Recently, my family celebrated my grandma’s 80th birthday on my dad’s side, and we surprised her with all 6 of her kids, and 9 of her 15 grandkids.
The 6 grandkids that couldn’t make it are the older generation of grandkids that have families, newborn babies and t-ball practices, while I’m the start of the second generation of grandkids, mostly all in high school, newly graduated, or me, in college.
My generation of grandkids were all close as toddlers and kids. We were never in the same town, or even in the same states, but the connection was always there when we all gathered for family Christmas’s at grandma’s house, or summer trips to one of the aunt’s houses.
A couple of years ago, the other 8 started to turn on me. Or, I guess from their perspective, I was turning on them. Suddenly I was growing up: I had a boyfriend, there was talk of college, and I sat at the grownup’s table more often. I was even told, “you’re no fun anymore,” because I didn’t want to run down to grandma’s basement (our normal meeting place for mischief) and ride on the old Clifford scooter.
But now at grandma’s party, we are all sitting around (what would still probably be considered a “kids table”) and having intelligent conversations about the family, each other’s lives, where everyone’s working this summer, who’s going to what college, or how they’re enjoying high school. Each of our relationships have matured with age, and it’s so cool to see us growing up and having adultier conversations.
We used to plot how to steal sneakers from the older generation of cousins at family Christmas, but now we’re plotting how to sneak out of grandma’s birthday party and wondering who’s gonna drive.
Getting older is a weird feeling, especially when you see the children you grew up with, growing up too. My generation of cousins/grandkids has about a year or two in between each kid: so once I graduated high school, it seemed like just a second later, there’s an 8th grade graduation, two more high school graduations, and one right after another, we’re all hitting milestones and making bigger decisions in life.
Everyone has more pronounced personalities and exciting things happening in their lives, too. One is eating 5,000 calories and lifting 4 hours a day to bulk up for his senior year of football, another just got home from drinking bottles of wine in Europe, a third is a caretaker at a daycare, and the twins just broke out of junior high and are preparing for their freshman year of high school.
It’s hard for me to grasp, because shouldn’t they all be in elementary school still? Shouldn’t we all be sitting around the 3-foot high kids table in grandma’s basement? Shouldn’t we be serving plastic cookies and bananas from the oven of our Little Tikes kitchenette? I forget that we all endure the same amount of years and age at the same pace. We’re all growing up.
Soon we will all be out of college and back at a family reunion with our own families and kids who’ll hopefully be as close growing up as we were, and still are. It’s nice having built-in friends that we can follow from the wee ages in life, to the trickling ends.
Aging is such a weird thing. It just doesn’t stop.
