The Form My Son Filled Out

Sunday Afternoons

Here is the thing Brianne and Drew never understood, that I understood from the start of all this, and it is the thing that let me stay decent through it.

Being the paid lady who keeps them weekdays did not stop me being their grandmother. It made it cleaner.

For three years I had been both at once, the help and the grandma, and the two had gotten mashed together into one gray tired thing, and the grandma part had gone out of it. When you change the baby, do the laundry, fight the nap, and read “Goodnight Moon” for the ninth time, you have not got a lap left over for the fun of it. I had been so busy being useful that I had stopped being Grandma. I had become furniture. Useful furniture. The kind you do not notice until it needs replacing, and then you say it is too old.

So I made a rule for myself, and I told Roy, and Roy nodded like it was the only sensible thing he had heard all year.

Sunday afternoons are mine.

Not as the help. As Grandma. Drew and Brianne drop the children at our house after church, or we take them, and I do not change a single diaper that I do not want to change, and if I want to give Cody a second cookie before supper I give it to him and grin at his mother over his head, because that is the job of a grandmother and it is a job nobody pays you for and nobody should.

We made cookies the first Sunday, the three of us, Cody standing on a kitchen chair with flour to his elbows, Ella in the high chair banging a wooden spoon, Roy pretending to steal dough and getting his hand smacked. I looked around my kitchen and it was loud and it was a mess and my arms were full and it cost me nothing but love, and I thought, this. This is the thing they tried to take and did not know they were taking.

Drew came to pick them up that evening and he stood in my kitchen doorway, same doorway Brianne froze in at the daycare, and he looked at the flour everywhere and his boy asleep on the couch sticky with cookie, and something moved across his face.

“You didn’t do this stuff when you watched them,” he said. Not mean. Wondering.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t have it in me. I was too tired being your babysitter to be their grandmother.” I handed him the diaper bag. “Now I’m their grandmother on Sundays and somebody else’s babysitter on weekdays, and I’m better at both.”

He took that. He is not a stupid man, my son. He is a thoughtless one who married a thoughtless girl, and the two of them had been coasting on me the way you coast a truck downhill to save gas, and it had not once occurred to either of them that the hill would end.

“I was out of line,” he said, in the doorway. “Brianne feels awful.”

“I know,” I said.

“At Christmas. What we said. I think about it.”

“I know you do, honey,” I said. “Get your boy home to bed.”