JO DAVISON: I want to be a gran in the auntie mould
TWO fortysomething friends are having babies. And honestly, all I feel is joy for them.
Nature is amazing. It tugs at the ovaries of women still able to reproduce.
And it disconnects the emersion heater for those whose thermostat has bust and their radiators run dry.
It's a good job, really. Otherwise there would be legions of wizened creatures double-using pushchairs as Zimmer frames and sharing nappy stacks with their infants. Now I'm hitting 50, all I want to reproduce is my own collagen.
But one day, I do plan to have another child by proxy. I plan to be a gran. A dead cool one, who picks up her grandson from school in her sports car and drives him home (slightly too fast) via the local delicatessen, where I am taking him on an epicurean tour of the globe, the local library, if one still exists, where I am introducing him to the books a boy must read, and the local paper shop to nudge him into the newspaper habit from a young age. (God forbid they won't exist either, but don't get me started on that).
When we get to his father's, I will show him how to make peanut butter sandwiches just like daddy, so crumbs fall to the floor in a wheaten rug about his feet. I'll explain milk always tastes best drunk straight from the carton and suggest we go for a bike ride before homework.
In the holidays, when he comes to stay with Bloke and me, the days will be golden. We will take him to explore far-flung cities, tell him tales of his father's childhood and mine, wake him up in the early hours to eat the best chocolate he has ever tasted, further his education with old footage of Spike Milligan, Morecambe and Wise, Fawlty Towers, Belle and Sebastian, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart… And we will watch them right through the night if we want to.
I will be a glamorous gran, but not in a Butlin's, short skirt and visible bingo wings way. My hair will be a tousled silver bob, I will still be wearing jeans with heels, white linen trousers with leather flip-flops and wafting a cloud of Chanel.
Having reached a ripe old age, I'll have devised lots of nifty new ways with a scarf.
I got to thinking about the grandmother I hope to be (in ten years' time; no pressure) after a mother-son conversation about our Auntie Jo.
Regretfully, I barely knew my grandparents. But this vibrant, funny, warm, impulsive and unconventional woman who every day was as glamorous as Monroe brought a different dimension to my life. And then his.
Each one of us got to do crazy, unexpected things with her. I was the child picked up in the sportscar and woken to Lindt in the early hours. He was the one allowed to watch TV 'til daybreak. And we both lost her. To a breakdown, some years ago now, from which she has never fully recovered.
We miss her. When I am a gran, I can try again at some of the thing I failed on with my child (too few bike rides, a timid palate and no result at all with books and newspapers). And I can strive to carry on the Auntie Jo way.
Got a view? Leave a comment below.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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