On July 19th our new grandson was born- Myles William LeFager. He couldn’t wait any longer and decided to enter the world on his sister’s birthday. They are exactly two years apart. I once heard someone say that every time a grandchild is born it is like a miracle that they immediately enter your heart. This was certainly again true. He also has potential to bring much drama into our lives. He didn’t come home for a week and we all worried like crazy about him. The first time I held him I realized that he was perfect.
This has also made me again realize that you never stop being a parent. I worried about my son and daughter-in-law almost as much as I worried about Myles. These blood ties really do run deep. Parenting has changed so much and stayed the same forever. I was born five days after the end of WWII. My father was wounded and came home in 1944. Thankfully he made a full recovery. He returned to the Chicago area where my mother’s parents lived. His mother had died in 1940 and his own father died in 1946. He was close to his mother, but not that close to his dad. His father had remarried shortly before his death. He and my mother had the typical marriage/family at that time. He worked and she stayed home. He was often too busy to play with us.
I know he loved us and I know that I wanted to be at least a good a father as he was. Times and family patterns changed. Both of us worked and tried to have an equal marriage. We also tried to share all the parenting tasks. We went to games and concerts and teacher conferences and doctor appointments. We tried to really be a part of our sons’ lives. I think this was because of how we were both raised. The difficult part is to learn to let go. We both still have difficulty with that. Both of our sons are highly intelligent and successful. I am unbelievably proud of both of them. I think what I am most proud of is how good they are as parents. I think that they are more involved in their children’s lives than I was and this may be just another adjustment of the current state of marriage and family.
This all has taken place in the midst of a pandemic. Myles is entering the world at a very strange time. There is a lot of fear and tremendous anger. The economy is very shaky right now because of all of this. We hear on one side that we are on the edge of a precipice. The other side proclaims that everything will be wonderful in the next few months aside from riots and anarchists.
At some point Myles will see pictures of this time with everyone being masked. We all look like bank robbers. We hear constantly the need to wash our hands and maintain social distance. We are urged to avoid crowds and even avoid family gatherings with those we don’t live with. Due to that our contact with all our grandchildren has been severely limited. Like all grandparents we have really missed them. We are now trying to increase contact. We both had Corona tests and were negative. I think this has made it easier for our families to resume contact.
Now we have another to love. We can think that this is the worst time ever over what has happened to us. Yet our parents went thru their own pandemic in 1919. They went thru a Great Depression, a World War, Korea, the McCarthy hearings, and Polio. We went thru presidential and political assassinations, civil rights abuses, Vietnam , AIDS etc. Every age has their struggle and crises and somehow we seem to make it thru.
I think we have a choice right now to be unrealistically optimistic or unrealistically pessimistic. The first time we saw Myles he was sleeping and then woke up and smiled. All the fear and anxiety disappeared as all of the grandparents made sounds of love. Even in the darkest time the fact that a new life has begun is a sign of hope. Perhaps that is still the answer. None of us know the future but we can focus on the present and the small joys that are present in our lives. If we can do that we may all have the strength to make it thru another day.