Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

“I’m worried about them.” My daughter was visiting her sister, who had just delivered her second child. “I don’t think any of them slept for more than an hour the whole time I was there.”

There’s really no excuse for the zing of pure joy I felt at these words.  I’m a grownup. A grandmother. Someone who should really be a better person by now. It’s not that I can’t appreciate what they’re going through. Heck, there was an entire decade when my own kids kept me from sleeping. (At least I think so, although frankly, most of the eighties and large chunks of the nineties are still kind of a blur.) I just wonder if there is some special form of schadenfreude that applies when you become a grandparent…

[image credit: Fallen Princess series by photographer Dina Goldstein]

Being a parent has never been easy, but at least…