A GRANDMOTHER SPEAKS...

(inspiration)

By Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

Although you hear people say it all the time, it isn't really just because you can give grandchildren back to their parents when they start to cry that makes having them so wonderful. It's something much deeper, and harder to put into words.

Was I a good mother? I'm aware now, from the vantage point of elapsed decades, that the answer is yes and no. Some things were great. Some should have been a lot better. I see in my children a number of wonderful qualities I helped them acquire. I see some weakness I know to be mine, too. And I see much that came from elsewhere: injuries & blessings that formed them as they walked through their growing-up years.

What a remarkable thing it is to see it all begin again! I see my grandchildren with the eyes of experience. I see things I recognize: the flash of a dimple here, a certain open-hearted gaze there, the same one I used to meet from another little girl long ago. They carry us in them, their mother and me. And they go forth into the world that will form them differently from the way our two different worlds formed us.

I now know, better than I knew it when I was a young mother, how glorious and how painful their journey into an unknown future will be. I ache for their futures at the same time as I rejoice for them. And, perhaps, I also ache and rejoice for my own past, and their mother's. Her motherhood, her girlhood, my motherhood and girlhood, mingle with told and retold stories of my own mother's girlhood, and a few from my grandmother's. They all rest in these little girls.

For the larger portion of their lives, I will be gone. They will have stories of our times together to tell, I hope, but I will be only a memory. I want them to pay attention to the ache and to the joy of life, more attention than I paid ---more,probably, than young people can.

But I can do so now; I am the link between them and the past, as they are my link to a future I will not see. Blessings on it, little girls, and on you, forever and ever.

Shared by Joe Gatuslao - Bacolod City, Philippines