A tale of two grandmothers

Once, I had a grandma and a nana, and they couldn't have been more different.

My grandma, my dad's mother, was round and soft and called me "bubbeleh." When we played hairdresser, her hair felt fluffy under my fingers. In all things, she was unhurried, unruffled. "It's fine" was her favorite phrase -- no one should go to any trouble; there was rarely any need to get upset. My mom told me recently that she and my dad had visited my grandma's grave and noticed it needed landscaping. I said, "But you know Grandma, she'd say, 'Don't worry about it! It's fine!'"

This summer, Phil and I stopped by the "bungalow colony" in Hopewell Junction, NY, where my grandma spent her summers. She's been gone more than 10 years, but some of the residents still remembered what a nice lady she was.

My nana, my mom's mother, was slim and angular with hair that felt like straw. She had a quick mind and prided herself on her ability to stay current with the times -- once bragging to us that she was a proficient VCR programmer.

When I was a little girl, Nana picked me up from school every Wednesday afternoon. When my teachers asked, "Is that your grandmother?" I was always perplexed. "No," I would say as it if were obvious, "that's not my grandmother, it's my nana."

See, there's a definite difference between a grandmother and a nana, and Nana embodied it. 

She had her own sense of style. She proudly wore the same pink suit to my bat mitzvah, in 1996, and my wedding, in 2009.

She had her own way of cooking and baking. "I used margarine instead of butter, and egg whites instead of eggs, and you can't even tell the difference!" she would say. 

She even had her own way of leaving a voicemail. "Rachel, it's Nana. Everything's fine," she would emphasize, as if I would fear she would only call me if something terrible had happened. Then she would tell me to send everyone her love and give them a kiss from her. 

But most of all, Nana had her own way of making me feel like the smartest, funniest, most special person in the world. 

It was Nana who taught me how to crack an egg, how to "window shop" and how to effectively stockpile frozen leftovers. It was also Nana who taught me about impeccable manners, loyalty and integrity. She was, as they say, a real lady.

Both my grandma and my nana are gone now. But both of them left indelible impressions on who I am.

Whenever Eli spills something and I take a deep breath and say, "It's OK, that's no problem," I think of my grandma.

Every time I say to Phil, "Don't throw it out! We can freeze it!" I think of my nana.

When I taste a Werther's caramel, I think of my grandma. When I bake chocolate chip cookies or hamentashen on Purim, I think of my nana.

In one important way -- my grandma with her insistence that no one should worry about her, my nana with her reassurance that everything was OK -- my grandmothers were alike: They wanted to know their families were happy. They took immense pride in their children and grandchildren, and like true Jewish grandmothers they kevlled with joy when we were all together.

So to them I'd like to say: Nana and Grandma, it's Rachel. Everything's fine. And I'll give everyone a kiss from you.

Some advice about motherhood (and why it's wrong)

One of my best friends in the world became a mommy for the first time yesterday! In honor of her delicious daughter, here is some advice you'll hear from well-meaning moms about new motherhood. And why that advice stinks and what you really need to know instead.

1. "Sleep when the baby sleeps."
This should really be "Worry when the baby sleeps," or "Pump breastmilk when the baby sleeps" or my personal favorite, "Bleakly contemplate the ravages of your postpartum life when the baby sleeps." Everybody trots out this gem of advice like it's the solution to all newborn problems, like if only you and the baby jive on the same whacked-up circadian rhythm you'll be riding the train to easy parenthood. This advice conveniently presumes you can get the baby to sleep at all in the first place and ignores the fact that by the time you ascertain that the baby is, in fact, sleeping and then fall asleep yourself, it will be time to wake up with the baby again. Forget sleeping when the baby sleeps. You'll sleep when the baby's 18.

2. "It goes so fast! Enjoy every minute!"
As the mom of a toddler who is starting to say things like, "Don't talk to me!" (forget about the terrible 2s, he is now a two-nager), I can affirm that it does, in fact, go so fast. However, nothing made me weepier as a new mom than frantically shhhing a screaming infant while wiping smeared spit-up off my shoulder while simultaneously reminding myself that I should be ENJOYING EVERY MINUTE. Or looming over the crib silently willing my child to please, please fall asleep while also being sure to remember to ENJOY THIS VERY MINUTE. New moms are under enough pressure keeping their tiny humans alive. They can't be expected to enjoy every single minute, too.

3. "Trust your instincts."
I'm going to be brutally honest. When Eli was a newborn, I had no maternal instincts. None. The only instincts I had were screaming, "You're doing this wrong!" I vividly remember a moment after Eli's bris when he started crying and I froze, paralyzed. My baby is going to cry with all these people in my house ohmygodwhatdoIdo. My friend Marissa, Eli's godmother, soothingly suggested that maybe he was gassy from all the sugar water he'd inhaled during the bris and needed to be burped; she was right. For weeks I held on to that moment as some sort of talisman that I was completely lacking in maternal competence. Sometimes your instincts will tell you that you haven't heard the baby breathing in a minute and therefore she must be dead. Sometimes your instincts will tell you your baby can't possibly need to nurse for that many minutes at a time (pro tip: your baby can potentially need to nurse forever, if you're cool with that). In other words: sometimes your instincts are wrong. That doesn't make you a bad mom. It just makes you a new one.

Here are four pieces of advice I'd give to new moms instead:

1. Every day you keep the baby alive without dropping her on her head is a good day.
Be gentle with yourself and set the bar low.You don't have to entertain your newborn. At the end of the day, you may have gotten poop on yourself, you may have an infant wearing a misbuttoned onesie, you may have every single dish you own piled precariously in your sink. But is the baby still alive? Then it's been a good day.

2. Now and forever, you are your child's parent.
There is a lot - a lot - of advice for parents out there. I know this because when Eli was a newborn, I Googled it all. (Compulsively, even though I was repeatedly told to stop Googling.) If you can't trust your instincts, trust your husband's, or Dr. Karp's, or your baby's, and put them all in a blender to help you make up your mind. Worse things have happened than starting your baby on rice cereal instead of avocado or inadvertently causing the dreaded "nipple confusion." You -- you -- are your baby's parent. You may not be able to trust your instincts now, but that day will come. And guess what? You got this.

3. You don't just have a baby. You have a human being. 

You are your baby's parent for the rest of both your lives. I find this totally overwhelming but also comforting in a "This too shall pass" kind of way. Like, in 20 years it's not going to matter whether your baby was breastfed or formula-fed (well, unless he turns out intellectually inferior and chronically sick, then we'll know it's because he was formula-fed. Kidding!). It's not going to matter that she screamed in the bath when water got in her eyes or that you once accidentally clipped his finger instead of his nail. Sometimes it helps to focus on the short term and just getting through the day. But sometimes you have to remind yourself that you're playing the long game.

4. Motherhood is a wild ride. You're not going to enjoy every minute - but you should embrace the adventure. 
A week ago or a month ago, this human being didn't exist on Earth, and now she's here. You grew a human being inside your own body. Everything you say she hears for the first time. Every smile and coo from you is like a beacon that guides her toward humanity. Every sweet touch from you is like a welcome mat: You are safe, you are loved, you are home. You've got a lot of living to do, so let's get busy.

How long can you call yourself a new mom?

When Eli was just 4 weeks old, I brought him to a new moms' support group that was meeting at a local library. It was early September, and any other year I would have been commuting to school, shuffling my lesson plans and straightening my classroom for the day ahead. Instead I fretted over Eli's outfit -- what were they supposed to wear when we went outside, again? -- and pushed his stroller down Queens Boulevard, wincing when he cried, leaning over him to push with one hand and use the other to hold the pacifier deeper in his mouth (take it, take it!). At the library, I wrestled with the door, sweating in my nursing top, feeling like I had just run a marathon.

There were gym mats spread out on the floor, and I dug Eli out of his carseat and laid him down in front of me, while the other moms did the same. Then, on my left, another mom strolled in with her baby in a carrier, plucked her out and sat her on the floor. "Sat her," because this baby could sit up. We must have all goggled in amazement, because the mom -- bright-eyed, because she was probably getting more sleep than us moms of newborns -- laughed.

"One day they'll sit up too!" she said, gesturing to our squirmy, wriggling infants. I felt this odd flash of despair. This was supposed to be a support group for new moms, I thought. Not this mom, with her smiling, sitting, teething baby, who had to be at least 6 months old. A mom to a 6-month-old wasn't a new mom. She was a totally experienced, been-there-done-that mom.

Of course, eventually I became a mom to a 6-month-old. By then I had figured some things out -- how to get the pacifier to stay in Eli's mouth -- but not others (2+ years in, I'm still flummoxed by the door/stroller maneuver). And by then I had found my own support group, and we talked about what moms of 6-month-olds talk about: teething, introducing solids, crawling. All of it was new to me -- because even though I was no longer the mom of a newborn, I had never been the mom of a 6-month-old before either.

When Eli was a baby, my Twitter profile said I was a "new mom." Sometime after he turned 1, I amended it to say "new(ish) mom." Now that he's 2, I caught myself wondering: Can I call myself a new mom anymore?

When does the statute of limitations on new motherhood expire?

Recently I was with Eli in a playground when he decided to live large in someone else's personal space. When he was a baby, he'd crawl over into some bigger kid's area and that kid's mom would say, "Be careful of the baby!" Only this time, Eli was the bigger kid, and the baby in question and his mother looked sort of aghast at the antics of my cavorting, stomping toddler. And I was the mom who had to say, "Be careful of the baby!"

And that's when I realized: I'm still a new mom. I've never been the mom to a toddler before. Sure, I can tell you which pacifiers to buy or how to choose between puffs and mum-mums. But by the time I figured all this stuff out, I didn't need to know it anymore. (And from what I gather from friends who are on their second kid, you either (a) forget it or (b) have a kid with such a radically different personality that it doesn't matter what you did with your first. So even on your second, you're still a new mom to that baby.)

Yesterday I was trying to calculate how old Eli would be when I turn 40, and I realized he'd be almost 11 years old. I shivered. Someday I will have a 10-year-old.

And I'll still be a new mom then, too.

Everything they tell you about toddlers is true

I find some Cheerios sitting on the counter in a cup.
Me: "Eli, would you like some Cheerios?"
Eli: "Yeah."
Me: "OK, here's some Cheerios in a cup."
Eli: "In a bowl. Cheerios in a bowl."
Me: "Fine, I'll put them in a bowl." [takes out bowl]
Eli: "In the green bowl."
Me: "Whatever. Here, I'll put them in the green bowl." [dumps Cheerios from cup into green bowl]
Eli [incensed because I merely transferred the Cheerios rather than pouring new ones]: "No, different Cheerios! Different Cheerios!"  
[Looks in bowl] "I don't like raisins!"
Me: "OK, then don't eat them."
[pause]
Eli: "I eat the raisin!"
[Gobbles up raisin triumphantly, then spits it back into the bowl]