After learning the thrilling news I'd become a grandmother, I looked for a guide on how to be the best in every way I could imagine, from how to ready my sixty-something body for baby wrangling to how to help financially. What I found instead was a gap.
I found thoughtful books that opened important conversations about grandparenting, family relationships, and the joys of grandmotherhood. What I did not find was the particular guide I had imagined: a comprehensive, science-based, how-to that brought the many dimensions of grandmotherhood together. At the same time, emerging research was revealing just how powerful the grandmother-grandchild bond could be.
As a lawyer, professor, and researcher whose work centers on transforming complex ideas into relatable realities, I began looking for answers myself.
I found a question no one was answering
preparing for grandmotherhood
As a researcher, I'm used to asking questions. The question that began this project was deeply personal: How could I become the best grandmother I could be?
The answer wasn't one book or one study. It was a growing body of research that fundamentally changed how I understood grandmotherhood. The deeper I researched, the more convinced I became that this conversation belonged in the public square.
Curiosity became conviction
I started looking for a guide and instead found a body of research
Today, I serve as Director of the Writing Center at Loyola Law School, where I teach advanced legal writing, lead the Legal Writing Teaching Assistants Program, and work one-on-one with students as a Writing Specialist.
I hold a B.A. in English, a Ph.D. in Literature and Composition Theory, and a J.D. Together, my education, career, and life experiences have shaped the way I approach grandmotherhood: with curiosity, research, and a commitment to making complex ideas useful in everyday life.
Research has always been where I begin
Looking beyond assumptions
Though my husband and I took the best possible care of ourselves, I had cancer and he died of cancer just days before his sixtieth birthday. I've learned, excruciatingly, to make no assumptions. I channel this lesson and my survivor's guilt into cherishing every second of my life, especially the gift of time with my grandchildren, all of whom are under the age of five.
Although my life centers on them, if I perished today they would likely have no memory of me. Still, I know that every smile, hug, warm word, and shared experience is another stone in the bedrock of their now-and-future happiness.
The gift of being here
why I believe that every moment matters
What I hope grandmothers gain from my work is an awareness of our superpower and the confidence to unleash our full-scale grandmother love, supercharging our brain-to-heart bond with our grandchildren. In the process, we make their lives, as well as our own, the best they can be and shatter the misconception of grandmothers as merely amusingly sweet, fragile, dotty, aproned relics.
Love is the most formidable force, and nature has bestowed on every grandmother the most formidable love.
Every day, as no one else but their other grandmother can, I fortify my grandchildrens' sense of security, their self-confidence, and their physical and emotional well-being
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