Everyone who has this privilege will tell you that being a grandparent is far better than being a parent.  I am here to say that everyone is correct.  It is better, freer, more giddy and joyous - by far much more fun.  

My husband and I love to dole out money to the grandkids, but now that money is so scarce around here, we're expected to bring love and home baked cookies and cheesecake, soups and laughs because that is our most important job - to make our grandchildren feel as if they are the most loved children in the world.  Their wish is our command and we relish this role. 

I hold a special place in my heart for my grandmothers, each in their own way who gave me the tools to be the grandmama I am today.

There were no Grandpas around for me or my brothers.  Just our Grandmas.  And they were as different as night and day: one a feisty Jewish woman, modern, working, strong willed, married three times, somewhat detached but always loving within very defined boundaries.   

She had come here from Poland with my father when she was still in a teenager to join a husband who she learned upon arrival had started up a lucrative bakery, had a new wife and a few kids.   My Grandma was proud of the fact that she fluently spoke five languages.  She was adorable: petite, fine boned, blond, blue eyed, lush figured.  

My other Grandma rarely smiled, she only spoke Spanish with bits of broken English thrown in for measure, certainly not to be understood.  She loved us passionately, argued passionately, smacked me hard when I got my first period, looked a million years old, even though I know she was not nearly as old as she seemed.   

Our primary form of entertainment was walking and shopping, but with each Grandma there was a different type of shopping to accomplish.  The more assimilated, upscale Jewish grandma, trying hard to be as contemporary and American as she could, would take me to small boutiquey type local shops and buy me clothes.  I don't ever recall buying food with her, she kept Kosher so she'd only shop at certain stores.   Besides, she had it all ready when we got to her immaculate apartment with the white French Provincial furniture and beautiful knicknacks here and there.  Our job was to eat and then watch tv with her husband or go shopping.  

She worked all her life as a haberdasher and made sure I had one of her beautiful hats for the High Holy Days every year.   She was a dishy woman, very fashionable, somewhat critical of my shabby young self but I imagine she recognized there are limits to how much a child can improve their own life, so she made it her mission to help make mine a little better.  She wouldn’t discuss her family or her history but every Friday night, the prayer glasses lit up her kitchen, covering every surface, literally over a hundred of them, each one mourning a dead family member lost in the Holocaust. Her father was a rabbi and she came from a large family.  They were all gone except her and her sister.  They had escaped by innocently coming to America in search of a better life, never thinking their entire extended family would be erased from the face of the earth. 

My other grandma was poor, lived in a two room flat on the Lower East Side, a Spaniard from La Corona in Spain, she would boil giant fish heads, grind her own coffee and always had a jar of red beans in sauce on hand.  She kept her food in a window box that kept it cold in winter, even though she had a small icebox, but it was a luxury to have a block of ice delivered and put in so it was more for storage than for cooling anything with seasonal exceptions.   In summer, we would eat everything quickly so it didn’t spoil.   

This grandma with her long thin grey braid that she wound around the back of her head would clean office buildings at night and had awful varicose veins that were fascinating for me to see whenever she rolled down her support stockings.  She was always tired but seemed to enjoy having me visit her, sometimes for a week or two at a time.  

We’d go food shopping at the Orchard Street Market on the Lower East Side a few blocks from where she lived and walk around the stalls.  She might buy me a pickle from a barrel.   I remember loving the ticklish feeling rolling the different dried beans in my hands and the all the pungent smells of the food stalls as we walked along, she with her mesh bag buying and gathering a little of this and that as she shopped.  There was a Spanish speaking movie theater and we’d sometimes go see a soap opera in Spanish.  I’d fall asleep or play by myself, running up and down the hallways of the old theater -everything seemed to be painted red - as she watched her movies.  I didn’t understand a word of it.  But somehow I understood my Grandma.

Only after she died did we find out reading her correspondences that in order to come to American she had to leave behind two children in La Corona - a boy and a girl.  This may have explained the omnipresent anger and sadness that permeated her.  I wonder if her life was better here in America, if it was all worth it, the trip across, the stopover in Cuba, the landing at Ellis Island, the abandonment by the men that fathered her four children here and the miserable poverty they all endured during the Depression.   Was it worth it?  I so much hope it was.  More than my Grandma, she was my friend. 

 I have five grandchildren, whom I adore.  There's no other way to put it.  I adore them.  They are brilliant and so beautiful, they are menaces!  We have actors and artists, musicians and a couple of mysteries.    They change every time I see them.  I've ordered them to stop growing and they apologize to me, shrinking down by bending their knees and laughing at my ridiculous demand.  

But grow they will.   I know as they grow taller, I grow greyer.  As they get stronger, I get a tiny bit weaker.  This is the way of life.  I can bear it.   I have them to bear it with me.  To make me smile in the face of my mortality.  

All I need do is look at one of them to know this has all been worth it.     The children.  This is why I was born.  To bring them here.   

We moved across the country so I...we could be with my grandchildren.   I would do anything for them. I will do anything for them.  They are the point of it all.