Walking on Eggshells

I spent years cataloguing my mistakes as a mother. Then my grandchildren arrived and handed me back my life.

There’s something nobody tells you about becoming a grandmother. The guilt goes quiet. Not forever and not all at once, but in those first moments when you’re holding a baby who looks at your face like it’s the only face in the world and the noise in your head just stops. I had carried guilt for so long I thought it was part of my personality. Guilt about the years I stayed in a marriage when I should have left, about what my daughter watched me absorb. Guilt about working and having to be away from my children. Guilt about anything and everything I could have done better.

Then this small person arrived and looked up at me and none of that was in the room. It was just the two of us and his tiny face and my heart cracking open in the best way it ever had. I didn’t feel terror, which surprised me. When I held his father, my son, I was nineteen and so afraid of breaking him that I held my breath for what felt like months. This was nothing like that. This was my heart getting bigger than I knew it could get.

It took me a long time to name what I was feeling. It was love with nothing to fix. For me, that was new.

I had been a fixer my whole life. My mother told me so, and said it out loud when I was young. What I didn’t understand then was that she had handed me something heavier than a compliment. She taught me, without meaning to, that love is a problem you solve. That showing up means having an answer. That if someone you love is in pain and you aren’t doing something about it, you aren’t really loving them at all.

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I come from a long line of women who got it wrong before they got it right.

My grandmother, we called her Granny, was a hillbilly from West Virginia who could make a room full of people fall down laughing with a single limerick. As a grandmother she was pure warmth, bony hands holding mine tight on the bus to the five-and-dime, root beer and hamburgers at the lunch counter, small plastic treasures purchased that made a little girl feel like the whole world was centered around her.

But she hadn’t always been that woman. She came from an abusive father and a mother who stayed. She married a man who was no better, mean and stingy, who she finally left after learning that his family had shut her daughter in a closet during dinner. She worked two jobs and made desperate choices, and one of them was leaving my mother alone on the front stoop at six years old while she went out chasing the man she loved. The neighbors would take my mother in for dinner. A little girl at someone else’s table, watching the door. My grandmother eventually married this man, and my mother loved him so much she took his last name as her own.

But this is how it starts. Not with monsters, but with women doing the best they could with what they had and the children who paid for it.

My mother survived all of that and built something steadier. She showed up before she was called. She covered our rent and utilities when we were short, bought groceries, and gave advice we actually took because she’d earned the right to give it. The night I was robbed, I chased two strangers out of our house in my underwear, barefoot, while my husband lay in bed screaming. I made two phone calls: one to the police and one to my mother. She got there first.

That was love as I understood it. Loud and warm, consistent and daily. And because she loved that way, I believed that love involved a rescue or a fix, something you could always do more of if the person you loved was still hurting.

She was the one who held things together, smoothed things over, made things right. And if something ever happened to her, that job was mine. She told me so when I was about ten. “If you want something done, ask Toni Ann to do it.” I believed her and I was good at it. I just didn’t know yet the effect it would have on me.

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My son is five years older than my daughter. My son's father — my first husband— related to both my kids in ways my second husband never could. He was silly, and thoughtful, and always showed up, whether or not the child in front of him was his own. My second husband, my daughter's father, was missing the dad gene. When she was born he was distant, and as she entered her preteens, his expressions of love came through words swimming in alcohol.

My son left for college at eighteen, and by the time his stepfather’s drinking years settled in, he was already building his own life.

My daughter had a front-row seat to everything he missed.

I stayed for twenty-two years. I told myself I was holding things together. That was the fixer talking. What I was actually doing was modeling, for a girl who was watching every day, that this was what love looked like. That you absorbed the damage and you hoped it wouldn’t reach the children.

It always does.

There is a photograph I keep coming back to. My daughter and I in matching velvet dresses and hats, on our way to see The Phantom of the Opera. She is around ten and she is beaming, right next to me, exactly where she wanted to be. We went to plays together and held hands. When I traveled for work, she made me a small bottle filled with folded notes and trinkets, pieces of herself, so I’d have something to hold while I was gone. When she was eighteen, we went to New York together, stayed in an apartment with naked art on the walls, and she sat on the fire escape and wrote in her journal while I watched her and thought: This is it. I love being with her. Alone.

I would give anything to go back to that girl and fix all the wrongs. And there it is again. Fix. Even now.

Her second marriage was to a man who, if my father were alive, would be wearing cement shoes. I watched her move through those years the way I had moved through mine. I wanted to reach in and solve it. I didn’t know how to just be there without trying to rescue her, to fix everything. I come from the kind of Italian family where a single phone call could make a problem disappear, and I'd be lying if I said I never thought about dialing.

She got out in five years. Five years to my twenty-two. She was smarter than me, or maybe she’d just watched long enough to know how the story ended. She now has a good man, the kind of stepdad who relates to her kids on their level, who makes each of them their favorite meal and delivers it like a four-star restaurant. Who can talk vintage technology with one while they build a computer together, then pick up a guitar and sit in on a band practice with the other. He has made it clear that no one makes his wife cry, not on his watch. Maybe it's the Italian DNA that makes him so protective of this family. It also makes him a man of his word. This is the man who promised me a granddaughter long before she was born.

I am in my third marriage too. I found my own good man, one who adores my kids and our grandchildren and asks for nothing in return. I finally got that part right.

And still, my daughter and I keep finding our way.

She doesn’t want to revisit the past and go deep. I don’t know any other way. I want to curl up on the sofa with her and hold her tight. She doesn’t like public displays of affection. She likes her privacy. I wear my life on my sleeve for all to see. Once, when I told her all I wanted was to hug her, to tell her daily how much I love her, to have what I had with my own mother, she said: “Mom, you want a different daughter.”

Ouch.

She wasn’t wrong about the wanting, but what I want isn’t a different daughter. What I want is to fix any distance between us, to solve it, to find the right combination of words or gestures that closes it for good. That’s the fixer again, dressed up as longing. Maybe what she needs isn’t someone with answers. Maybe she needs me to put the toolbox down and just sit with her in the room. Maybe she needs me to just chill. Anyone who knows me knows that chilling has never been my specialty.

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My mother believed in redemption. She believed that everyone deserved a second chance, or a third, or maybe even a fourth. Mine came in the form of four grandchildren. It started the moment I held the first one and felt my heart grow without having done a single thing to earn it.

I chose the name Grammy. Not Grandma, not Nonna, not Glammy, though I considered it. Grammy, like the award. I had spent years building something in the music industry, on that strip of Sunset Boulevard, in a business that is not kind to women. I wasn’t leaving that behind. Grammy felt like something I had earned.

It sounds like a second-place award. It isn’t. It is the golden ticket. The lottery that paid off in ways that changed everything.

The first one was magic in a blanket. I stared at his tiny perfect face and made myself a promise no one else could hear: This is the do-over and I am not about to fuck it up.

More came after him. Two from my daughter's first marriage—a marriage neither of them was old enough to hold together — but they loved these two. The first was a blond boy with little muscle arms and full lips who expanded my heart again in ways I didn’t think were possible. Then a second. We called him Yoda: bald, enormous blue eyes, and a wisdom about him that made no sense in an infant.

My heart, it turned out, had no limit. Then the granddaughter arrived, and I’m certain my heart no longer fits in my chest.

The granddaughter my daughter’s husband promised me came last, with big blue eyes and ringlets of curls. I see his mother in her, and I see my own mother, women who left this world before she got here but somehow still show up in her face. I see myself too. Social, not shy. Loves to dance. A wild imagination. Passionate about everything.

She’s three, and when I come to the door, she goes nuts. She hears my knock, and by the time it opens she’s already there, vibrating, making a squealing sound as she yells “Grammeeeeeee.” Pure joy that hasn’t learned to contain itself. She loves me with her whole body, as if my arrival is the best thing that has happened to her in all three years of her life. I get down on my knees, open my arms, and take in every bit of it.

There is nothing to fix here. That’s the whole secret, and it only took me forty-eight years to find it.

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The magical one is twenty-two now, an honor student who just graduated college with a business degree. He freestyle raps, fearless and fresh, and I believe, with the total lack of objectivity I'm entitled to, that he's going to be famous. He's also creative and sharp beyond the mic, the kind of person who'll be successful at whatever he does. We talk on the phone for hours about his life, his plans, what he's thinking about. His insight on so many topics, everything from politics to journalism to technology, sometimes throws me. He’s so kind and I hold the phone and just think: how did I get to be someone this person wants to talk to?

The blond one is twenty-one, his hair brown now, and I have told him to his face that those lips belong on a model. He has yet to thank me for the career advice. He's smart, musically talented, and driven. He lives for playing live shows, and I've spent decades watching people walk onstage. I know what it looks like when someone's got it. He's got it. He has lunch with me and often brings his friends, mostly musicians. He introduces me like I belong there. I sit in the middle of his world feeling lucky to be included. He turned me on to Radiohead, one of the greatest bands to ever exist, which I would have known decades ago if my ears hadn’t been so clogged with eighties glam bands. He reminds me most of myself. Loyal to the end. Mess with his people and you’re dead to him. A mob mentality I recognize completely.

He is also the one who said it plainly, the way twenty-one-year-olds sometimes do. “Grandparents have it good,” he told me, “because there’s no blame there. The parents are the ones who get the blame.”

Lucky us.

The one we called Yoda is nineteen. They came out as queer and have been sharing themselves with me ever since, sending me links to unisex vintage and designer fashion I would never have found on my own. A curator of eclectic music. A gifted artist. An encyclopedia of vintage technology, with an ongoing Google Doc of things they wish to one day acquire that would make a collector weep. A foodie who will try anything, anywhere, and says yes every time I suggest getting together. The most careful person I know with other people's feelings, someone who never wants to hurt anyone. Wisdom rooted in compassion and empathy.

No history in the room. No eggshells underfoot. This is where all the love that had nowhere to land finally finds its way through.

I have spent more time than I care to admit walking on eggshells around the people I love most, afraid to be too much, too loud, too eager to fix everything in sight. Too much myself. It turns out I just hadn’t met the right audience yet.

Grandchildren, I have learned, are perfectly happy to let you be useful. Need an Uber at 3 a.m.? Call Grammy. Hairstylist who costs more than the electric bill? Grammy. Shoes, clothes, swimming lessons, driving lessons, guitar lessons, vacations? Grammy, Grammy, Grammy. A handbag filled with gifts? Grammy. I show up and I love every minute of it. For someone who was always trying to fix things nobody wanted fixed, being on the wanted list is a whole different feeling. Less toolbox, more cape.

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David Bowie only promised us one day of being heroes. I want to be their hero every day. That is the whole ambition, the entire plan. And speaking of my heroes, Joni Mitchell knew it too: there’s no going back, only the circle game carrying us round and round. I used to think that was the sad part. Now I know it’s the whole point.

A child’s laugh cannot be saved for later. You spend it the moment it’s offered or it is gone. You don’t get to change the first time. That part is already written, but you get the next one. You get to show up completely, no baggage, just yourself standing at the door while a three-year-old loses her mind with happiness because you knocked.

That is the do-over. Not a chance to be young again, but a first chance to be free.

For every mother carrying a list of wrongs: it doesn’t go away. But one day, if you’re lucky, someone who looks like your child but isn’t will look up at your face and decide it’s a good face to look at. Grammy, like the award. I hope I’ve earned it.

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My daughter doesn’t yet know what this feels like. I hope she gets years and years of it. I hope her grandchildren run at her with their whole bodies, and I hope she feels what I feel: pure joy, no guilt, no urge to make it better than it already is.

We are not going to get it perfect. None of the women in my family ever did. Some were gone before they got the chance to see how the story turned out. But the ones still here are still trying, still showing up in the ways we know how and learning the ways we don’t. That has to be enough, and on most days, it is.

With my grandchildren, I don’t walk on eggshells.

I dance on them.