My granddaughter Robin has altered my life, but not in the way I imagined. She can not speak and can barely sit up, yet she is a powerful creature, she is re-arranging the world around her, and my own troubled experience with family.

I do not much care to speak poorly of my own life. In a nation of victims, I do not wish to be a victim. My experience with family has been the tragedy of my life on several different levels, I grew up watching people I loved be destroyed by people who should have loved and nourished them, and barely hung on myself.

I am sorry about all of this, I know we all do the best we can for as long as we can. Everyone deserves clemency and empathy and compassion. I did my own destruction of family some years ago when I fled my unhappy life to come upstate and buy my first farm, and began the path to fulfillment and rebirth.

In the process, I left my first wife Paula, a very fine person and my spouse for 35 years behind, as well as my daughter Emma. Our divorce was awful and it was not simple for Emma. That, and the fact I was living a completely alien life 300 miles away pulled us apart.

Paula and I spend five years working out the divorce and afterwards, we lost contact with one another, as is quite common and sometimes quite healthy. You are either married or not. With a child it is complicated. Emma and I struggled with one another, but we never quit on each other, we kept trying.

I watched in awe as she put a good life together, balancing love and work with courage and heart. When I heard I was going to be a grandfather, I had, as you know, low expectations. Part of this was an acknowledgement of the emotional and geographic issues involved, part of it was wishing to protect myself – family has not ever been a source of nourishment and comfort for me.

Somehow, Robin the wizard has changed all of that. Of course, I do love her, but I am not into the gaga over the top grandkid worshiping thing. It has to happen naturally, cute only goes so far. But she has cast something of a magic spell. Emma and I talk all the time.

Last week, she paid to rent a beautiful apartment so Maria and I could come and visit her and Robin and Jay over the holidays. I got quite ill on the last day, food poisoning I think, but we had to leave very early to beat a snowstorm and I was concerned that we hadn’t cleaned up the apartment as thoroughly as I wished, and I was embarrassed and regretful that I might have marred this generous gift.

Emma came up to the apartment after we were gone, cleaned it all up, made sure everything was okay, and never even mentioned this to me. No big deal, she said when I found out.

And Emma is very busy between her demanding job as an editor and a new baby. She didn’t need to do that. Yet I am not all that surprised. We are at ease with one another again, as we once were, trusting and loving and engaged with one another, something I have wanted for a long time. The wounds of the flight and the divorce are finally healing, I think. Robin seems to have a magic wand.

Emma wants me to be involved and I think she also needs me to be involved.  She is working hard at it and so am I. Robin has enough on her plate, but perhaps she has healing powers, that is what her stare is about. I am appreciating being a grandfather, and not necessarily in the ways I expected.

Another healing thing.  Paula and I are in touch now also, I send her photos of Robin and we talk about what a great job Emma and Jay are doing. It is through e-mails and we are not looking to be best friends, but we care about one another, and we can and do share the joy of Emma and Robin, something very good that came out of our long marriage.

The circle turns, and Paula and I are in a good place again.

Maria is open to the experience, although she is in an odd position in many ways. She wants to be a part of it, and Emma and Jay want her to be a part of it. That will help greatly. It can’t really work without her.

I have no illusions about being a grandfather, honestly. I am not being coy, it is not about loving Robin,  that’s easy enough to do, it is about being realistic. I will not likely be around when Robin gets old enough to really know me well and there are real geographic and emotional obstacles to being close to my granddaughter.

It would be foolish of me not to see that.  Sometimes, there are good reasons to be wary.

I think she will love the farm once she gets up here, the donkeys are waiting for her, and so are the dogs. The people too.

Still, much has already changed, and Robin can’t even walk or talk She is a powerful baby, already helping to heal deep wounds I thought would never stop bleeding.