Green with Gorgeous Grandma Envy

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I am surrounded by friends and family moving into that coveted phase of parenting: grandparenthood. And I am insanely jealous. My sisters, my best friend from high school, my former boss, it seems everyone has a new grandbaby to cuddle, share darling pics on social media, and generally make me pine for a grandbaby of my very own. Yes, this is silly. Yes, I am fully aware that none of our children are ready to be or should be parents at this time. But that doesn’t stop me from being green with grandma envy.

Joys of Grandparenting

Parenting legend says that being a grandparent is all the joys of parenting with none of the hassles and overwhelming responsibilities. My own mother will often say that she sometimes wished she could have skipped parenting and gone straight to grandparenting. And from the looks of my friends, she is right about being a grandparent. The relaxed joy in my friends’ faces as they cuddle newborn grandbabies is enough to set me to pining for hours.

My pining needed to stop. I knew that. But I couldn’t stop and I knew I needed help. The best tonic for getting over yourself is a good friend who will tell you to just get over yourself. Cue my friend Meggen, my unflappable, tell it like it should be, get it done friend. We live hundreds of miles apart, but we had the chance to grab brunch together recently while I was in her hometown for a convention. I began lamenting my grandparentless state and she looked at me with horror and disbelief. “How old are you? You are not old enough to be a grandma.” Boom. There it was. A solid reason to own my current state and stop wishing for something that wasn’t meant to be right now.

Green with gorgeous grandma envyEmbracing the Now

I am going to embrace Meggen’s philosophy that grandparenthood is for people older than 60. That gives my children, ages 26, 23, and 21, ample time to get their relationships together and present me with a grandchild for my 60th birthday. (Cue the horror on each of their faces when they read this.) I can just picture myself cuddling a newborn and blowing out the candles on my cake — then sharing it to my social media universe for a flood of hearts. But until that far-off day, I have found a solution to ease my granny envy: Gorgeous Grandma Day! Did you even know such a national day existed?

[quote]Celebrate your gorgeous grandmas and share your photos with #GorgeousGrandma.[/quote] In 1984, Alice Solomon created Gorgeous Grandma Day to honor women of a certain age, whether they were grandmothers or not. “It is a time to recognize their accomplishments and their abilities,” she stated. “Their lives have only just begun.” On this Gorgeous Grandma Day, celebrated every July 23rd, instead of stoking my granny envy, I will celebrate all the gorgeous grandmas in my life. I will find ways to tell my sisters how beautiful they are and how much fun I have being Auntie C to my great-nieces, their granddaughters. I will schedule that long-overdue lunch with my high school best friend so I can see loads of newborn photos. I will enjoy my pseudo-granny status with my flock of little ones in Sunday School. And I will be sure to tell my own mother how gorgeous she is, inside and out.

Celebrate your gorgeous grandmas and share your photos with #GorgeousGrandma. I promise to heart all of them.

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Chris L
Born in Wisconsin, Chris moved South with her family, first to Richmond, Virginia, and then to Birmingham when she was 12. She loves being a girl raised in the South, and her only remaining Midwestern traits are a love for the Packers and a fondness for bratwurst. In 2010, Chris reconnected with Christopher, a former Birmingham-Southern College classmate, after a random meeting in the cereal aisle at Publix. They married in 2011, not realizing that they were bringing together a perfect storm of teenage angst with their three children. Today, Chris is the center support that keeps the seesaw of her family balanced, leading a blended family of three young adults and enjoying an empty nest. Before the pandemic, most days were busy managing client relationships for a corporate event production company, but after six months of unemployment, she has become the parish administrator aka “the church lady” for her church. When she's not working, she loves reading a rich historical novel, volunteering with her sorority, and planning their next wine-tasting excursions.