i go back to work tomorrow. i come out of retirement and go back to work. it wasn't supposed to be this way.
when we found out that my daughter, abby, was pregnant with twins and needed to be on bed rest, we decided that i would cut back from full-time to part-time in order to help her.
when the twins were born, we decided that i would take an early retirement - something i was always hoping to be able to do, anyway - and that i would give two days per week to helping abby with the kids. actually, the original plan was that i would take the twins off her hands entirely for two days each week - thereby freeing abby up to run errands, take a much-needed nap, go shopping, get a mani-pedi (i don't think that ever happened), or just do whatever she wanted/needed to do.
for quite awhile, that's how it was, but gradually, as the twins got older and one thing led to the next and to the next and then to the next, gradually my two days became much less a matter of me entirely taking over the child care and more of a cooperative, teamwork kind of venture between abby and me. we would often pile the kids into the car and go out for lunch or to the park or to the library or something. it was a great little team, the 4 of us.
and tomorrow, it is ending. because i am going back to work.
it wasn't supposed to be this way.
for reasons beyond my control and certainly not because i willed them, i have to return to work. i feel badly for all of us about that but perhaps especially for the twins......it is rare in this day and age when grandchildren can spend so much time with a grandmother (without the grandmother actually raising the children herself), and i like to think that these two years have been as important and as special for charlie and olivia as they have been for me.
that said, i know that they won't remember them.
they won't remember how grammy used to come over two days a week and we'd all dance to michael jackson.
they won't remember how grammy sang her old camp songs - songs they probably otherwise never would have heard - and how they loved those songs so much, they kept saying, "again! again!"
they won't remember the countless number of walks in the double stroller and how we learned about insects and trees and fire engines and architecture and automobiles and mailboxes and windchimes and bicycles and pumpkins and snowmen and, well, how we learned about life on those walks.
but maybe what they will remember - maybe what their emotional memory will remember is that, every step of the way, every poopy diaper change of the way, every spilled milk fiasco of the way......
their grammy loved them.
and that chapter will never change.
literally.
