Chapter 1: I Told You I'd Make It
My 101-year-old grandmother couldn't walk, but she refused to miss my daughter's first birthday — she arrived with a bag hanging from her wheelchair and said, "I told you I'd make it."
My grandmother waited eleven years for me to have a baby.
Not in a pushy way.
She never once asked.
But every time I visited her she'd have the same photograph out on the little table beside her chair — me at about four, on her front step, in a dress she'd made — and one afternoon she said, "I'd like to see one of yours on that step.
That's all I want."
I was thirty-one then.
She was ninety.
It took us until I was forty-two.
Six years of trying, two rounds that didn't take, one loss at fourteen weeks that I have still not properly talked about with anybody.
And every year Grandma got older and nobody said the obvious thing out loud, and I did the math on my own in the car more times than I can tell you.
My daughter was born the summer Grandma turned a hundred.
She got to hold her, twice, in her own front room.
But by that first birthday she hadn't been out of the house since the winter; she couldn't walk at all, and getting her from the bed into her chair took two people and left her gray in the face for an hour afterward.
The party was in July.
Garden, paddling pool, about thirty people.
Everybody told me, gently, one at a time, that I should prepare myself.
"She'll want to come, love," my mother said.
"She won't manage it."
Grandma said the same sentence to every person who tried it on her.
"I'm not missing that little girl's first birthday."
I gave up watching the gate around two, because it was starting to look foolish.
Then somebody behind me said my name.
My uncle was coming across the grass, pushing her chair slowly because of the lawn, and she had one hand up shading her eyes, already looking for the baby.
I don't remember crossing that garden.
I went down on my knees beside the chair.
She was wrecked.
Ninety minutes in a car at a hundred and one.
Her hands were trembling in her lap and she couldn't lift her head properly.
Then somebody placed my daughter into her arms.
"I told you I'd make it."
I thought that was it.
I thought she was the present.
Then, just before the cake came out, she caught hold of my wrist.
There was a canvas bag hanging off the back of her chair.
I'd assumed it was blankets, or her tablets, or whatever my uncle had thrown in for the journey.
"Get that down for me.
It's for her."
It was heavier than it looked.
Wrapped badly, by hands that don't work anymore — layers of tissue paper, half a roll of tape, one corner already come loose.
I started to open it and she put her hand flat on top of mine.
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What was inside that bag?
May you like
And why did Grandma stop her from opening it right then?
Comment **"NEXT"** if you want Part 2 — it's in the comments.
