Our responses to new experience reveals us, if our eyes are open, we can learn who we really are.

This week, three days into the birth of my granddaughter Robin In New York City, I see how guarded I am, how wary and often detached. I loved being a reporter, and then an author,  because it was okay to watch.

I see how much I mistrust the very idea of human emotion, especially when it gets too close to me.

I see that Maria is tremendously excited about Robin’s birth, despite her insistence that she is not drawn to babies or mothering.

This morning, talking in bed as we often do on Sundays, we saw how Robin’s birth has already transformed our understanding of love and expectations. I survived by being careful and wary and suspicious, those are as much a part of me as my nose. Sometimes it is wiser to mistrust.

Maria survived by protecting her emotions, waiting for the right time to free them.

I feel excitement and anticipation.  In recent years, I have opened up and been rewarded for it.

I hope I will be close to this child. I see that there is little real thoughtful understanding or discussion of grandparentng, even though it can be a profoundly significant relationship for children. It was for me. I am disappointed by what I read and some of what I hear.

Mostly, people tell me in a sort of knowing, wait-and-see way, you’ll see, you have no idea,  it will knock you off your feet.

But I have learned to trust my own feelings and experience, that was how I felt safe. I’m going to meet Robin in New York City, but it will be a long time, I think, before we can have anything I would call a relationship.

If not for my grandmother and her pure and powerful love of me, I am not sure I would have survived childhood. She was my safe and steady place. When I ran away from home, it was to her apartment. When I was sick, I went there to heal. When I was hungry, she fed me.

I feel pressure to fully embrace this experience and turn myself over to it.

To tell people what they wish to hear, to concede that I am smitten beyond imagination and overwhelmed with feeling.  To get aboard the grandparent love train. People are calling and message me as if the most important thing in my life has occurred, they are almost breathless to know how she is, how I am.

I am fine, so is she. And two important things happened in my world this week: Maria raised the funds to go to India, and I think I sold my 30th book.

I understand that nothing makes me warier than being told what I feel, I’m not sure anyone who has ever told me how I  was feeling was correct or really wanted to know.

More than anything else, people tell me that there is nothing like being a grandparent, it is the purest kind of unconditional and unfettered love. You don’t have to raise this person, you don’t have to push her, argue with her, feel responsible for her, worry about who is watching over her.

You just have to love her and be loved back, and in a curious sense, that sounds like loving a dog – they are blank canvases, you can project almost anything you wish onto them.

A child is different than a dog, of course, when they evolve, they can speak and make their own decisions. It becomes more complex.

I have experienced grandparent love, I know it is real, but I still ask myself, is my cup so empty that I have to fill it with the life of another person? I’m just being honest, that’s what goes through my mind. I never wish to hide in the life of another human being. Or a dog, for that matter. I’ve never read a great novel about grandparenting, or seen a movie about it that isn’t a cardboard cliche.

I am learning about myself this week, seeing in some ways how damaged and incomplete I am.  Or perhaps, how complete I am beginning to be. I am wary of all this miracle talk, pushed into admitting that I am surrendering to something I don’t yet feel, and may never feel. We are all individuals, shaped by our own experience.

In most respects, I see my childhood was a horror, I do not trust love or accept its motives and constancy. I could not trust the people I was supposed to trust, and love was at best, a two-edged sword, it cut as often as it nourished.

Maria has penetrated this screen more than any other human has, I feel the armor cracking and melting bit by bit, but it is never fully gone and it will never be completely gone.  For all of her troubles, the love inside of Maria hid and waited – it was never destroyed.

I think I am more damaged than she is, or perhaps in a different way. She has always been able to see the feeling inside of me, even when others – including me – can’t. Her love pushes me to liberate my own. Her emotions are visible, powerful, intact. I learned a few years ago that I was broken,  I was a Humpty Dumpty, the challenge for me is to put the pieces back to together.

Having a granddaughter raises all of those issues for me, brings them sharply into focus.

There is little thoughtful or useful written or said about grandparenting.

The big idea about it is rather simple-minded and elegiac, it conjures up great and powerful love, almost beyond measure. It is always portrayed in a one-dimensional way, and I do not live in a one-dimensional world.

In a way, the big idea of grandparent love reminds me a little of the Rainbow Bridge idea of dogs – they are waiting for us to come across and love them without condition and for all eternity. Okay, I think, that’s what we need to think, but what do they need? We know what is good for us, but what about what is good for them?

When Red crosses his own bridge, I wish for him to live freely from me, and unbound.  He no longer needs to be defined by me.

I have no doubt that I will love this child, I already do, she comes right out the womb of my own child, who I love dearly.

I am open to new experience, whatever it brings. But I do not know what it will bring, nor can anyone predict that for me.

My  idea about love is to be thoughtful and careful, it sometimes seems like one thing, but is often another, and sometimes, when you truly open your soul up to it, you are hurt, not loved,  beyond imagination. And you hurt others. I have hurt people and been hurt, that is not a complaint, that is what it often means to love.

Is grandparenting always wonderful? Always pure? Is there any other dimension to it? If so, I will have to experience it, I will never get to read about it.

I got a beautiful message the other day from a grandmother who adores her grandchildren and who sees them as having greatly enriched her life. “But I will be honest,” she said, “like anything else, it is not easy to do it well, and I only see it from one side, I don’t think they could ever tell me what it is they truly about for me.”

I think love is about trust and faith, and then it is about mystical things like chemistry and feeling, hard to quantify, predict or see. So I am eager to explore this idea of grandparent love. Maria has shown me the possibilities of trust.

My daughter has made it clear to me that she wishes me to be close to her child, closer than she was to her grandparents.

So I will consider  that really means and what is truly possible. I am getting older, I turned 69 just a few weeks ago, and I do not know much more I can really change.

To me, change is life, it is creativity, it is love. To be closed to change is to be closed to life. I don’t want Robin to need me as much as I needed my grandmother, and I doubt she will. I don’t want to need her as much as I needed my grandmother, either.

My wish for her is that she lives the life she wants.  I imagine I will have little to do with that.

My guess is she will see me, as her mother does, as that strange and sometimes difficult and erratic figure with a distant farm and some animals and has fun visiting once in awhile.

I’m curious to see.