A few days ago I found myself wandering around a Target muttering to myself. “Why do they always move stuff around? I can’t find a dang thing in here…where are the calcium chews? I wish they’d stop rearranging this place.” And I realized I’m beginning to feel like my grandmother. Not like my mother, because in my mind my mother is still quite young: the age I am now or even younger. But my grandmother – long dead – will always be, in my mind, that old woman I couldn’t quite relate to across the chasm of our ages.
I loved my grandmothers, both of them. But they were always old women. My mother, although obviously older than I, was never an old woman. She was a professional woman with professional friends, living in a world where she had many activities (most activities, in fact) outside of her relationship with me. She had an identity in addition to her age. But my grandmother was simply that old woman who came to take care of me periodically. Or on occasion we’d go to visit her. But, for this youngster, her existence was pretty limited to being my grandmother and being old. Even though she told stories of her past, even though we went to the zoo, playground, and shows, even though I saw scads of pictures of her as a younger woman, her identity for me always remained locked to her age. She was old. She never quite understood the new fangled ways of the twentieth century. She had no interests outside her grandchildren.
Because the plane on which I interacted with her was only “visiting grandma” I never got to see her in the rest of her life the way I saw my mother having the rest of her life. I knew my mother had portions of her life, major parts in fact, that didn’t revolve around me because I saw them daily. But all I saw of my grandmother was her interaction with me. And in that interaction she was two things: concerned only with me, and old.
So when I found myself wandering around the store muttering I felt, in that moment, pretty old. And in my memory old is assigned to my grandmother, not my mother. I had become a woman who couldn’t handle her own life and needed a grandchild, or guide dog, to help her through her daily activities.
