Adair Lara author of The Granny Diaries

this is an excerpt from my book.
I was fifty-two. I thought that was so shockingly young—where was a kid like me going to find an apron and learn to crochet doilies on such short notice?—that I was astonished when I realized that my own grandmother, Dorothy, was fifty-two when I was born.
You could’ve knocked me over with a ball of yarn. That old lady? My grandma was a bit of a rake, with boyfriends, a job at Metropolitan Insurance in San Francisco, and a past as a member of the Women’s Army Corps (my grandma really did wear army boots!), but by the time I was ten, she already had a white braid wrapped around her head and two Siamese cats wrapped around her ankles. She was old.
True, the average age women become grandmothers remains steady, at forty-seven. But in the last century, the average life expectancy was forty-seven. Because grandmothers used to be old people, near the end of their shelf life, the stereotype is of a comforting human antique trailing a faint smell of lavender and strewn with cookie crumbs, grateful for any time or attention she gets.
We new grandmothers are not only not about to keel over dead -- we’re not even next in line. Today everybody outlives their cold germs and even their parrots. We have as much as thirty years of being grandparents ahead of us. And great-grandparents!
People say to me, “You don’t look like a grandmother.” As tactfully as I can, I say I do look like a grandmother—it’s the picture of a grandmother inside their heads that has to be adjusted.
Grannies are all ages these days, ranging from thirties to nineties. Boomers have split down the middle, with some, like me, having their kids early and others just becoming empty nesters. I had Morgan at twenty-six, which in San Francisco today is like having her at age nine (Morgan bucked the trend by having her first baby at age twenty-four). The average age for a new mother in San Francisco is over forty. At the swings, I can pass for one of the graying mommies nursing their babies while sipping no-fat, low-foam, decaf lattes.
Like those mothers, a lot of us grandmothers are in the middle of our lives and careers. And a growing number of us are baby boomers, which as usual complicates everything. We are youth obsessed, distracted by our careers, and vain. No one knows where Ryan got her almond-shaped eyes because she got them from me, and I had my eyes done. I imagine that many grandmothers with discreet procedures in their past have to hide a grin when they see that schnoz growing on a grandbaby’s kisser. Shortly after she had become a grandmother, Joan Rivers was told by the proud new parents that the baby had her nose. Rivers disagreed. “I didn’t get this nose,” she later explained, “until I was thirty-four.”
In sum, we don’t look much like the matriarch, monster, wise woman, fairy godmother, wicked witch, wolf bait, the easily shocked geezer, or poor old lady eating cat food that the word grandmother conjures up.
Perhaps that’s why I had (ahem!) a little trouble with what I was going to be called.