This is about my child's firsts
Only my child is a 73-year-old woman, and it's her first in a *while*, not like, in general.
I've been going to the gym again. But this essay isn't about me. Well, it is, in the sense that it's about our relationship, and I'm the narrator. But! You get what I mean! My point is: yesterday was my grandma's first time in the gym in over ten years.
She said it was the first time in two. That's the first thing about her. She has absolutely no sense of time, never had. She'll also call me by my mom's name, Andrea, or her last dog's, Vilma. She has gray eyes — for real, like you used to read about in 2005s dystopian YA novels — but if it's very sunny outside, her eyes are green or blue. (Did you know that eyes of these colors are actually melanin-deficient? That's why people with these eye colors are usually photophobic. I would brag about my healthy dark eyes, but eye surgery made me just as photophobic. Alas.) She has also never believed herself to be beautiful, which kind of puzzles me, because she's a total babe. This isn't even my love speaking. Look at her when she was younger:
See what I mean? Total babe.
This is what happened yesterday morning: immediately after waking up, I called her.
“Hey. Did you sleep well?” I asked.
“Yeah. My head hurts, though.” Her head always hurts lately. Migraines. “I had breakfast earlier and now your grandpa is watering the garden. I'm back in bed, but I'm dressed.”
“So everything okay for this morning? Gym still up?”
(Reluctantly:) “Mmhmm. But I'll wait for you in bed.”
“No prob. I just woke up. I'll have some breakfast and get dressed. I'll be there in twenty.”
Had some breakfast. Hung out with the cats. Got dressed. Hung out with the cats some more. Then I went to her house, honked the car, and waited outside. Grandpa was around, so he immediately came to my car to chat while she got her things. The usual banter — I'll tell him he's the most handsome man in the world. He'll tell me I need to check my glasses (but will giggle). They live ten minutes by foot from my house. When I chose where to move, I wanted somewhere close to their house. It's close to my dad's, too. I've lived in the same region for twenty-five years. I know this neighborhood and its history like the back of my hand.
Grandma comes, wearing a red cardigan. It's our color, both hers and mine, and part of the reason why I steal so many of her clothes. The other part is just that she has excellent taste in pajamas that end up becoming my going out clothes.
“It's cold,” she complains as she gets in the car.
“You'll feel warm soon enough.” I wink at her. She chuckles. It's part of our banter too.
When we leave the car in the parking lot, immediately I offer my arm. “Hook me,” I ask, and she links her arm to mine. She's bigger than me, but I'm stronger than I look. I don't know if I could actually stop her from falling if she tripped, but I like to think my love could shield her from the ground. (Very tacky. I am.)
As we walk the block that separates the parking lot to the gym, she's a chatterbox. Talking about the traffic before, and how they're rebuilding this store, and was here where Renner used to be? I can tell she's nervous. We're alike in many ways, but not in this: I thrive in the new, and she hates anything that disrupts routine.
I'd scheduled a trainer just for her beforehand, so we make acquaintances and he starts asking her questions. Mom's there too, we've been working out together in the mornings, but I don't let grandma or her speak. I don't mean any harm, it's just that I know her better than either my mom or herself.
“Any injuries I should know about?” he asks.
“No,” grandma replies.
Mom thinks for a moment. “Not really,” she decides.
“Knees,” I say. “She fell three years ago, and hurt her kneecaps. She did physiotherapy for eighteen months. Sometimes it still hurts to sit or get up. It'd be good to build some muscular strength there, but take it easy.”
“Noted.” He writes something down on his tablet.
Grandma mouths to me: “It wasn't that serious.”
I give her a stare. She chuckles and looks away.
“What's your main goal by working out?” the trainer asks. “Losing wait, building resistance, …?”
Grandma looks at me directly this time. I tell him, “She gets tired very easily, even walking around the block. But I cannot stress how slowly you two need to take it. She's 73, and had COVID a few months ago. That made her lose 10kg and she was in bed for the entirety of a month.”
“Noted,” he says again. Writes something else down. “Let's go, Regina?”
Regina is her name. She's always been vó to me, so hearing it sometimes catches me off guard. It means queen in Latin. My great grandparents didn't know that when naming her, but I think it suits her. We have a family friend who only calls her rainha.
She goes with him, but exchanges nervous glances with me as she disappears from my sight. Or, rather, as I disappear from hers. I watch her for the whole hour, no matter what I'm busying myself with.
To Mom, I say, “Look at her facial expressions. It hurts. I'm afraid she'll want to give up, or worse: overextend herself and get injured.”
Mom watches me watching her. Then she laughs at my concern, as if she's not concerned too. “You have to let your daughter grow up,” she jokes. “Let her suffer if she has to. She has to know she can still do things alone.”
In 2018 I sort of became their official caretaker. It's not that my mom and uncle aren't present in my grandparents lives, but I'd bought a car for the first time and suddenly could drive them places. I still worked as a teacher, so I had a very flexible schedule, and didn't like the idea of them driving the bus and subway alone anymore, not with my grandpa on his eighties already. I took them out frequently, and on a trip to Curitiba, this guy wanted to give them a hard time on the plane, and I became a feral soccer mom. When he asked me what I was to them, I didn’t say granddaughter. I said that: caretaker. I take care of them. Obviously. Also, asshole, back the fuck off from my children.
If you're not an adult who's extremely close to your grandparents, it may sound very weird that I embrace so much responsibility for them. I make sure their bills are all paid on time and that they get paid too. I know all their bank passwords and ID numbers, take them out shopping when they need new clothes, take them out for haircuts, and respect the frequency of their medical check-ups way better than mine.
I lived with them from ages 4 to 14. My biggest father figure is my grandpa. It felt natural that this happened the way it did: they took care of me when my mom was working three jobs, and now I take care of them.
But maybe, yeah, I worry too much. I've never had any children before, much less children who are in their seventies and eighties, stubborn and with long prescriptions of medication (I also make sure that they don't run out, and that they take each pill at the right time). As I watch my grandma like a hawk, I can't wait but think that there's a real possibility that by doing everything for them, especially with her, I've made her think that she can't do things on her own anymore.
Realization strikes me when I'm doing a plank. I nearly fall on my face. It's not cute, but it makes a teenager pulling twice as much weight as I can laugh. It's discreet so I let it go and don't scowl at him. Instead I sit down on the mat and run my hands over my sweaty hair: holy shit. Am I a bad mom?!
When her hour is up, she comes meet me. She's flustered, her hair's sweaty, and she's holding the water bottle I gave her that she insisted she didn't need. She pulls my shirt. “You know, it's like I left my headache here. I don't feel anything bad!”
My heart triples in size. I feel a little choked up. “Yeah? You liked it?”
She nods. “I was much rustier than I thought, but if we can take it slow, I'll get better.”
I look at my mom. Mom looks at me. We have this quiet conversation:
Mom: See? Told you she'd be fine. She needed to see what she can do on her own.
Me: I know. I hate it when you're right. I'm so proud of her.
Mom: Tell her. She needs to know.
Me, out loud: “I'm so proud of you, grandma.”
She smiles. She also looks like her heart has tripled in size.
Mom, out loud: “I'm proud of you too. Now you're a gym rat!”
On the way home, she couldn't stop jokingly picking fights with any car that cut me in traffic. She'd turn to me from the passenger seat and say, “Now that I'm strong, I'll take them all out for you!” She also called herself a warrior, completely out of context, when I was pulling up by her house.
This was early in the morning. I needed to run some errands for them in the late afternoon, so I went there later again. She was wearing pretty clothes and told me she was really happy that she'd started going to the gym.
God, she's so capable. Of everything. I love her so much, and she could take anyone in a fight. I love her so much I could bite her. But instead I hug her. I hug her so much, and cover her face in kisses, and she laughs and laughs, and says she loves me back.
Alright, I see now that I lied: this essay is about me a little bit. It's about how I realized that sometimes loving someone is letting them do their own thing. It's worrying but sitting back and watching, not meddling, not stopping them, not intervening. It's supporting them in finding things they can do on their own. It's about me still worrying myself sick that she's going to pull something, but shutting up about it.
But mostly it's about her. It's about how cool she is.
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Beautiful.