To the mother who hasn’t met her grandchild

You’ve seen the baby once, in a photo a friend forwarded with “I thought you’d want to see.” You zoomed in on the hands. You looked for your mother’s chin and thought maybe you’d found it. In a drawer there’s a small sweater with the tags still on. You bought it in the spring, in a size that’s already too small.

Nobody tells you what to call this. You’re a grandmother, and you’re not. People at church show you pictures of theirs and you smile and say “how lovely,” and you go home and sit in the car in the driveway for a while before you go in.

In the 1980s the anthropologist Kristen Hawkes and her colleagues, studying the Hadza people of Tanzania, noticed older women spending long days digging for food to feed their daughters’ children. In 1998 they laid out the idea now called the “grandmother hypothesis”: grandmothers may have mattered so much to whether children thrived that it is part of why women live long past their childbearing years. Your longing for a child you’ve never held is nothing to apologize for.

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No one can tell you when the door will open, or whether it will. What you can choose is where the love goes in the meantime, so it doesn’t just sit in a drawer with the tags on.

You could keep a small notebook for this child. One line on each birthday. The recipe for the cookies your own grandmother made. What the weather was like the week the baby was born. A short note about who you are, in plain words. If the door opens one day, you’ll have something to give. If it doesn’t, the love still had somewhere to go.

And on the hard days, you’re allowed to say it out loud to someone you trust: “I have a grandchild I haven’t met, and it hurts.” Saying it takes nothing away from anyone. You’re a grandmother, and you miss someone.

The sweater can stay in the drawer. So can the hope.

— Be A Good Mom

Source: Hawkes, K., O’Connell, J. F., Blurton Jones, N. G., Alvarez, H. & Charnov, E. L. (1998). “Grandmothering, menopause, and the evolution of human life histories.” PNAS, 95(3), 1336–1339.