Giving birth was the most profound privilege in my life. Deep, holy, spiritual. Not so holy though when you think about spreading your legs in front of your mother in law – your ML! And yet, I could’ve cared less. I actually think it was an amazing gift that my daughter was greeted by her dad, me, AND her grandmother.
My mom was abroad at the time and we had called my husband’s mom in my last stages of labor before transition. My ML arrived with wet hair – it was summer and early morning – in a beautiful green shirt just in the moment when I was bearing down in bed, seeing her framed by my naked spread legs. That moment, I saw her briefly puzzled face and as concentrated as I was, I couldn’t even say Hi, but I was thinking: “Oh, my, she’s seeing me pushing her granddaughter out!”
No more time for thinking than that, she joined in the work of holding my thighs up and being the cheerleader for the babies and my work: “Come, baby, come!” Have you ever thought of calling out this mantra together with your mom in law? More likely not. But it was an amazing and quite liberating thing to do. From that moment on she’s been a very involved grandmother – like my own mom as well – and the moment of her witnessing her granddaughters birth was the start of a deep love for her grandchild. A love that must be so different and still so close to the mothers’ love for a child. In “Eye of My Heart”, a new book about exactly that, the author Barbara Graham writes about her own experience as a new grandmother along with 26 writers, who explore their new, deep and more often also complicated feelings of putting the “grand” in front of the “mother”. Cleaning up with stereotypes of knitting grannies and telling many truths of grandmas, the book comes just in time for mothers day – if for your mom or your ML.
http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061474156/Eye_of_My_Heart/index.aspx