Starts with K

By the time you read this, I may have a new grandchild.

This will be our ninth one, which sounds like far fewer than it feels when we’re all together. Any time a car containing grandchildren pulls into our driveway, my husband makes the same pronouncement:

“The noisemakers are here!”

But what a joyful noise it usually is.

Every time a friend becomes a grandparent, I tell them the same thing: Get ready to never think about anything else ever again.

I also tell them that I firmly believe my grandchildren are my reward for not throttling my own sons when they were teenagers.

Apologies to those of you without your own noisemakers, but if that day is in your future, listen up.

When my first grandchild was born, I wore the softest sweater I owned when I went to the hospital to meet him. In fact, I told him that.

“I wore my softest sweater for you,” I whispered. My son, the impossibly young new father, heard me. I think our relationship changed in that moment.

The next shift came when that little boy went to the grocery store with me. He was about 18 months old, and I returned him to his parents with a cookie in one hand and an open box of crackers in the other.

“Where did that cookie come from?” his father asked.

“The grocery store bakery,” I said. “They’re free!”

The look he gave me was pure betrayal.

“I know they’re free,” he said. “And you NEVER LET US HAVE ONE.”

Accurate. I also never would have let them open any food or drink in the store or car. With four little boys, I had to control the chaos where it was possible.

When I relayed that to my son, he shook his head.

“I feel like you love him more than you loved us,” he said.

“I do,” I told him. “I can’t explain it, and it’s not necessarily more; it’s different.”

It’s not the “feed them sugar and send them home to their parents” theory, either. It’s the absence of the everyday-ness of life that makes it different.

Grandparents typically don’t have the responsibility of making sure teeth are brushed every day, homework is done every day, manners are minded every day, bedtime is hit every night.

We aren’t refereeing sibling arguments or navigating last-minute school projects or squeezing in a doctor appointment because that rash is not clearing up.

Instead, we’re mostly the good-time adults, the grownups who smother them with hugs and shush their parents when the rules are bent. Is there anything we can’t do? We shush their parents!

And we are rewarded, though it may take a while.

That first grandchild? The one who got the free cookie?

He’s 15, and he stopped at our house last Friday night. He was out with friends but told them he needed to go to his Granny and Papa’s house for the traditional sloppy joes and milkshakes served up after trick-or-treating.

With a deepening voice and delicate fuzz above his lip, he sat at our kitchen counter with his friends, all of them a collection of rapidly growing limbs that haven’t quite agreed on how to coordinate.

“This is my favorite part of Halloween,” he told them. I nearly wept.

So, yeah, I do love them all more – or differently – than I loved their dads, and I still cry with hope and happiness every time I hold a new grandchild for the first time.

As I said, another noisemaker is making its way into our family, two days late as I write this.

My softest sweater is waiting.