Daisy

My gram and I had a funny relationship. I was her last granddaughter and she was always worried about me. I think because I pushed back on the importance she put on finding a husband and caring for a family. I knew I could be just as happy independently and starting a career first. She asked me once, “you’re so footloose and free. You’ll settle down one day, won’t you dear?” Sure, gram. 

She lived a very full 94 years- seeing four of her six children become grandparents, four of her five granddaughters become moms, and I was her last one. 

In December of 2020, nine months into being isolated at her assisted living house and limited to only window visits with her family, my mom finally told her I was expecting. She made it a point to make it down to breakfast, lunch AND dinner that day to tell her friends the news. It was at dinner that night that she fell, and was taken to Beverly Hospital for the last time. She’d never make it back to give her friends any further updates, but her last conversations with them were about her newest arriving great grandchild and that’s how she would have wanted to leave it.

She was taken to the hospice house a week later and I hated myself that I didn’t get to have that moment with her. My mom was able to FaceTime me and Shane for one of her last coherent conversations, and she said to me “That’s wonderful dear.” And when asked if she thought it would be a boy or a girl, “whichever, dear, whichever. As long as it’s healthy… but obviously I want it to be a girl.”

Three days later, I was let in to the hospice house and I sat with her while she peacefully slept. I brought my ultrasound picture and put it in her hand. It was my way of knowing that she got to hold my child for at least one time. I took this picture knowing I could show it to Roux one day and tell her, “you did get to meet great Grammy Daisy.”

Fifteen minutes after I left her room, my gram passed away. 

I found out later from my mom and aunts that for the last few years all my gram would say when it came to her health was, “I just have to live to see Jenna become a mom.”

And as I sit here now holding my two month old daughter in my arms while she sleeps, rocking in a chair that isn’t a creaky wood one passed down as a family heirloom and in a nursery that isn’t ballerina pink, I know it wasn’t ever about old fashioned gender roles- it was about this feeling in my heart right now. She wanted this very moment for me and for all of her girls. Being a mom, and raising my daughter to know she can be whatever she wants to be, marry whoever and have children if she’d like to. Be footloose and free til she wants to stop or not. But that this life with her is truly magical✨

She’d still give me that look though if she ever knew our daughter’s middle name was James.