Aspirations of Being a Grandma....

As a little girl, I always loved and admired my grandmothers. Not only were they the only babysitters we youngest grandchildren knew (not including our older brothers/sisters), they baked and played games and went for walks with us whenever we were with them. They seemed to be content with their lives and enjoy teaching us how to do some of the every day chores that needed to be done in a way that didn't make it seem like work.


My great-grandmother was the only one to live in town. They had a corner lot with a one bedroom house with an almost-bedroom upstairs, a one-car garage, and an enormous garden in the back yard. We used to walk to the market to get milk and licorice whips, which was great fun except that Grandma would always insist on holding onto at least two of us and I don't mean holding our hands, she held us by the wrist, which we all abhorred! Another of my grandmothers lived on a farm, as we did, but it was so much more fun to be there for a week each summer because she took us swimming and boating at the end of each day. We probably visited our fraternal grandmother most often, however, as I remember being there almost every Saturday afternoon. Dad would usually say something like "we're going for a ride," followed by all eight of us piling into a car designed for six, driving by every field he had crops growing in, just to check on them and often getting out to walk out into the field and look closely at the plants there, then off to the next one. We were bribed into being good by the possibility of a stop at the Dairy Queen before finally ending up at our grandparents house. We always wanted to get there before all the other relatives - although I don't really remember why. Once everyone was there, we would be treated to homemade doughnuts or ice cream with fresh berries from the garden. She had such grace and a wonderful sense of humor. I never saw her wear pants. She wore house dresses or Sunday dresses and always with a pretty apron when she was in the kitchen.

None of my grandmothers were thin or even seemed concerned about their weight, or fashion, or gray hair, or the multitude of things the media scares us into worrying about these days. They were confident, happy and loving. In fact, I wanted to grow old to be exactly like them. I wanted to have family come visit every weekend and have grandchildren running around and not worry about how I looked in a bathing suit.

I'm not saying I want to be old and out of shape; I just want to be able to relax and worry less about what everyone else thinks, so I can be happy just being me. It seems that the bar has been raised and we have to live up to impossible standards of aging today. Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Tyler Moore, Marie Osmond, Joan Van Ark, Priscilla Presley, Joan Rivers, and Dolly Parton have all had so much work done, I have to wonder, was their goal was to look like strippers or drag queens???  Why is it so wrong to look like Betty White, Bridgitte Bardot, Meryl Streep, Lauren Bacall, Jodie Foster or Lisa Kudrow? Dyan Cannon and Jane Fonda have had remarkable lives, but I wouldn't want to be like them for anything.

What I want is to be comfortable in my own skin, and if people are going to criticize how I look, it will be criticism of what I was born with, not some surgical change that emphasizes my failure to be perfect. My grandmothers were the epitome of perfection to me - the perfect role models for growing old gracefully. More than anything, I want to be the kind of grandmother my grandchildren will grow up to admire. So forget the diet (I'll never be a size 2 again...) and the hair dye (well, maybe just a little bit), with a sense of humor and lots of love, I can grow old along with the best of them!