Whatever Held

My grandmothers were their own study. Just as different from each other, and between them they handed me almost everything I know about how to be a woman in the world.

My mom’s mother was a straight shooter with very little filter. She was strong in her church and would quietly hide the fact that she played bingo, which tells you most of what you need to know about her: devout, a little sly, and entirely herself. She kept an immaculate house. She loved to dance at parties. She was snarky and funny, and when I got ornery she’d tell me to knock it off, but even then it felt like something she was only saying because a grandmother is supposed to say it. Underneath, I always sensed she liked it. I think she recognized herself in me. We were cut from the same cloth, the two of us, and you don’t really scold your own reflection, not with any conviction. And more than anyone, she took me places. My first ride on a public bus was with her. Fairyland, the Oakland Zoo, the Mormon temple all lit up at Christmas, theater shows, movies. She didn’t just love me at her kitchen table. She loaded me up and showed me the world.

My dad’s mother did the opposite, and it was just as much a gift. She made the world soft right where she stood. She came from the South, and she was a feeder in the best sense, the kind of woman who measured love in whether everyone had enough to eat and a comfortable place to sit. When company came there was always too much food, which was exactly how she wanted it. She had incredibly soft skin and a sweet laugh. She’d take me to the toy store and let me pick out a doll, and there was a McDonald’s around the corner where she’d hand us money for ice cream sundaes. When I was home sick from school, she played games with me all day. One grandmother took me out into the world. The other made home feel like the safest place in it.

There is one more thing I noticed, young, and I’ve thought about it my whole life since. My mom’s mother lived in Oakland, and she would strike up a conversation with anyone, of any background, without a second thought. It was simply how she moved through the world. Everyone was a person to talk to. My dad’s mother, raised in the South in a different time, carried fears about people who were different from her, people of other backgrounds, and even as a child I could feel the difference between the two of them on this one thing. I loved them both. I don’t say this to diminish the grandmother who fed me and played games with me when I was sick. She was warm and she was good to me and she also carried something she’d been handed long before I knew her. Both things were true, the way both things are usually true about people.

But I watched. Children watch. And somewhere in there I chose. Everything I feel about the diversity of the place I live, everything I’ve tried to pass to my own kids about people of every background belonging at the same table, traces back to a woman making easy conversation with a stranger on a street while I stood next to her, taking notes I didn’t know I was taking.

Behind the two of them stood their own mothers, and I was lucky enough to know most of them too.

My mom’s dad’s mother lived in Nevada, and I only met her a handful of times, but she left an impression. She seemed elegant to me, always, with her little dog beside her. And I heard the stories, my favorite being that she and my poppy used to have food fights, this refined woman flinging food at her grown son. Elegance and mischief in the same person. It runs in the family.

My mom’s mom’s mother was petite and had a character far bigger than her size. She was the matriarch of an enormous blended family, and we’d go to her on Christmas Eve to a house so full of people that keeping track of who was who was hopeless. She had also gone through cancer, long before I did.

I sat with that fact for a while when I first put this together. The disease I fought didn’t begin with me. It came down the same line these women came down. She faced it and went on to preside over that huge, loud, blended family for years. I faced it and went on to raise my three. There’s a thread of women in my family who got hit by something enormous and simply kept pushing through everything anyway.

That’s what I come from. Women who took me places and women who fed me. Women who danced and women who hid their bingo. Elegant food-fighters and petite matriarchs. Women who talked to everyone and one who was afraid to, and the choice I got to make between them. Women who survived the exact thing I would later survive.

I used to feel like I was doing all of it alone. And in the day to day, mostly I was. But when I look back far enough, I can see I was never the first. I’m just the latest one in a long line of women who held everything together, and I learned how to do it from watching them, at kitchen tables and zoo gates and Christmas Eves, taking notes I didn’t know I was taking.