Becoming Nana

REALCUISINE | Julianne Glatz

My family has been keeping a secret for the last couple months. We haven’t done a very good job of it, in spite of lawyers and experts who cautioned us that it was the only wise course. But it’s hard to keep quiet when your heart is bursting with joy and love. Sometimes you just have to throw yourself off the cliff and figure that you’ll deal with the consequences if things fall apart.

Fortunately, things didn’t fall apart, and what was a poorly kept secret needn’t be secret anymore.

I have become a grandmother. Robert Ellis Schaeffer (a.k.a Robbie and Little Bear) came into our family on Dec. 3. The reason for the “secrecy” is that he is adopted. In New York, where my daughter, Anne, and her husband, Ben, live, birth mothers have 30 days to revoke adoptions. In Robbie’s case, that stretched even longer because of holiday closings.

While we weren’t exactly instructed to hide him in a closet, we were advised to tell only family members and very close friends – and even then to always add the caveat that it wasn’t a done deal. There should be no mention or picture of Robbie in anything that could be publicly accessed. Nothing on Facebook. Nothing on any interoffice communication. No picture on anyone’s office desk. “Just think of yourselves as his foster parents for the next month,” Anne and Ben’s lawyer told them.

Yeah, right. Anne and Ben tried for four years to become pregnant. After a respectable interval of trying the good old-fashioned way, they entered the world of assisted conception. The medical procedures used are sometimes humiliating and/or uncomfortable-to-excruciating and always expensive – but, of course, worth it when they produce the desired result. Anne and Ben didn’t just try a variety of doctors and medical procedures. There also were acupuncturists and herbalists, yoga and special exercises along the way.

It became ever more heartbreaking to see – and share – their emotional (and for Anne sometimes physical) pain as nothing worked. All babies are special, but perhaps Anne’s and Ben’s long ordeal in some ways made our joy in Robbie even more special. There was no way we could hold him at arm’s length for a month-long countdown.

Corny as it sounds, Anne was immediately radiant with happiness and Ben glowing with contentment, despite the clock ticking in the background.

I know because I was there. Anne and Ben wanted to adopt a newborn; usually adoptive parents of newborns have a month or more to get ready. But the call to Anne and Ben about Robbie came on Thursday, Dec. 2; less than 24 hours later, they brought him home. That Sunday, I headed to Brooklyn. They’d already gotten a crib, but had nothing other than a few things from a hasty trip to Babies-R-Us Thursday night. Ben was able to arrange to work from home for the rest of December, but Anne, who is an appellate attorney at New York’s Children’s Law Center, had briefs and filings to complete before she could fully begin maternity leave. They asked for help, and I was only too happy to comply. (And still am: I’m back in Brooklyn for the next few weeks.)