The Ledger

By Patricia McClellan

There is nothing quite like watching your own daughters become mothers.

Your heart swells with pride as you whisper a prayer that all those years of advice, correction, and the occasional “Because I said so!” somehow found their way into their memories.

You hope they have a well-stocked toolbox filled with patience, faith, common sense, and the ability to function on three hours of sleep.

Then, behind those happy tears, you can’t help but smile. You know exactly what’s headed their way, and there’s a little voice inside whispering, “Welcome to motherhood. Buckle up, buttercup. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

Fast forward a few years, and life has a funny way of coming full circle.

Now I’m watching my granddaughters become mothers, and suddenly I’m thinking they surely need a bigger toolbox.

Because if motherhood has taught me anything, it’s that every generation thinks they’re ready… right up until they buckle that precious little bundle into the car seat and realize the hospital is actually going to let them take a human being home.

It hits a little differently when your daughters are about to become grandmothers. Somewhere along the way, they stopped being the little girls who needed me and became the women everyone else turns to. At least, that’s what they think.

I’m standing by, fully prepared to share a lifetime of parenting wisdom. After all, I earned every gray hair the hard way. The problem is, there’s someone standing between me and my new assignment.

Their mothers.

My daughters.

Apparently, just because they became mothers, they think they’re experts.

Bless their hearts.

They forget one very important fact—I raised them. Every parenting trick they know, every shortcut they’ve discovered, and every “brilliant” idea they have probably started somewhere around my kitchen table thirty years ago. I’ve been in this role twenty years longer than they have. Not only do I know all the tricks… I’m pretty sure I invented most of them.

I’ve learned to choose my battles. Experience has taught me that mothers have to figure some things out on their own. Grandmothers, on the other hand, get to sit quietly, smile knowingly, and wait.

Because sooner or later, there will come a day when the baby has cried for two hours, refuses to sleep, has decorated both parents and the living room with the contents of a diaper, and every trick in the parenting books has failed.

That’s when my phone will ring.

And on the other end, I’ll hear the sweetest words a mother can ever hear:

“Mama… what would you do?”

Now that’s the moment I’ve been training for all along.