It’s December. Again. Christmas is around the corner and my ageing, menopausal brain is slowly and unwillingly kicking into seasonal action. Luckily years of practice and a tried-and-tested spreadsheet means I’ll be ok.

I feel kinda smug because I started early. I do feel slightly guilty due to my massive over-reliance on Amazon. But I remember the pre-Internet days of trudging the high street; it wasn’t better. I spent an entire afternoon wrapping gifts, made the best of it by listening to five hours of BBC Radio four podcasts (thank you @women’s hour) while fighting the sellotape goblin. I retrieved the pretend Christmas tree from my cupboard of shame (in which I store things that are only a wee bit dysfunctional and might one day be useful, aka junk). I inadvertently decluttered for 3 hours and yet, three bin bags later, there was zero measurable junk volume reduction. I swear there’s some mischievous magic going on… you know its true, because every year you can hear the Christmas-tree-light goblin cackling gleefully as you laboriously untangle them.

Fortunately, my depleted oestrogen, having now reset to (almost) factory levels (ie child/bloke) allows me to care much much less about achieving impossible Christmas standards. Obviously some things are baked into our XX psyche, we cannot unlearn them because we were born that way, so I’ll always care more than both Firstborn Son and Middle Child. I refuse to go all ‘bah, Humbug’ though, because the day is about family and making an effort to show we appreciate each other. If we are lucky enough to have family (be it genetic, adopted, or otherwise chosen) it’s reasonable to show up with good cheer and festive spirit! It ought to involve indulgence and gifts. And chocolate. It doesn’t need to involve matching pyjamas though. Or photo-shopped selfies shared across the socials. Or Christmas cards.

The other evolutionary advantage of this anti-puberty reset is that women get to be grandmothers. Only human and killer whale females get to do this, apparently! Unfortunately for the orca grannies it’s mostly just an extension of caring for their sons who depend on their mummy for life. That doesn’t sound like fun.

My mother (who is from a French, Catholic and military  family) married conventionally young and kids soon followed.  Naturally, she expected to be a young grandmother. As her first born daughter, I came under a certain amount of pressure to produce these heirs in a timely manner. I, however, had grown up in London, under rather less religious conditions. This mitigated against parental pressure and (french) societal expectation. Plus I’d added nursing and midwifery (only women) training to an all girl’s education.  Oh, and I hated tennis (according to french lore,  that’s where the eligible bachelors are…)  Reproduction, when it finally happened, was utterly unconventional, but by then I was considered so old that traditional standards had dropped considerably, and a ring was no longer considered essential. A grandchild was a grandchild and my mother immediately began her campaign to be his favourite person in the whole world. Because that’s the joy of the role. When you’re the mum, boring rules have to be set and adhered to for everyone’s sake. A child’s sleep pattern, bladder, and food preferences all have to be trained and this involves a certain amount of discipline. The granny doesn’t have to get involved with any of this repetitive, difficult, boring, relentless stuff. To be fair, she’s been there already, how else did we turn out so great! Now, she laughs at the rules. She’ll take your child and she will feed him pasta with pesto sauce if that’s all he eats. After all, if that’s all he eats, that’s on you. Obviously she’d have trained him better had she been his mum, but hey ho, she’s just the granny… she will also feed him chocolate. And pizza. Bedtime will be when he says it is. Grandma rules. When your child is returned, over-sugared and under-rested, you will express a reverent amout of gratitude.  Not gonna lie, I’m looking forward to that gig!

I’m touching lots of wood as I write this because becoming a grandmother AND being alive to enjoy it does involve a great deal of good fortune. Both Firstborn Son and Middle Child profess to wanting kids. Only Daughter (currently) informs me that it is  Absolutely. Out. Of. The. Sodding. Question. Already, my chances of grannyhood have dropped considerably. Can the boys convince a current/future partner to risk her career, her lifestyle, her future income, even her health to become their child’s mother? It’s not a given. Thankfully, it is no longer conventional/acceptable to ask the putative mother of your would-be grandchild when she plans to conceive. But in my experience as a midwife, she could easily (and unproblematically) wait til she’s 35. That’s in 15 years, assuming the boys pick a woman their age. If, as is plausible,  she’s much younger, I’m looking upwards of 20 years… you get my drift… and sure, it’s not utterly unreasonable to hope I’d still be around, but nothing is certain. 

Obviously I would dearly love to be around to sabotage my kids’ efforts to train their offspring but, jokes aside, I do hope to be able to help. I’ve looked after many women whose mothers have passed away prior to grannyhood and this is a source of immense sadness, a whole new burst of grief which surfaces during pregnancy even if the bereavement wasn’t recent. Several of my friends have experienced this. One of them asked me to write about it. She felt the pain of losing her mother was exacerbated by her absence as a grandmother to her daughter.  I confess all I can do is acknowledge that extra dimension of grief, and recognise that Christmas is a time when such a loss is felt even more keenly. She should be holding your hand as you begin your motherhood journey. It’s an overlooked fact, but had Mary’s mother been with her, you can be sure she’d have kicked up a mega-stink and found her a room. (Then again, if the gift-bearing so-called wise men had got there on time and used the gold, the whole stable thing could have been averted). She ought to be causing granny mischief, like, say, accidentally cutting your middle child’s hair so short you didn’t immediately recognise him. She’s supposed to start all her sentences with ‘well, in my day…’ and finish all her sentences with ‘but it was better back then.’ (It wasn’t. It wasn’t worse either. People muddled through, like they always did and always will).

Christmas is a time for family. It’s also a time to celebrate the matriarch in our lives.  She might not be perfect (for the avoidance of all doubt, mine is), she might even drive you crazy, maybe she could have done better but she almost certainly did the best she could, even if that was underwhelming. It was different back then, for sure, but it wasn’t easier. We shouldn’t judge lest our children also  judge us in an out-of-time-context for would-be crimes that simply weren’t a thing when they were small…

Fortunately, my matriarchal mother is the glue that keeps us all together, the keeper of family traditions, the repository of wisdom, the voice of reason. Long may she spoil her grandchildren. If I’m unbelievably lucky, she’ll spoil mine too!