Aroha mai, aroha atu

Now that I am a grandmother, I think quite deliberately about the influence I want to be as a grandmother for my own. Grandparents can be such a force for good (and not so good too) in the lives of their grandchildren. Grandmothers can be the glue that holds a family together, maintains family traditions, reminds wayward whānau who they are and where they belong, and a source of unconditional love. One evolutionary theory I enjoyed showed that that societies with present grandmothers survived and fared a whole lot better than those that didn’t – I suspect its due to the longevity, the retention of wisdom, and the extra pair of hands to keep young ones well, that can prepare a meal or medical potion with limited resources.

My own ever-present grandmother, Kathleen Dorothy Bowater (nee Cleaver) died a few years ago, aged 96. She was and continues to be a truly influential person in my life.  Nan passed on to me her love of playing and composing music, of reading, of good British drama, of gardening (a love yes, an ability no). She taught me the names of flowers from a young age. I can look at so many plants and know what their names are without any recollection of ever being taught: impatiens, lobelia, succulents, flaxes, Leucadendron. All sorts of plants, native and introduced, how to care for and propagate where possible.  They had a large, elevated property and landscaped every nook and cranny, with appropriate vegetation for each corner. I spent years of weekends scouring the bank with my grandmother and in the veggie patch with my grandfather – a labour of love for both of them. I still live near their house, and the bank that they lovingly cultivated, is quite overgrown and the retaining walls, fencing and walkways in disrepair – long gone are the weekends and late summer evening spent in backbreaking maintenance of a tricky bank.

My grandparents were keen recyclers, but out of necessity – they were frugal and careful with resources. Reduce, reuse, recycle was a lifestyle rather than a philosophy. They reused everything till it fell apart. They had newspaper-made bin liners long before they were trendy, because everything went into the compost, in order to nurture their impressive home vegetable garden.

Nan’s love of gardening, artistic flair and competitive streak blossomed into floral arrangements and local competitions. She’d spend hours, in her retirement years, thinking about and scouring the garden for the just the right bloom, in just the right size or colour, or that would fit a theme or style.  To this day, I still scan for lovely vases, and interesting vessels in second hand and antique shops.. One even stands out in my mind, when the arrangement needed to be less than 5 centimetres tall including the vase. She planned that arrangement for weeks to finally win first prize with the daintiest of garden flowers– we looked at the garden as giants looking for the best options for what could have been a Barbie doll bridal bouquet. Many years later, she and my aunty would prepare all the flowers, bouquets and button holes for my wedding.

Nan was a rock in my life; a reserved lady who cared about manners and decorum. As a teacher, and one who was quite proper, she influenced my love of words, grammar and writing through books and games – family favourites such as Scrabble and Upwords.  My own children grew up with a game called Bananagrams, a scrabble-esque game that I know she would have loved.  She would have come up with all the tricky words, while we’d be searching the dictionary (pre internet) for the words that none of us had heard of. Even though she was, in my mind a gifted wordsmith, she had a teaching reputation of a gifted remedial reading tutor, enhancing the reading capabilities of hundreds of young people. Looking back I think she connected with me as I was such an enthusiastic learner, I often read anything I could from her bookshelf, which were not always age-specific. After absorbing a Māori grammar book from her shelf, aged 8, she often introduced me to a range of topics – gauging my interest, including all those garden ones.

Teaching was her second career, somewhat impressive for women at the time. Before teaching, she’d been a nurse and taught me to care about perfectly folded sheets (a two-person job) and hospital corners when those sheets went on the beds. She was an army nurse, had her first child in a house with a dirt floor, and married a progressive man who knew how to sew, cook and do the washing – as well as grow vegetables. He encouraged her to pursue teaching.

My grandparents gave my upbringing the depth of support that every child needs. But they were also ambitious for me. They valued my opinion, challenged my assessment of the world around me, and set expectations to live up to. I am very grateful to have had had them both for so long.

In many ways we lost Nan a number of years before her body went. As dementia crept in, she became more and more distant.  Although, her physical presence reminded us of what she was to us, the relationship, by necessity had to change.  The last few times I saw her was a practise in letting go. She still held my hand and sometimes, I think she knew that she knew me, somehow, and even occasionally knew we were connected, but she couldn’t put all the fragments together. It became harder and harder to take her away from her now home, as she became more and more disoriented, unable to remember where she was, where she belonged, who she belonged to. This experience has allowed me to have a few conversations with my own children, about how to transition through dementia. Some family members have a hard time during the change, hard time with the loss that comes from a loved one who forgets who you are. If I live that long, as many of my relatives have, it’s likely to happen right?

 

So, in the meantime, what sort of Nana do I want to be?

First and foremost, there will be unconditional love, and reassurance to my own children, their parents, that everything will be ok. Second, there will be books, and reading, and days cuddling up on the couch with blankets in literary heaven. There will be gardening. Even if I learn as well, along the way. I will transfer my academic knowledge into some sort of skill – we’ll learn together. We will run our hands through the dirt, and name the flowers, and plant courgettes. We are going to laugh, and enjoy life, and find the humour in every day. And I hope I can help them look up and out at the world though a loving lens, to look for context, and seek justice, and know that is good in the world, and sometimes they need to be the good in the world.

But most of all, I want them to have a wonderful memories of time with Nana, someone who loves them, that they can carry with them, long after I’m gone.

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We are … in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear; a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish, and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again. - Henry Thoreau