ORLANDO VICENTE TO OUR GRANDCHILDRENS WITH LOVE. It must be seen that with the birth of our first child it seemed a blessing from God and a biological miracle. The same thing should happen to most parents. It seemed to us in large part a natural event fruit of the love of parents.

 

TO OUR GRANDCHILDRENS WITH LOVE.

 TO  OUR GRANDCHILDRENS WITH LOVE.

  It must be seen that with the birth of our first child it seemed a blessing from God and a biological miracle. The same thing should happen to most parents.

  It seemed to us in large part a natural event fruit of the love of parents.

   We watched them grow, take their first steps and say their first words that were Dad or Mom. And it seemed to us the most natural thing in the world. We were young and so was life.

  Later, when they were older, more severe demands began for them to be organized and disciplined and future men or women of good, always in the religious beliefs of their parents.

  Years later, adolescence arrived, the period of rebellion that all the children go through in which everything changes, until it seems that we are no longer important in their lives and that our advice is from another world. 

  And we suffer, for not understanding well that it is a normal stage of independence that everyone has to go through many values that we have instilled.

  Then comes the crush and courtship. We think we lose a part of them and especially their love. We are selfish in appropriating the feelings of our children, until we resign. And we have to compete with a son-in-law or daughter-in-law who comes to divide us, almost always, as a family, especially in Cuba in which two or three generations live together under the same roof.

  And at the time of the arrival of the first grandson or granddaughter, what a love that renews us! It had existed as a pause in love that our children showed us. But the arrival of a granddaughter "pregnant" us grandparents too.

  Be careful to give many tips and notices to our daughter about pregnancy, despite having also been parents and have experience. Great care. 

  Children want to do things their own way, and they label us as old,  very intrusive in the process.

  When my granddaughter was born here in Uruguay by caesarean section because of an Eclampsia, the baby weighed 860 grams. I was at her side and cried like a kid. 

 The calm mother, in another room, hoped that everything would work out, that life was like that. Only left in God hands.

  MY granddaughter fit in one hand and was in an incubator for two months. The CTI doctor said that the baby was a fighter and that she would have a lot of character. She clung to life with all her might.

  Weeks later they allowed her to breastfeed and feed her with mother's milked milk. The father always trusted that the baby would get ahead. 

  So it was.One day, she was discharged from the Mutualist and what emotion I felt when I supported her against my heart as if she were a miracle of God. 

  I am a doctor, I saw in Nicaragua how premature babies died daily. But science had advanced for good and the discovery of the Surfactant for lung maturation had been miraculous.

  Now my granddaughter walks and calls me TATA instead of telling me Grandfather and has a very special language in which some vowels and pieces of songs that only the mother understands are heard.

  She is still breastfeeding and ate food. I feel so much love for the girl that I download in her what my children did not have in Cuba. Filling her with toys every time I see her in exchange for some attention and love. It is a mistake to buy so many toys. Only on special days of the year. Thus they learn to value things. But my daughter and son-in-law don't tell me anything.

  Another thing, when she has some diarrhea, the mother calls me alarmed at the cell and asks for advice: I tell her that her mother, my wife in Cuba, gave her an infusion of the fruit peel of Granada - which was a holy remedy - and salts of oral rehydration and that did not suspend the chest. But they don't listen to the advice from an old but experienced doctor and take it to the Pediatrician who advises the same except that he doesn't know the fruit of Granade.

 But grandchildren are another resurgence of the deep love we gave to our children, and a greening of the importance of having a close grandfadad who is only called Tata, still.

                                     Orlando Vicente Álvarez