Opinion | What Anne Lamott learned about love from becoming a grandparent

Alyssa Rosenberg: How did your relationship with your mom change when you became a parent and she became a grandmother?

Anne Lamott: Everything became a lot easier because I was no longer the focus of her gimlet eye. Sam was her first grandchild, and she got so much softer.

It was wonderful that it was no longer about whether I was doing well enough with my career, because I had produced a person who was incredibly easy to love as is. She had never been an “as is” kind of mother. It was pretty conditional on how we were doing, all through the school years and then with our careers. And then as soon as I gave her a grandson, everything was forgiven.

It was always sad to me that I didn’t have the kind of mother who delighted in me just because of who I am. I can feel the pain of seeing other women with mothers who just delighted in them and accepted them and supported them and taught the really important woman-to-girl sorts of things, which my mother wasn’t able to do. I partly blame it on the fact that she was from Liverpool, and she was kind of a Monty Python character. We didn’t do emotion in my house. If you were angry or sad at the dinner table, you went to your room with that dinner. When I had Sam, I was very grateful that the relationship became much sweeter. And at the same time, I just kind of rolled my eyes and thought, “Well, you know, I’m 35. It’s about time, but I’ll take it.”

It sounds like you had a very clear sense of what you wanted grandparents to be for Sam. Was that something you thought about while you were pregnant?

I hadn’t had real grandparents. My mother’s father died in Liverpool when she was a child. My mother’s grandmother died with Alzheimer’s when I was very young, and my father’s father died when I was about six. My gran, my father’s mother, was a very cold Presbyterian. We called them “God’s frozen chosen.”

I’d never had the experience, and I had just longed my whole life for the kind of once-removed, unconditional love, where you just can’t screw up and nothing is expected of you. I really wanted to provide that for my son, and, and I knew that if my son ever had a child, I would be that way with his child.

One thing I’ve always found really interesting in your work is the relationship between love and control, and grandparenting seems like a relationship where those two things can collide. How did you work that balance out?

It was the hardest work I ever did to release my grandson to the care of his parents, about whom I was very worried. They were so young and Sam was alcoholic and using drugs.

I was 55 when Jax was born. And that was when I began to really get, at a cellular level, that I was powerless. I couldn’t self-will Sam into getting clean and sober. I wasn’t going to get my way, which would have been that Sam would get a college education and then establish a career, and then maybe even at 22, if he wanted, to start a family.

So, when Sam had a baby, I realized that my help was not helpful. I’ve said before that help is the sunny side of control. And I had to learn that there was a healthy kind of love I could offer them, mostly babysitting and paying for things if they were strapped, and that my thoughts and ideas on how best to raise this baby were going to result in me not getting to see the kid.

Were there any moments or any particular decisions in which it was especially hard not to intervene?

Sam got arrested with a whole lot of drugs in his car when Jax was about 2. And a bail bondsman called about getting Sam out of jail, and I said no. The bail bondsman said, “You’re the first mother in Marin County who hasn’t bailed her kid out.” If I bailed him out, I’m not positive he’d still be with us. I thought, to rob somebody of the consequences of their self-destructive behavior is not helpful. It is not a gift.

Were there things you learned about parenting Sam from watching him be a parent? Were there things that you learned about parenting…