Grandma Betty

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My Friend Asked Me Why I'd Stopped Talking About My Granddaughter. I Didn't Have an Answer.

My friend Patricia asked me in March. We were at book club. The meeting was winding down — the discussion had turned to whether anyone had read ahead, which nobody had, which is always how book club goes — and she said it the way she says most things: directly, without softening it, the way she has talked to me for fourteen years. She said: "How's Emma? I feel like I haven't heard an Emma story in a while." I started to answer. And then I stopped. Because I was reaching for an Emma story and I did not have one. I had been going to book club for fourteen years. For fourteen years, I have been the person with the grandchild stories. Not bragging. Just telling. The time Emma said something at the dinner table that made her mother choke on her water. The time Emma and I drove all the way to the pottery place on Route 9 and when we got there she decided she didn't want to do pottery but they had a Foosball table in the lobby and we played Foosball for two hours and that was better than pottery anyway. The time she walked into my kitchen at seven years old and said, very seriously: "Grandma, I've been thinking about what I want to do with my life," and then sat down and described, at length, a career in professional dog-training. I had always had a story. Patricia asked me where the stories had gone. And I realized, sitting there at book club with a glass of wine in my hand, that I didn't have one. Not for this month. Not for last month. Maybe not for several months. I drove home and thought about that all the way. Let me tell you who I am so you know who is writing this. I am sixty-two years old. I live in a small city in western Pennsylvania. I worked for thirty years as a social worker at a family services agency. I retired two years ago. I have been married to my husband Paul for thirty-six years. I have two children and two grandchildren. Emma is eleven. Her brother Jack is eight. I want to tell you about Emma the way I would have told Patricia about her at book club a few years ago. Emma is a person. I say that because some grandchildren are your grandchildren, and some grandchildren are people you feel you actually know. Emma has always been a person to me. She is curious the way some children are curious — not about everything, but about specific things with a specific intensity. She went through a phase at eight where she read every book about weather she could find. She has been drawing the same comic strip since she was nine — a comic about a girl with a fox sidekick who solves crimes. She has opinions about things. She will tell you her opinion. She will tell you in some detail. She used to tell me her opinions. Here is what I noticed at book club. I was reaching for an Emma story and I had none. And when I thought about why I had none, I knew the answer. Nothing had happened. Not because the visits had stopped. They hadn't. I see Emma every two to three weeks. But the visits had become visits where we were in the same house and nothing became a story. She was on her phone or in her room or watching something on the television. I was at the kitchen table with my daughter. We were all present. Nothing happened between us. Nothing became a story. And when you are the grandmother who has always had a story, the absence of stories is its own kind of story. I had not noticed I had stopped having them. Patricia noticed. I want to tell you about the other thing Patricia said that evening. After the book club. In the parking lot. It was cold — a March parking lot — and we were walking to our cars and she said: "I told you about my granddaughter Maya, right? What happened at Thanksgiving?" I said I didn't think so. She told me. Her daughter had a game on the table at Thanksgiving. Wooden blocks. Maya, who is thirteen, had sat down and not moved for an hour. Her husband had sat down with her. Her son-in-law had joined. Patricia had watched from the kitchen, and then she had sat down too. She said: "I have not played a game with Maya since she was seven. She stopped wanting to play games. And then there was this thing on the table and she sat down and I sat across from her and we played and she cheated—" She laughed. "She absolutely cheated and she denied it and we argued about it for the rest of dinner and then texted about it for three days." She looked at me in the parking lot. She said, "That's a story, Ruth. That's a story I had to tell you." I drove home from book club thinking about stories. About what makes them. Not the big events. Not the trips or the concerts or the performances. The small ones. The ones that start with "she cheated and she denied it." The ones that have a running joke in them. The ones that you are still texting about three days later. I thought about what Emma and I had done together in the last six months that had made a story. I could not think of anything. Not because we hadn't spent time together. Because the time had not generated anything. We had been in the same house without making anything. I started reading about this. Not about screens. About co-creation. About what specifically generates the kind of ongoing relational language that grandparents and grandchildren carry with them after visits — the inside references, the private jokes, the texting-three-days-later. The research I kept finding said the same thing in different ways: shared physical making. Something built together. Something that requires both people to stay in it. Something that can be referenced afterward because it happened in a specific, funny, arguable way. You cannot reference an afternoon where you were in the same house. You can reference the afternoon she cheated and denied it. I found Uzzle. Wooden blocks, challenge cards. Fast, physical, head-to-head. The kind of game where someone can absolutely cheat and deny it. I ordered it. I put the box on Emma's kitchen table on my next visit. She said, "What is this?" I told her. She said, "Are you going to be mad if I'm faster than you?" I said, "I'm going to be shocked if you're faster than me." She said, "That's the same as being mad." I said, "Prove it." She proved it. She was faster than me on the second round. She was not gracious about it. She was the opposite of gracious. She was genuinely delighted about it. She texted her friend from the table, in front of me, to tell her. I said, "Are you texting someone about this right now?" She said, "I'm letting people know." I said, "There is no one on earth who needs to know this." She said, "You're embarrassing yourself." I said, "I'm embarrassing myself?" We argued about this for twenty minutes. I drove home and I had a story. At book club in April, Patricia asked about Emma. I had three stories. I told her the one about the cheating. She laughed. She said, "There she is." There she is. I am telling you this because I think you might be at book club without a story. Or wherever you go — the neighbor's kitchen, your sister's house, your Tuesday morning coffee — and you are reaching for your grandchild story and finding that nothing has happened that made one. I am not telling you Uzzle will give you back everything. I don't know your granddaughter. I don't know what makes her laugh. What I am telling you is that the things you play together become the things you talk about. And the things you talk about are the things that mean you are still in each other's lives in the specific way — not the obligatory way, not the holiday way — that makes a grandmother have stories at book club. Open the box. Let her cheat. Argue about it. Text about it for three days. That is the whole protocol. https://theuzzle.com/pages/top-family-board-game-new P.S. 30-day guarantee. Any reason. P.P.S. They sometimes sell out before the holidays. P.P.P.S. Emma asked me last week if I was going to enter the "rematch era" or if I was "officially in retirement." I told her I was considering my options. She said I had 48 hours to decide. I have no idea where she gets this from. But I have a story for book club. I have had one every month since March. Patricia says I seem like myself again. I am. I really am.

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