Becoming a Grammy on the Other Side Of The World

My grandson, Finn, was born yesterday. I am so ecstatic I can hardly contain myself! He is beautiful, plump and healthy. Perfect! I could go on and on—but hasn’t everyone listened to a new grandparent at one time or another? To avoid mushy redundancy, I will simply say I am very, very excited to watch Finn’s life unfold and to find out who he is.

I wanted to go. I wanted to be there to hold him when he was newly arrived and welcome him to the world. But, my son and his wife live in Great Britain.  I live in Colorado. I admit I was attached to the newborn “thing”. I love newborns! I love how they smell, how they sleep, how the nuzzle up and their lovely gentleness. It is a miracle how they arrive, as if from another world. Birth is a mystery that fascinates me and always has.

It took me probably too long to hear my daughter-in-law’s request for space. At first it felt like a slap—an “I don’t want you around”-kind-of-rejection. After a while, I took the high road and kept perspective. From that vantage point I realized a greater thing—my place in the process of Finn’s arrival was to help  them from the other side of the world.

But, “what does that look like?” I wondered. How do you participate energetically from thousands of miles away? I needed to pull out my metaphysical hat to remember the answer to that question. This one was going to need BIG thinking.

My emotions were scrambled and ENORMOUS as I tried to calm myself enough to wade into this territory with a different approach. Once I really began listening to my feelings the situation began to shift. I needed to let my emotions direct me to what I wanted. What I wanted was to be the best, most helpful, loving Grammy possible.

I calmly meditated on what this might look like. The image conjured was of loving children. I was flooded with images of my son when he was born. It felt like my heart would burst. There was more love than I ever imagined. It didn’t take long to feel the pattern once again. Concentrating on and holding  “love” energy was what I did in my son’s birth and entry into the world. Now, as Grammy, the process was the same for Finn.

I felt the hugeness of the love. I felt the energy of love. I felt the bouyency of the energy of life. I felt part of something much greater than myself. That energy had no bounds. It was not personal, situational or in one particular place or another. I didn’t own it. It was simply there for me to be held. I liked it! A lot!!!!!

It was an easy small step from this awareness to transferring love to Finn and my son and daughter-in-law and their little daughter, Amelia. I could just think about them and feel the love and light. There was an endless bounty of love. In fact, love seemed to expand exponentially as I was immersed in it. I had found my place to be the best Grammy possible on the other side of the world.

Last weekend, before Finn’s birth, I got an indication from my daughter-in-law about when it would be good to visit them. October. I am thrilled when I think about going. It helps me formulate a concrete plan. I will undoubtedly enjoy it beyond imagination. Still, I am blessed with the awareness acquired through the process of Finn’s birth:  Love is bigger than personally being in one place or another. Being part of something does not exclude you. You can participate in something wonderful and be on the other side of the world. I love being a Grammy!

My Favorite Place To Be

My Aunt Leonie loved me. She was actually my Great Aunt, my grandmother’s oldest sister, and she was GREAT! It may not seem extraordinary to be loved by an aunt, but when I was growing up, she was the only person in my world whose relationship with me was based simply on love.

Relationships with everyone else were bound tightly with ideas of who I was and was not supposed to be, how I was to act, expectations, rules and unspoken conditions. Like other children who grew up in complicated environments, I thought my family was just the same as everyone’s. I developed ways to cope with my situation without realizing the challenges I was unknowingly enduring.

When I was with my Aunt Leonie, however, I could abandon my defenses and relax into who I truly was. I felt safe, nurtured, inspired, excited, and happy. Confusion about myself disappeared. No matter how many other children were around, there was no jealousy or competition. Aunt Leonie was an infinite abundance of purity and kindness and enveloped each of us with bountiful warmth and caring.

From my earliest memories she seemed very old. Her eyes were sapphire blue and sparkled like stars. When she smiled her entire face lit up. She had a large lump from a hernia on her side and she covered it with a flowered dress and sometimes an apron. She had white hair which she wore pinned up on her head. Sometimes when I was at her house she would let it down to wash it. It hung way below her waist and she would lean over the kitchen sink and pour a mysterious blue liquid over it. She would let me watch the entire process without explaining anything. I never felt the need to ask about it.

To this day I don’t exactly understand why my Aunt Leonie was excluded from large family gatherings. I knew intuitively that it was not a subject that should be brought up with anyone. The subject hovered in the family like a stampeding elephant. Once I overheard someone say that my grandmother was angry with her sister because, as children, Leonie was older but smaller and frail and my grandmother had to wear Leonie’s hand-me-down shoes. That explanation did not help my child-sadness or dismay at having my favorite person home alone right across the street as if she didn’t exist.

One noticeable contrast between my house and hers was how people talked with each other. At Aunt Leonie’s house it was like the volume had been turned down low on the radio. Voices were never raised. There didn’t seem to be a need for that. The words that were spoken were always kind, supportive and encouraging. We laughed a lot at her house and talked about our feelings.

I felt I belonged there. Aunt Leonie's house was at the end of a dead-end street one house away from mine. I was allowed to wander back and forth between our houses as early as I can remember. Her enormous yellow house became my refuge, although I didn’t recognize it as such at the time.

One of my earliest memories was running through the sprinkler in her freshly clipped lawn. I was wearing just my shorts, having spontaneously discarded my shirt for a more complete experience. The sun was shining brightly, and big puffy clouds were floating in the enormous blue sky. I was free. Suddenly, I was grabbed up by the back of my shorts and carried firmly under the strong arm of my father like a football all the way home. I was told in no uncertain terms I would never betray my womanhood by not wearing a shirt in public EVER AGAIN. I wanted to run away from home right then and live at Aunt Leonie’s. I thought it would probably be okay, as long as I packed plenty of shirts.

Aunt Leonie’s stepdaughter, Flossy, lived with her. They had a huge porch swing on the South side of their house that seemed to be the place to go for a gentle breeze. There were no railings behind the swing so it would fly out into space and take my breath away. Aunt Leonie, Flossy and I would swing for hours, me in the middle, singing songs that we all knew and even some that we made up.

Aunt Leonie loved to bake. She had a little stool for me to stand on which made me just the right height for helping. She would spread all the ingredients out before me. She taught me how to sift flour, skim off cream, measure lard, and form leftover pie dough into animal shapes that we would sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. I could hardly wait for them to come out of the oven so that we could eat them.

No matter what we were doing at Aunt Leonie’s house, when the cuckoo clock announced the hour, we would race into the sitting room and watch the little German man and woman and their duck come out to take turns ringing the bell. We would squeal with delight and laugh right out loud at the whimsical folly. Every hour we were taken by surprise and thrilled, as if each cuckoo was our first.

Aunt Leonie had an enormous antique oak oval table in her country kitchen. Kids would flock to her house in the cold times of the year to play solitaire. We would play for hours. Instead of playing against each other, we would play in such a way that in order to win, we each had to get rid of all our cards. It was an amazing experience of working together, finding peaceful and encouraging solutions, and having an important place in a group. We worked together and we all won. Putting puzzles together were also a favorite winter activity.

One of Aunt Leonie’s virtues was the ability to be in the moment. We spent many afternoons sitting on wooden crates in her driveway with a small pail of water right by our sides. We would carefully choose little rocks that seemed drab and uninteresting, plunk them into the bucket and gently begin to scrub. When we would pull them out and hold them up, the sparkles that had been hiding inside would burst out, glistening and dancing in the sun’s rays. I was convinced that we were working magic. Those moments were so full and perfect; there was no possibility of being anything but completely absorbed. I didn’t miss a thing.

One of our favorite things to do at Aunt Leonie’s happened every year in the fall. Lots of kids would flock there after school like geese knowing it was time to fly south. When we arrived, a bushel basket of Granny Smith apples sat in the middle of the oval table surrounded by pairing knives. Now, I am sure if our parents knew about this they would have been horrified. We would take an apple and start slowly and carefully peeling the skin into long snakelike ribbons. As we developed our skill, the spirals from one apple would continue on into the next. The challenge was to see how long you could make it before the spiral skin broke. To my knowledge, no one ever got cut.

I am certain I am the person I am today because of my Aunt Leonie. She initiated me into the world of spirit and soul, empowered me to discover myself, inspired my imagination, encouraged even my wildest dreams and allowed me to express my feelings. Aunt Leonie sowed the seeds of kindness, caring, trust, safety, living in a peaceful way, and being all I could be.

Aunt Leonie taught me, most importantly, about love and offered this comfort in so many ways. She showed me with her smile, the delightful sparkle in her eyes, how she put my ponytail in a rubber band, the way she talked with me, and how carefully she listened and listened and listened. She affectionately held me in her loving world, which gave me ground beneath my feet. My Aunt Leonie loved me and I loved my Aunt Leonie! She was my favorite place to be.

LESSONS OF LOVE

I love my pets! The steadfast quality of these relationships shared day after day through the years has taught me more about love and compassion than anything else in my life. The gentle consistency of the steady, unconditional company makes being with my pets a continual Celebration of Life.

A friend of mine told me a story that speaks to my own experience. Parents of a little boy decided it would be best for the child if he went with them to the veterinarian to put his dog to sleep. Afterward, the boy seemed to be not as upset as his parents had anticipated. When asked about this he said, “I understand that dogs don’t live very long because they already know what people need to learn”.

When I think about it, I cannot even begin to list all the positive things pets have taught me. Under their guidance I have learned to trust, open my heart, care for and protect, cherish tenderness, and allow myself to be endlessly delighted and entertained. Loving people, while enormously educational on my life journey, has contained complications, disappointments, conditions, and ups and downs along with closeness, intimacy and happiness.

The love I share with my pets touches in me the deepest purest experience of unconditional love, without any confusion or struggle. No matter what kind of day I am having, they wait patiently, ready to connect, love and be loved. Our commitment to each other is invincible. I love them and they love me. Loving them is natural, straightforward, and simple.

I feel like an apprentice when the Universe brings me exactly the perfect dog, cat, (or person), to further assist and support whatever part of my life I need to master at that particular junction. When my mother and several other close family members were dying, a cat named Studebaker Hawk came into my life. He was a big, gentle Tom who would hang around with me until I felt comfortably attached in a safety-blanket kind of way. Just when I reached a secure level of trust, he would leave and stay away. The first time he was only gone a day. As time went on, his absences would last longer and longer. Like clockwork, at the very moment I came to terms with his not coming back--he would show up. In hindsight, I can see that he was teaching me about letting go. At the time, I experienced his lessons as inflicting more pain by amplifying my already agonizing process.

After all those people passed on I was submerged in grief. I got a Basset Hound that I named Tristum. The symbolism was clearly obvious even at the time. Tristum personified and embodied the grief that was too enormous and painful for me to carry alone. His being with me allowed me to project onto him my inner feelings of sadness and depression that I could not allow myself to feel or show. He accompanied me through some rough times.

When Tristum died, I was left alone to bear my anguish. I had to take back all of my grief projections and own my feelings. I pulled myself into a tight little cocoon. In my abandoned state I swore adamantly that "I would never have another pet". I lived this way, pet less, for almost 18 months. One afternoon I heard a knock at the door. When I opened it, there stood my son (18 months old) and my niece (11 years old). They were both bundled up for winter and the joy in their big brown eyes pierced my soul. They proudly held out an 8 week old puppy to me that they had gotten from someone at the Mall. Dumbfounded, I recoiled and burst into tears. "I can't! I can't!" is all I can remember saying. Then my son, in his tiny voice tenderly said, "But Mommy, his name is Happy Dog". How could I argue with the cosmic sense of humor of the Universe? I kept the dog.

I have a much better grasp now of allowing pets help me with my life lessons than I did when I was younger. The challenge recently presented to me is how to consciously accompany my pets through illness and their passing on. Within the last 6 months, I was told that two of my three dogs were terminally ill. My world felt as if it had been turned upside down. I could not talk about it at first because grief took me too deeply inside myself. It triggered memories of all the people and pets I had lost before. My mind raced to try to remember how I had gotten through the other times I had been faced with this situation.

I remembered Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross encouraging me to practice "letting go" of little insignificant things every day as a way of dealing with bigger griefs when they occur. An important and unexpected memory about letting go popped into my mind. It had happened during a time when I was a young adult, grieving the loss of a relationship, dealing with disappointment about my dreams for the future and struggling with redefining myself without all the things in my life I had lost. One evening I heard my son, who was almost 3 at the time, go into the bathroom. Flushing the toilet, he raced out the door and ran down the stairs where the pipes were, screaming with sheer delight, “Goodbye, Goodbye”.

When I got the news that one of my dogs and shortly after the other were dying, I felt as though I could not bear the pain. Needing to reach out for support with my anguish I called a friend. I just kept asking, “What shall I do?” With great compassion he said, “Make happy memories”. It seemed almost too simple. After several weeks of being in shock, the wisdom of the words "make happy memories" turned into a full-blown unexpected spiritual experience.

I was sitting outside with my dogs. The sun was shining on us and I was lost in dark thoughts of sadness, grief and impending loss. Suddenly, I was suspended in a moment of timelessness. In that moment, there was no past or future, no fear, no loss. Everything that had ever happened in my life, everyone I had ever loved, all pain, all joy, EVERYTHING was there. All my life was occurring in that moment. I could feel everyone I had ever loved. Even those who had crossed over felt like they were there. My senses were in such a heightened state of expansion that I felt the energy of my dogs snuggling against me as if we were one.

In that moment, I realized that loss had provided me over and over with the experience of separation. This experience made me see the world from the perspective of constantly being disconnected from others and things in my life without any choice or control. The feelings of angst, fear and despair that came from the illusion of being disconnected, kept me from being connected with my soul self and made me forget who I truly am. In this expanded moment of remembering and reconnecting with myself, the illusion of separation dissolved and was replaced with an awareness of Oneness.

In that moment I felt a new respect for death and loss. They have provided me with core spiritual lessons and given me the opportunity to remember and reconnect with myself. Reconnecting allows me to know what is really important in my life. Feeling connected with my pets was a safe way to form strong attachments. Loving them and the experience of separation (or fear of it) that ensued was my life lesson. Finding the meaning of the experience has shown me the way back to loving myself. Actually, it has expanded my love of everything and everyone. Life is vulnerable and precious. Being in every moment in Oneness enlivens the witnessing of being present and creates gratitude, deeper meaning and joy. That is what produces happy memories.

Ever since that day when "the moment" changed my life, the relationship with my dogs has grown sweeter. I feel more relaxed and open and have more appreciation for our love. I have new and heartfelt respect for myself and how much and how well I love. There is a certain peace in my life now.

In the experience of Oneness, I know the death of my dogs cannot possibly separate our souls.
When their time comes, I know I will not really loose them or their love. That is simply not something that can ever be taken away. Even though I know I will miss their physical presence and our day-to-day rituals, now I imagine them running joyfully through Meadowland with Hobbit, Little Dog, Tristum, Studebaker Hawk, Rose Hips, Mitzy, Happy Dog, Picalily and all the other animal loves of my life. Thinking about that makes me smile. I love the mysteries of life. I love loving. I love my pets.