Wake up, Grommie! — the jeri cerutti

We were cleaning out the garage.

It was late in the summer of 2009, several weeks after my husband had his right knee replaced. He was dancing on crutches, dressed in gym shorts with his leg encased in a compression sleeve. He alternated waving his crutches at things he said we needed to get rid of, and hoisting himself up to the storage loft to hand things down to me to pack into my minivan for a trip to the Swap Shop.

I was carrying the Little Tikes baby crib left over from our youngest daughter’s childhood when something occurred to me. I stopped and said, “Danny, if we give all of this stuff away, the next thing you know…Adam and Amanda will get pregnant.”

I panic-loaded that little pink crib into the back of my minivan and sped off to the dump before fate could notice.

That is a one hundred per cent true story.

About 9 months later our first grandchild was born, turning me into a grandmother, and for that I am eternally grateful.

While we waited for her to be born, people would ask what I wanted the grandbaby to call me. There was no doubt I wanted to be Grommie. My mom, my sister and I lived with my grandmother, my mom’s mom, after my parents’ divorce. My crib was in my grandmother’s bedroom. My mom said I would sit with my legs hanging out the side of the crib and watch my sleeping grandmother like a hawk searching for signs of movement. She tried to stay still, but at the first sign of life I would call out, “Wake up, Grommie!”

I went to Florida to visit the new grandbaby before she was even a week old. Seeing her cradled in her father’s arms, it occurred to me that maybe now my son had a clearer idea of just how much I love him.

A few years later, on a trip up to see us, I was sharing lunch with my granddaughter at our table by the kitchen window. The sunshine was streaming in – I took a picture of her sitting behind her little lunch tray – and I was struck by memories of my Gramma 'Cella's kitchen table. My mother worked and my Gramma 'Cella took care of me in the mornings before I went to afternoon kindergarten. Gramma ‘Cella was my dad’s mom.

My mom used to say that when she and my dad got divorced, she got custody of my grandparents. They lived a few blocks away from the apartment where we lived and my mom would drop me off on her way to work. I would have “second” breakfast with my grandfather at the little table under their kitchen window. Then I got to spend the rest of the morning with my Gramma ‘Cella before school.

Both of my grandmothers, my Grommie and my Gramma ‘Cella, were integral parts of my life. They were constants in a world that quite often lacked stability. I always loved them to pieces and knew that they loved me, but it wasn’t until that day, with the sun streaming in as I shared lunch with my granddaughter, that I realized they had loved me the way that I love her. Wild.

It was one of those rare cosmic moments that help you recognize a truth of your childhood from the opposite side of the equation, inhabiting both sides of love simultaneously.