, no doubt, I’d appreciate the irony. Me, a former hippie recast as a meddling grandma, like some awful character on a television sitcom. But now I feel like hollering. If you didn’t want me to be so involved, why did you move here? Instead, I say, as neutrally as I can, “If I’ve intruded or overstepped my welcome, then I’m truly sorry.”

With my granddaughter, Isabelle, everything is so simple: There’s nothing to do except love her. With her father and mother, however, I feel as if I’m crawling blindfolded up a steep ravine studded with land mines.

We continue walking. He still seems anxious, so I know there’s more.

And then: “We’re going back to Paris.”

My body contracts as if a fist has just landed squarely in my chest. I miss Isabelle when I don’t see her for a few days. How will I manage when months go by? Who will I be to her? I’m afraid I already know the answer: an occasional treat, a confection, not daily sustenance; important theoretically, but in practice, nonessential personnel.

And then it hits me: In a certain sense I am nonessential personnel. If I were to die tomorrow, Isabelle would grow up fine without me. The early death of a parent leaves track marks on the soul; but unless a strong bond has formed, the absence of a grandmother is a loss more abstract than palpable. Which, in fact, is how nature — unsentimental in its practicality — seems to have designed it.

I am learning this lesson early, harshly. Now you see Isabelle, now you don’t.

Five days after our walk, Clay and Tamar put their house up for sale. Six weeks after that — with 10-week-old Isabelle strapped to Clay’s chest in a baby carrier — they board a plane for Paris.

The Buddha taught that human suffering is caused by the desire for life to be different from the way it actually is. When Clay breaks the news about leaving Washington, I know there’s nothing for me to do but let go — of my longing to live near my son and his family, of my yearning to know my granddaughter intimately, a yearning so forceful it feels cellular — like an undertow in my blood.

Is this my karmic comeuppance, I wonder? I, who never for a moment considered raising my son near my own parents? Clay even reminded me in one of our many conversations after the Big Talk that being true to yourself was my mantra when he was young.

“We’re not leaving because of you,”  he assures me in the days leading up to their departure. “This is about us, not about you.” In my heart I believe him, but I’m unable to take comfort in this knowledge.

One day when I’m at my gloomiest, the doorbell rings. It is my next-door neighbor, Katharine. Over tea she tells me about a theory she heard once that has helped her take her own family struggles less personally. The idea, she explains, is that our relationships form a series of concentric circles, like the rings of a tree, with each of us stationed at the center of our own innermost ring. Next to us in the first circle are the people dearest to us — our mate; our children; our siblings or other family members and possibly a best friend. The pattern continues through each succeeding ring: Those closest to your center are — literally — the people closest to you. And though parents normally belong in their child’s innermost circle when the child is young, they don’t necessarily remain there.

“That’s the rub,” says Katharine, “because even though we may drop back a ring or two in our children’s lives, they stay forever in our very core.”

“Grandchildren, too.” When I say this, I know it’s true — no matter where Isabelle lives.

Even Clay, who came wise into this world, already seems to grasp that, in the end, there is nothing to do but let go. I know he knows this because the night his daughter is born, with her cradled in his arms and the full moon shining in on both of them, I watch him bend down and whisper into her perfect, tiny ear: “Someday you’ll break my heart.”