Grandmotherness

How does it feel to be a grandmother?

I don’t feel old, or any older.  There are some things that make me feel “old,” like a certain sense of public dismissal, but even invisibility has its perks; Athena defeated the god of war in a borrowed invisibility helmet. 

But Layla Isabelle Bhayani, born October 27, 2026, makes me feel lighter, happier, livelier.  I have become close with the word “poesis,” “the emergence of something that did not previously exist,” says wikipedia.       

My head now swivels away from the news to a curled newborn, opening and closing her hands, pushing her feet down into her still capacious onesie, and then retracting her knees up into a V, her feet snuggly meeting again.  I see her just-opened eyes seemingly awed by the light on a blank wall.  And I see those eyes rapt on her mother’s face like an art history scholar seeing The Last Supper for the first time, starved for and thrilled by every detail.   

The power of this new life - the tides of feeling that are lifted by the tiny corners of her mouth turning up into a smile that for a half second disclose the secret of her dimples - has its equivalents in salience, almost:  the Super El Nino, for example, which has already flooded her coastline and the Blue Wave that crashed down upon this country exactly one week after her arms first reached for this world.   

I won’t be measuring the next hundred years in presidential elections and retirement parties; this seven pounds something ounces, nurtured in milk and hugs, growing fast, has become the rule by which time and space will be considered, Layla miles and minutes.  

Thanks to Praful Bhayani for this photo, taken at Layla’s first Diwali Celebration.

- and the very happy new grandfather!