Debra-Lynn B. Hook: Grandmother-to-be finds unexpected bond with her expectant-father son

My son was quietly making breakfast the other morning while I sat at the kitchen table doing a jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly he lifted his head from the stove and asked, “So how did you learn to be a parent?”

I kept flipping puzzle pieces even as my heart did its own little flip.

Here was a topic equal to a mother’s heart, the standout thing that has defined my life for 33 years, the underpinnings of which my children have never shown interest in before.

Now, suddenly the boy who made me a mother, about to be a parent himself come June, had a need to know.

“First of all, I observed other families,” I said. “If I liked the way the kids behaved, I watched how their parents disciplined and otherwise interacted with them. I read lots of parenting magazines. I wrote and researched topics for this column. And I went to therapy. Boy, did I go to therapy.”

Chris, mum about his expectant father anxieties these many months, was opening up to me now about the enormity of the impending responsibility of fatherhood while I offered the concept of the “good enough parent,” a phrase coined in the 1950s by English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott that saved me a time or two.

“You don’t have to be perfect," I said. "You’re going to make mistakes. But mistakes are how you learn to say ‘I’m sorry.’ You, personally, are also going to get a lot of things right. Because that’s who you are. There's no doubt in my mind you are going to be a wonderful parent."

The conversation lasted only a few minutes, as long as it took to finish the bacon.

But in those minutes, it occurred to me that our relationship had officially crossed over into a place I couldn’t have predicted.

Certainly I knew as soon as Chris and Kate announced they were pregnant that my son and I would be growing into new territory as individuals: first-time grandparenthood for me, first-time parenthood for Chris.

What I hadn’t envisioned was the depths to which we might grow together.

What I hadn’t considered was the solidarity we would share.

My son’s baby will be my son’s first child, like Chris was mine.

He will be a boy, like Chris.

Chris will be 33 when Kate gives birth. I was just shy of 32 when I gave birth to him.

Beyond the similarities on paper are the existential similarities, blood and flesh and sinew, brain and heart and disposition.

Chris is curious, focused and optimistic, like I was as a young parent.

Like me, he is thoughtful, analytical and thorough in his approach.

He has also been determined to find his own way, not to call his mother or anybody else into the deeper meanderings of his fledgling thoughts on impending fatherhood, but, it seems, to let his story percolate privately.

Now here on this morning in the kitchen, I felt the common reach.

The desire to get it right, to stand on solid ground in this most monumental task, to share the bewilderment and the startled joy with somebody who knows, and not just somebody, but the woman who brought him.

This, then, becomes the unexpected surprise of this lovely package that has me becoming Grandmother while my son becomes Father.

Him, standing here in the kitchen, waiting.

Me, remembering waiting for him.

We are suddenly something akin to peers, though not quite.

I will always be his elder, his mother, and he, my son.

But now we will have this common bond between us around this exceptional thing called parenting.

The honor was always mine.

Now it is ours.

Journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, has been writing about family life since 1988 when she was pregnant with the first of her three children. E-mails are welcome at dlbhook@yahoo.com.

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Grandmother-to-be finds unexpected bond with her expectant-father son