I’m standing in the takeaway queue in a fancy Indian restaurant. It’s busy; all the tables are packed, waiters shooting around with loaded trays. I scan the interior and my gaze comes to rest on the mirror behind the counter. There I am, a tired-looking old bag, dirty hair pulled back in a ponytail, no make-up. And then I see in the reflection that people are staring at me, well, staring at my legs, nudging each other and smiling. I look down. Orange tracksuit pants tucked into black cowboy boots. That’ll do it.
And it kind of says everything about me as a grandmother: no time for hair and make-up, jeans off and trackies on because being down on the floor with the kids is no place for tight pants. And cowboy boots because that’s all I could find when I volunteered to go with my son Lach to pick up the takeaway. Then when he couldn’t get a park it was me jumping out in the rain, me paying, and now me waiting in line, getting laughed at. I’m laughing inside too; it’s a pretty funny look.
Before we had this explosion of grandkids, I imagined I’d be a kindly, generous, sweet, venerated grandma, but I’m really more of a loved slave, so busy I hardly have time to ride my horse.
There are three families.
Will and Sam with their four under five, Eddy, Frank, Hattie and Winnie—they can always do with a hand. The energy that comes off those kids is incredible. They came to stay a while ago and when they left every picture in the house was crooked, even the ones up high.
Then there’s Clair and Troy with Trixie and Max, also with busy lives. When Trix was a baby, she was so loud she inspired one of my picture books, The Very Noisy Baby. But Max is even louder, so sweet you could eat him up, but with a bellow like a bull if the slightest thing is not right. He’ll scream the house down at four-thirty a.m, then smile at you when you go into his room. Last time he came to stay, five of the other grandkids were asleep. I didn’t want him to wake them, so I took him for a drive at five a.m. There I was in my PJs with a coat over the top, hoping I wouldn’t break down or hit a kangaroo on our lonely gravel road.
And Lachie and Georgia have Francesca, with her wicked sense of humour, her striking resemblance to her father (it’s very unnerving seeing a six-foot-five man reflected in a baby girl) and a traumatic start in life that has us all weeping whenever we look at her baby photos. She was born ten weeks early and then spent three months in ICU, very ill, undergoing various operations. I felt myself disintegrating as I watched this tiny person, paler than her sheets, fighting for breath. And I am so proud of Lachie and Georgia for being the amazing parents they are, sitting with Francesca day after day, until finally she could come home—with oxygen and a breathing monitor. That was terrifying too. There have been several visits to Emergency, but she’s sailing along now, getting bigger, saying more words, just one of the kids. So much that, when she wouldn’t have an afternoon nap a few weeks ago, I found myself muttering (I’m deeply ashamed to say), ‘Jeez, you’re a pain in the arse, Francesca.’ She really is one of the gang now.
My parents started late and I’m the youngest in my family, so I pretty much missed out on grandmothers. I have a faint memory of Mum’s mother frightening me when she joked about having me for dinner.
When my own three children were small, I found it a mixture of delight and frustration. I loved days at home with them—mucking around in the garden, making playdough, playing with puppies, doing all that stuff you do with little kids—but I also thought it was the hardest thing I’d ever done. As soon as I could, I found work that would give me an excuse to have some days off from full-time parenting. This was bliss, a few days at home to hang around with them, and other days when they were cared for by someone else and I went to work, to write and illustrate picture books. Work seemed like a holiday.
My mother was a fabulous grandmother. Nan, the kids called her, and they loved her for her endless patience, full biscuit tins and non-judgemental love. I guess she’s the grandmother I thought I’d be, but I’m more like my husband’s mother, Grandma Joan, who treated her grandchildren like small adults and delighted them with her ability to swear with a posh accent, usually in the car.
Looking back now, it’s as if my time as the mother of babies and little kids only lasted a few years, before they were off at school, then away studying. Next thing, all three were out of the country, and then they came home and teamed up with lovely partners. But I had to wait a while before I become a grandmother. I used to joke that, once the first baby arrived, there’d be an avalanche—that they’d all get onto it. And, sure enough, that’s what happened. Will and Sam had baby Eddy, and in the space of four years there were suddenly seven grandchildren.
When I was trying to persuade them to have babies, I said I’d retire and look after the grandchildren five days a week. And I meant it. But when it came to the crunch, I couldn’t give up work altogether. Even though I love them dearly, it drives me crazy if I am babysitting all time. It has me on the road a lot, leaving home at five-thirty a.m. to beat the peak hour rush and waiting until six-thirty p.m. to miss the traffic again on the way home. The days can be long when you are on your own with small children and the last hour, dinner and bath-time (the hour from hell), when all of us are tired, can be really exhausting. A glass of wine is sometimes the only thing that gets me over the line.
For a couple of years, Clair lived just around the corner from Lachie, so I looked after Francesca on Clair’s day off; that way we could share the kids. It was a nice way of spending time together. One great thing about the grandchildren being so close in age is that they all get on. In fact they LOVE each other, which is a beautiful thing. When they are all at our place together, it’s like a little posse on the move: out on the deck, back in the kitchen, then into our bedroom, playing with my shoes and the money jar.
A few years ago, before the grandchildren, I was giving a talk about my books, and about kids, and I said how much I used to yell when my kids were little, but that I hadn’t yelled for years, that I couldn’t imagine getting angry enough to yell about anything. Well, that’s changed. If I’m having to get a whole lot of things done, I find myself bellowing. ‘Get in this bath now!’ ‘Come here!’ ‘Put your hat on!’ And when I really do my block, I am embarrassed to say that I swear like a sailor. I like the idea of being a calm grandma who can handle any situation, but that’s not me.
One of the things the grandkids love to do when they come to stay is to feed the horses. It sounds idyllic. But the first time I took four of them up to the horse yards by myself, within thirty seconds, Eddy had hit Frank over the head with the aluminium feed scoop, Trixie was throwing oats around the shed and Hattie was crying because I’d yelled at her to stop doing whatever she was doing. Just as I was dragging Eddy off to the house, his father appeared, and then I got into trouble for being too emotional.
I love watching each of them growing into the person they’ll be, seeing their idiosyncrasies emerge. When Eddy was tiny, he was obsessed with DVD covers. Right now, Winnie likes to carry a ball of fluff in her hand and Frank has a love affair with his soft toy, Ducky, who has been lost, run over, locked in a lunch box for six weeks and patched so many times there’s scarcely a trace of the original fabric.
Eddy is always on the go. When he was two, he was dynamite. It was a battle to keep him in his sleeping bag. I used to put a safety pin on the zip to keep him in, then a twisted paperclip; I even tried a small padlock, but he could always get out. One night, something woke Will around two a.m. When he followed the noises to the kitchen, he found Eddy, who had unzipped his sleeping bag, climbed out of his cot, carried his and Frank’s empty bottles to the kitchen, pulled a stool over to the fridge, climbed onto the stool, reached up and removed the ‘childproof’ sock that held the two fridge handles, climbed down, got the milk out and tipped it into the bottles, dragged the stool across to the microwave, climbed onto the stool again, put both bottles in the microwave and turned it on. It was the ding of the microwave that had woken his father.
And the kids’ honesty is wonderful. At Frank’s most recent birthday, his fourth, as I handed over a parcel, Eddy muttered, ‘I hope it’s not stupid clothes.’ When Frank peeped in and saw clothes, he dropped the parcel and moved on to the next one.
One of the hardest things about being a grandmother is sitting out the births, waiting to hear that everything is okay. I am like a cat on hot bricks for the last couple of weeks of the pregnancies. When I was pacing around waiting for my daughter to have her most recent baby, Will said, ‘Don’t worry, Mum, there’s a baby born every minute. She’ll be okay.’ I shook my head. ‘You haven’t lived as long as me—you don’t know how many things can go wrong.’
I knew I was going to love the grandchildren, but I didn’t realise I’d fall in love with them. That’s what it’s like: being in love. I think about them all the time, miss them when they are away for too long and am bubbling with excitement when we are about to get together. My life has got a lot more interesting and fun. It’s a deep and consuming love.
When Eddy was tiny, Will and Sam let dear friends of ours take him overnight. I hadn’t even thought to offer to have him to stay—I thought he was too little to be away from his parents. So when Will casually mentioned that Eddy wouldn’t be there when we called in—because he’d GONE TO STAY WITH SANDY AND PAUL!—I was inconsolable. I knew I was being a sook, but I was broken-hearted. I sobbed and sobbed. I’ve toughened up and am now so busy babysitting that I’m more than happy for them to go and stay with other people, but I’ll never forget the immense sadness I felt then. It made me realise that if I wanted to be part of these kids’ lives, I had to be involved, to offer my services and do the hard yards.
Looking back at those early days of being a new grandparent makes me smile: to see how unsure I was. Now it’s nothing to have a couple of them staying the night, to change nappies, get up at all hours. Cope. But I remember looking after Eddy when he was just a little baby. I was at Will and Sam’s house with their friends’ ten-year-old son, Joe, who was there for the day. I think Joe had more idea about what to do than I did. ‘Do you think I should pick him up?’ I remember asking Joe, and being reassured by his nod.
We have terrific times together, painting, drawing, reading, building Lego, bouncing on the trampoline, playing in the cubby. When the kids come to stay, there is a circuit we do: first we go and feed the horses (there are strict rules about that now), from there we head to the swings and slide and the rings that you can hang upside down on, then to the cubby, which Sam’s father built when she was a little girl; somehow it ended up at our place. There’s a small kitchen with an old broken microwave and stove. One window is jammed permanently open on the side: that’s where the adults stand to order pretend cappuccinos and doughnuts—we all love this game. And then to the trampoline, one of those old trampolines that are probably illegal now, a big rectangular thing with no safety net. It’s on a bit of a lean downhill, so the kids’ favourite game is to start uphill and bounce, bounce, bounce until they fly off the end of the trampoline and into my arms. Sometimes the big ones get up such momentum that they nearly knock me backwards into the Echium bush.
I’m Podge to them, not Grandma. It’s the baby name that I’ve never shaken off and its playfulness sets the tone for the type of grandmother I am, up for anything. The kids love playing with me. I let them sit on my lap and steer as we drive around the farm, we ride the ponies, race plastic trikes down the hill to the orchard, swim, sing, tell stories and ride up the road to find tadpoles.
The times I love best are the times when there’s nothing that has to be done: loafing around on Clair’s bed with the knitted finger-puppets from Peru; playing ‘Sharkie’ in their backyard, where I’m the shark and the picnic table is the boat and you can’t stay in the boat for more than thirty seconds; taking turns being the bossy teacher (Miss Cardigan) with Bear and Trix and Francesca; playing with every toy in the toy box; seeing how many different hats can be folded from a piece of silver wrapping paper.
One of the things I love about the hit series Bluey is how playful the family is. The adults are always happy to muck around with the kids, to delight in their wackiness. We need to remember how joyful that can be, and not get hung up on meals and chores.
Recently, I asked a friend what being a grandmother meant to her. She said it felt as though her life was complete, that she could relax, because the next generation was on its way.
I like that feeling too, that our kids are becoming the family leaders, that we are living on the edge of their lives. But what I love most is the emotional richness, the happiness these grandchildren bring to us. We are so lucky to have them.