My Grandson Taught Me A Few Things About Love

And other ways he’s changed my life

One month before my granddaughter was two, my grandson was born. I remember wondering if I would ever be able to love another child the way I loved her. As an only child who had raised an only child, I found it difficult to imagine sharing my love between two children.

During the first four or five months of his life, it became hard to show my love as he faced challenges I’d only heard about. Diagnosed with failure to thrive, he wasn’t putting on weight, and my daughter became fearful we were losing him. She was doing everything right, following her doctor’s directions, with the full support of a loving family, and yet, he seemed to be fading away from us. There was no discernible reason why his little body refused to absorb the nutrition it needed.

This was the first thing he taught me:

I learned not to judge parenting based on how healthy or unhealthy a child is.

I always assumed “failure to thrive” meant the parents or family were doing something wrong. It may not have been their fault that they were doing whatever it was. Circumstances of poverty and trauma may have given them few other options. I assumed society could fix this sort of problem with better social programs.

We couldn’t fix this problem, and no social program would have helped.

Getting to know him took a while

This new little boy resisted anyone holding him except his mom. I would smile, shake my head and say, “he’s a mama’s boy.” I couldn’t help but think how different he was from the little girl who had captured my heart the first time I held her, who would wiggle her way down the bed before she could crawl to get to me when I visited. Instead, he would turn away when I held him and scream for my daughter. I wondered if I would ever learn to love him the way I loved his sister.

Then one day, the doctor said the words my daughter had hoped to avoid. She would have to supplement her breast milk with formula. All of her efforts, including a rigid elimination diet recommended by the physician, had not yet succeeded in helping him gain enough weight.

She asked me to give him the bottle, and he refused it. We had frozen some raw goat’s milk specifically for weaning. Finally, she agreed I could offer him some, and he drank it with gusto.

A few hours later, his father was holding him. As I walked past them, I was stunned to hear, “Look! He’s reaching out to you!”

That was the day I fell in love.

This was the second thing he taught me:

I learned that love is not divided; it is multiplied. I didn’t love my granddaughter any less because I loved her brother too.

He began gaining weight after that due to the efforts my daughter had made and the supplemental goat milk. After that, he seemed to grow normally, and our family now had two little ones, one of whom was quite a chatterbox. My granddaughter started talking when she was only a few months old, and it seemed like she never stopped.

There were a few things different about the boy.

At first, there seemed nothing unusual about the fact that he wasn’t talking. “Boys are always slower to talk, especially second children,” said the many people who offered advice and their opinions during those first years. “He’ll talk when he’s ready,” we assured ourselves.

He wasn’t ready at a year, a year and a half, or even at the age of two. When he was finally ready, it may have been partly because he had something to say. He has a biblical name. It is a serious name that the family had shortened into a nickname. By the time he was three, he told us in no uncertain terms that nickname wasn’t his name.

This was the third thing he taught me:

Each child, each person in my life, is unique, and those differences are to be cherished, not feared or squashed.

The depth of his feelings seems to know no bounds. As a toddler, he once handed me a live bee. He had gently picked it up from somewhere and carried it to me.

He still laughs when I tell him that story almost ten years after it happened. He loves hearing about when he was younger, when his mom was a child, and even when I was young. His smile lights up the whole room. His tears make my heart hurt.

One more thing I’ve learned:

Yes, loving a second child as much as the first is possible. Somehow, loving him has taught me how to love everyone in my life more deeply, including myself.

If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like this one I wrote recently about love and family:

I am a grandmother of two delightful children and have been gardening organically for over 50 years. I’m on a mission to live a healthy, joyful life, and I write about it on Medium. If you don’t already have a membership subscription to Medium, please consider using my referral link when you join.