Who You Callin' Grandma?

Every day I get up, I shower and dress, fix my hair and apply my makeup and I look for the grandmother in the mirror. She's not there. And yet, it is undeniable that I am a grandmother now. I was there for my granddaughter's birth, and while both she and I are novices at our newborn roles in this world, when I look at her I see a beautiful baby, but I'm just not seeing the grandmother in myself. I feel all the feelings of a grandmother - the inexplicable joy and love in knowing that I have a precious granddaughter and that she and I will share a deep and loving relationship . But I'm not feeling like a grandmother and I don't think I look like a grandmother. So, I ask myself, what should or does a grandmother feel like; what does she look like?

My two grandmothers were as different as night and day. My father's mother was quite advanced in years when I was born, so I remember her as a very old lady with white hair, braided and twisted at the back of her head. She never seemed to move from the far end of her green leather sofa, always within arm's length of her big black telephone and a box of wintergreen mints. I don't even remember her standing. She didn't drink, never had, and she was the traditional southern lady of her time. Born in the late 19^thcentury, she was there when so many things we have today were just appearing - the car, the telephone. She was a mother before she was given the right to vote. She sipped lemonade on her huge wraparound porch in the summer, sometimes asking her cook to prepare homemade ice cream for what appeared to be dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She was a true southern matriarch. Other than proudly declaring myself a southern woman, I don't think I am very much like her. So, perhaps the grandma in me is more like my maternal grandmother.

My maternal grandmother was a northerner - a very independent woman, highly educated and full of life. Still older than I when she became a grandmother, I never felt that she was necessarily comfortable around small children. Perhaps it was due to her having grown up without a father and with a mother who was a feminist pioneer - the first dean of Jackson College, established as part of Tufts University in 1910. My grandmother grew up in an academic environment and went on to earn her bachelor's degree and then her master's. She thrived on travel and the theatre and intelligent conversation. She even spent part of her childhood living in England. And unlike my paternal grandmother, my maternal grandmother loved a sherry in the afternoon and a cocktail in the evening. I would bet my bottom dollar that, during Prohibition, she indulged in sip or two of bathtub gin. And despite the true devotion I know she felt for me, my sister, and my cousins, I was not aware of her having a particularly nurturing persona. In that way, we couldn't be more different. And her fatherless status could not be more opposite to mine - my father was my hero and an ever-present part of my life.

So, despite some similarities with both, I am, and perhaps like every grandmother should be, my own version of what a grandmother is. So, how do I reconcile myself with the iconic grandmother of old - the apron-clad woman, proudly holding a roast turkey for her family's admiration at Thanksgiving, or what I call the AARP image of the silver-haired, smartly attired grandmother, skiing down a snow-covered slope somewhere? I'm neither of these women either.

I must confess, and I blush to do so, that I have a tattoo - and while I am sure I am not alone in the grandma-with-a-tattoo category, it is probably not as common with my peers - southern, white, middle-class, college-educated Baby Boomers. So, there's a big difference between what I see as my reality and society's perception of what a grandmother is or appears to be. I've lived abroad - again, not something that every grandmother has done, but my generation is more widely traveled. So the year I spent studying abroad and the 8 years I spent living abroad probably make me part of a minority, but certainly not unique. I smoked pot a couple of times as a young woman - this must be fairly common among my fellow grandmothers. And unlike fellow Baby Boomer Bill Clinton, I did inhale. It was fun and I'm glad I had the experience, although I am not sure when this information may become available to my granddaughter. I will tell her if she asks, but I'm not sure I would volunteer it. What would she think?

Despite my being a grandmother, I am still a rock chick at heart. I listen to my music with the volume up - after all, you can't listen to "Stairway to Heaven," "Bohemian Rhapsody," or "Freebird" with the volume turned down. It just wouldn't be right. And while these may now be golden oldies, they certainly don't make me feel like one. I am trying to imagine what it must be like for someone to think of Woodstock as being from the "olden times." That truly makes my head spin - to think of Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury and the whole hippy/flower child era as being ancient history - but to my granddaughter it will be.

The world of Norman Rockwell's iconic grandmother is long gone. Families don't always live near each other anymore - my granddaughter lives in Scotland. And families aren't always made up of biologically realted grandmothers and grandfathers, sons and daughters, granddaughters and grandsons - divorce and remarriage can make for variations on the nuclear family. But the love is still there and I suppose, under my short hair, funky earrings, hippy-ish clothes, and young-at-heart attitude, I am every inch as much a grandmother as my gray-haired, sensibly shod, cookie-baking predecessors. After all, it's not the appearance or lifestyle that makes a grandmother, it's the love.

So, go ahead, call me grandma. After all, I am besotted with my granddaughter and that, I believe, is the only real requirement for the title.