Sundays with Baba
My grandmother and I couldn’t have
been raised more differently. I grew up in Los Angeles, was taught to believe in
myself, follow my dreams and not allow naysayers to hold me back. My
grandmother was raised in Winnipeg, Canada with conservative parents who told
her what to do, how to look, and whom to befriend. My adolescence occurred in
the 90s, when birth control pills were as widely accessible as Tic Tacs. My
grandmother, a teen in the 40s, was admonished for sitting next to a boy at the
beach.
During my childhood, I’d have
characterized our relationship as … non-existent. Yes, I saw her on holidays,
birthdays. But she owned a business and traveled the world, had lots of money and very little interest in children touching her things.
However, after my grandmother’s
second husband died, she began to shed the mask of stoicism she’d worn
throughout my life. I was living abroad at the time, so I’d heard rumors, but didn’t
have the chance to witness the transformation firsthand until I returned to the
states a few years later.
It was true. My grandmother was a
different person. Yes, she still drank three glasses of white wine with ice
cubes in it every afternoon; yes, she still smoked like a chimney; Yes, she
still lived in a house full of whale bone statues (whale bone); yes, the
same dish of stale candies still adorned the exorbitantly priced living room
coffee table.
But she was… warm. Chatty. She
enjoyed the company of my small children who affectionately called her Baba,
and whom she doted over with hugs, kisses, questions and jokes.
So, after my dad died, the Sunday
afternoon visits which used to belong to him, were given over to my newly
invested grandmother.
***
A few years later, when I separated
from my husband, I was a ship adrift. At first, I spent the non-custody days at
home wallowing in loneliness. Despite my married friends’ comments about how
much they’d love to have a day to themselves, I took no delight in the eerie
quiet of an empty house. I hadn’t spent a full day alone in over twelve years.
I longed for company, but all my
friends were busy with their families. My grandmother, on the other hand – a
widow, blind, almost completely limited to the confines of her home, was as
desperate for human contact as I was. She asked me to continue to visit her on
my ‘quiet’ Sundays - on my own.
At first, it was awkward. I’d never
been alone with my grandmother before. I was nearly forty years old. She was
nearly ninety years old. What would we talk about after all these years of cool
distance?
We sipped glasses of Chardonnay on
chaises longues in the shade of her colorful backyard, and I learned that my
grandmother was … funny. Going out on a limb, I began to regale her with my
comical, surreal, and tragic dating stories. To my astonishment, she loved them!
She begged for more details and laughed heartily.
Soon, I had a standing date with my
grandmother every other Sunday to drink a glass of wine, eat my favorite
sea-salted caramels from Costco out of a large plastic tub, and bring her up to
date about my love life.
***
When I started collecting all my
stories into a memoir, my grandmother asked to read it.
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely!”
“You won’t be… shocked?” I asked
carefully.
“Well… don’t include too much sex!”
she exclaimed. “But I can handle almost anything,” she assured me. (The
extensive list of trashy romance titles on her Kindle confirmed this.)
As my grandmother could no longer see well enough to read, I made voice recordings for her. I excised the ‘improper bits’ (i.e. explicit sexual content), replacing them with ‘blah blah’s. She got the gist.
Once I started sending the chapters
her way, I couldn’t record them fast enough! She’d listen within minutes of
receiving my texts, then call me afterwards. Together, we’d delight in the
peculiarities of the men about whom I’d written, disparage most of their
behavior, and she’d poke fun at my choices and reactions.
***
Then, a few months later, a truly
startling thing happened. My grandmother started to tell me her stories.
Married at eighteen years old, she didn’t have too many dating
stories to recount. But she had a few, and she remembered them in vivid detail.
One afternoon, she told me about the
time she was alone in a car with a man. He was a family friend, but he was
anything but respectful. She described her experience fighting him off, which
sounded remarkably similar to something that had happened to me, that she’d read about in one of my chapters.
"I can't believe after all these years, things haven't changed at all," my grandmother aptly commented.
My grandmother had funny stories as
well. She told me about the awkward relationship she’d had with her children’s
pediatrician in the short period of time she was single between her first and
second husbands.
“Winnipeg was a small town,” she
explained. “There weren’t many options for a divorced, Jewish mother!”
My mother was with us one of these
revelatory afternoons, listening to my grandmother readily divulge her intimate
history. Her eyes widened. She listened in silence. Later on, she told me she’d
never heard any of my grandmother’s dating stories before.
Then, as my mother read my book, a
similar thing occurred. She started to tell me about her dating
experiences. Now it was my time to stare in amazement, mouth agape.
Perhaps naïve, but it only suddenly occurred to me that both these women had suffered from the same discord between their ‘mommy’ lives and their post-divorce dating lives as was now tormenting me. They’d navigated the same disturbing waters I was now wading through and writing about in my memoir.
I was overjoyed that my book had
inspired them to open up to me. We were three generations of women who’d all
gone through the same thing, decades apart, with so much to share with one
another, learn from one another, and commiserate over with one another. And
we’d never have realized it, had it not been for my book.
***
When I completed my memoir and sent
my grandmother the last chapters, I quickly received a phone call.
“I finished the book,” she told me.
“And I’m very upset.”
Uh oh, I thought. Had I crossed a line? Did she disapprove?
“Why?” I asked, unsure if I wanted
to know the answer to my question.
“Because it’s over! I want more
stories!” she said with a loud laugh.
As I post this, my grandmother eagerly awaits the release of my memoir. And you should too!
Click here to read more about F*ck Me: A
Memoir, my no-holds-barred, tell-all account graphically detailing the
foibles, humiliations, triumphs, unlikely encounters, oddball characters, great
love and even greater sex I’ve experienced in my years of post-divorce dating.
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