Guardian Angels

It's been a rough few weeks and the next days are going to be especially hard. I hope you're resting well in there and not too crowded yet and that things are okay - feel like I haven't had as much time to think about you lately as I'd like. You already have more guardian angels than any baby I've ever known with your great-grandparents and your grandma watching over you, but you got another one this week - your Grandma Sue. She passed away July 6, so peacefully and still at home, but you should always remember that one of the last words she said to me was "Baby." I'm so sorry that she'll never get to hold you, and I know she is too, but I like to think that during the last few months, just the idea of you was a bright spot for her when she was feeling worse and worse. She was thrilled by the very idea of you, so I can only imagine how delighted she would have been by the you that is going to arrive soon.

I've asked your daddy to work hard to remember things about her, so that he'll have stories to tell you. After all, she's largely responsible for how well he turned out, and there's no disrespect intended - your grandpa's a great man and you're going to have so much fun together reading books and going places and your daddy certainly got your grandpa's wonderful brain - but I'm pretty sure his heart came from your grandma.

So now you have both your grandmas over there, maybe in the same place you are now, maybe you'll even have met them both. Initially, some people might think they were really different. Your Grandma Tish was a good student who loved music and books and all things school. She liked the outdoors, and while she was always fashionable, she loved bugs and snakes and anything that grew in the dirt. She was a good shot and a good hunter. She grew up very poor, the kind of poor I hope you won't ever know anything about, way out in the country where she walked to a one-room schoolhouse. Grandma Sue wasn't much interested in school (she'd have admitted that herself) and in the time I knew her, I don't think she read a book or expressed much of a preference for any kind of music. And while she went camping with your daddy and the rest of the family when he was little, bugs and slithery things weren't high on her list of favorite things and I don't think she ever shot a gun. She grew up pretty comfortably in a nice neighborhood outside of Cincinnati with neighbors close on all sides and well away from farms and livestock.

So, on the surface, really different, but I'm pretty sure I loved them both from the first minute I met them and maybe that's because, after talking with your dad the last few days, we've realized that our mamas may have been very different in their day-to-day lives, but they were equally adamant about the qualities they wanted to instill in us.

Compassion or empathy or just an awareness of other human beings was high on the list. Daddy says he was opening doors for other people as soon as he could wedge them open, and Grandma Sue made sure that he helped out when he was little by doing little errands in the neighborhood or accompanying her to the nursing home so he could see how much a little kindness means to those less fortunate. Grandma Tish would have approved, and from a very early age, she talked to me about other people's feelings, scolding me if she thought I came anywhere near making fun of someone, especially if she thought that I was being unkind about something they could do anything about. We weren't ever allowed to ridicule anyone, but the punishment was especially bad if she thought we were being cruel because of lack of money or their looks or their clothes. People don't ask for much of what they get in life, especially other children, and both our mothers wanted to make sure that we understood how fortunate we were just by virtue of the families we were born into and to realize that most people weren't as lucky.

Daddy says Grandma Sue was big on responsibility too. She wanted him to be responsible for himself, and so sometime in the future when he's making you do your own laundry or allowing you to get a bad grade on a homework assignment you forgot to turn in or insisting that you use some of your chore money to buy a more expensive pair of shoes than the ones he's willing to get you, you'll know why. You have to take responsibility for yourself in this world, and I'm not sure exactly how Grandma Sue learned that lesson, but I know Grandma Tish learned it the hard way - doing hard work early in life because her parents worked so hard to have even a little bit of money that she and her brothers often couldn't count on anyone else but themselves. Responsibility is a big word and a big concept, but our mamas started us on the path so early that it just came along gradually.

But, of course, like all mamas, they indulged us a bit too, and that was when it came to our curiosity. They couldn't have been more different in terms of their own interests in learning - Grandma Sue would hardly read a magazine, I think, while Grandma Tish would have read the label on every bottle in the bathroom if she'd had nothing else - but they both gave us free reign to learn and never discouraged any of our interests. When Daddy was little, he brought home snakes and frogs and bugs, and your grandma never complained. She helped him nurse some baby rabbits whose mother had been killed, and she taught him that he had to let them go be the little wild rabbits they were intended to be when they got big enough. I hauled in bleached jawbones from dead deer, ratty bird nests and all sorts of things, and Grandma Tish never missed the opportunity to help an injured robin rest up for a few days while teaching us about what robins ate and how they flew. She even brought home snakes sometimes to show us a little bit about how interesting and unique they were before letting them loose in the backyard. They wanted us to learn about the world on our own, to see things and figure things out and solve problems, because they knew that we needed that in order to grow up to be independent and to find the things that would excite us.

Three pretty basic concepts really - empathy, responsibility and curiosity - but they were at the core of what we learned from both your grandmas. Neither one of them cared much about whether we were rocket scientists or extremely wealthy or successful by anyone else's standards; they wanted us to be inquisitive, kind, and good citizens, figuring, rightly so, that the rest would fall in line somehow.

And those traits work well together. If you have empathy, you'll always use your curiosity and responsibility to help others. If you have responsibility, you'll be careful about what you do with your curiosity and you'll be guided to do good things with your empathy. And if you have curiosity, you'll be aware of when responsibility and empathy are necessary. Just know that when we're teaching you these three things, the things we think it's most important for you to know, you're learning what your grandmas thought was most important too and that they're watching over you all the time, loving you more than you can even imagine.