My heart....times two.

My laundry pile

my helpers laundry pile

It's Friday. I hit the ground running this morning at 6am. At 7:15am the front door flew open and my 2 year old grand-daughter arrived. She comes in and takes the house by storm. She is the youngest of three and has been treasured by all since the day she was born, as a result, she has the confidence that comes from security, tolerance and love. Every other Friday it is just she and I, my Grandson is with his Dad. All the ideas for the day, all the playing that is done, every conversation that is had is just she and I. I do my best to hang....but by 7:30am, I am exhausted. Two year olds may be the most relentless people on the face of the earth. Their passion for repetitive sentences is legend. You simply can NEVER answer correctly. They don't understand the period at the end of anything, frankly there isn't an end that will satisfy them. The word why, covers most of their talk and if you ignore them, they just amp up the volume. Having said that tho, this little gal, is an easy keeper. When it is just she and I she follows me around and mimics what I do. The laundry you see piled here is a case in point. She absolutely loves to fold clothes. When I hang things on the clothesline, she takes stuff out of the basket and shakes it out (in the dirt and grass) before handing it to me along with one clothespin. When we are in the house, she takes the clothes and shakes them, spins them around, makes an effort to fold them and then just balls them up and tosses them on the ground and says "there". She is up for any household chores I want to do but she has the attention span of roughly 2 minutes, so I had better be fast.

Then there is this: Occasionally we have the opportunity to have all of the grand-kids at once. They are four strong and they get  along great. When they are here together I just have to sit and watch for damage control. They chase each other around, build forts for hours. They hang off the monkey bars of the swing set, set up massive homes in the playhouse, they ride their bikes in the summer and shovel snow in the winter. If one of them gets hurt, they all immediately stop what they are doing and converge on the injured to assess the damages. The door of the house opens roughly 1000 times, and often never gets closed again. The toilet flushes....constantly. We go through juice boxes, juice bags, bananas, sandwiches, ice cream and fruit snacks. Everyone is always hungry. At the end of the day, after their parents have arrived and they have gone home. I pour a glass of wine and collapse in a chair. I thank god for every second of that day.

This is what I know: There is a saying that to have a child is to have your heart walk outside your body for the rest of your life. It is true. It may be even more true for grandchildren. I tried very hard to be a good Mom. It was all I ever wanted to be. Oh I had ideas of jobs and careers and hobbies but if I could have only chosen one thing, I would have chosen to be a Mom. I got the opportunity to parent 4 times. Four times , a miracle. I was never disappointed. I remember when the kids were little I would worry. About everything. When they were all teenagers I remember asking my Dad, "when can I stop worrying". He said, "never". He was right. But here is the thing. There is worry and then there is paralyzing fear. I understood one until Mike died,  then I became intimately familiar with the other. I am not the Grandmother I would have been if Mike were still here. Before I knew that death really could come, not just to the neighbors house, not just to someone from your old hometown, not just to someone you read about in the newspaper or on the Internet, it could come to you. It came to me. In five years, I have never answered the phone that I have not thought, "it has come again". I no longer look at my daughters, my husband, my grand-children, my parents, sisters and brothers, my son in laws, everyone I love without fear,I know that in a split second they could be gone. Fear like that changes you, it changes who you are. It makes you be that person that repeats "be careful", so many times that the grand-children look and me and say "Nannie"!!!! I can't help myself. I irrationally think if I remind them constantly, if I keep as close a vigil as I can, somehow, I can outsmart God. Never again will he take from me someone I can't live without. I have walked the edge of that cliff, I have looked over the side, it is a paralyzing fear.
In an hour I am going to school. I will pick up my two oldest grand-daughters. When we come home I will prop the ladder up so they can climb the tree. I will watch as they ride their bikes within 5 feet of the road. We'll walk down and look at the creek and on the warm days like yesterday, we will take off our shoes and socks and wade in the cold spring water. I will try as hard as I can not to say "be careful", I will try to show...no fear.
Their Mothers and their Aunt Miss and Uncle Mike are my heart, it has been walking outside my body for over 36 years. The grand-children are my heart times two. Mike lived life, full on. Seems as tho I was always saying "be careful". He chose a profession racked with danger, he took chances that needed to be taken, he did not hold back. I was and am so very proud of the choices he made and the life he lived with such passion. On the day Mike died, I wasn't worried...at all. He had gone to do something he had done a thousand times. He went to hook a trailor to his truck. It was that one second of time, that one second where nothing lined up right in the Universe. That one second where I couldn't stop what was going to be. All my worrying didn't keep him safe. He would be the first to tell me, it will be OK. He would be the first to tell me, you can't outsmart God.

                                                        No Fear
He would be the first and maybe the only person that could tell me. Let go.

till next time.