You see them at soccer games, toy stores and ice cream parlors.
They have traveled far, out of love and longing, wearing sensible shoes, with digital cameras strapped around their necks.
They are out-of-town grandparents popping in for intense fixes with kin transplanted in Denver.
“Dropping into their busy lives is kind of like jumping from a helicopter into a moving train,” Shari Robinson of Portland, Maine, says about her semi-annual trips to visit granddaughters Eleanor Turner, 5, and Isabel Turner, 2.
“Sha-sha,” as the girls call her, is a dream grandma, and not just because she’s a children’s librarian able to converse about “Amelia Bedelia.”
For each visit she packs stickers, crafts projects and pink nail polish for the girls to discover in her suitcase.
In seven days last month, Robinson took them to high tea at Denver’s Brown Palace, made several trips to the library, played with them on the breakfast-food sculptures at Cherry Creek Shopping Center and even babysat while her son Brandon and daughter-in-law Jennifer went skiing. She also took Izzy to a parent-tot class at the Denver Zoo, visited the girls’ preschool and treated Ellie to a ride on her first snowmobile.
“As soon as the kids see her, it’s like matches and gasoline,” Brandon says. “You don’t see them again until one busts out of her orbit to say, ‘Hey, we’re with Sha-sha,’ then gets sucked back in until the next day.”
Rather than renting a car or hotel room, Robinson opts for full immersion by sleeping in the guest room and squeezing between the girls’ car seats so she can hold both their hands.
At night, she sneaks in to watch them sleep.
“I spend a lot of time looking at that space between their jaw bones and ears. The skin is really white and soft, and there’s a little down fuzz on it that you just could eat,” she says.
As a grandma, Robinson is beyond reproach.
Yet by the fourth day of each visit, tensions start to fester.
That comes partly with kids on overcharge from M&Ms whose wrappers Jennifer notices in the garbage can.
It also comes with having to adjust to a different time zone and schedule, and living in a home that’s not her own.
“I never know how far I should go to help with the housework,” Robinson says.
And Jennifer finds it stressful for a veteran mom to witness her every parenting move.
“When I get impatient with the kids, reverting to my natural self, I’m thinking this isn’t so picture-perfect,” she says.
Sha-sha is hip to her daughter-in-law’s feelings.
“I realize that my not saying what I was really thinking — that she’s a wonderful mother — that was not OK,” she says.
By day seven, a bittersweetness tinges Robinson’s departure.
Though Jennifer aches to have her privacy back, she knows she will miss the warm presence of a woman who loves her kids so unconditionally.
“We’re all so, so sad to say goodbye,” she says.
Denver is a city of many transplants — people whose reasons for moving away from our families often fade when we have kids of our own. And so we scramble in frenzied visits to make up for the mileage and keep our folks up on the fleeting rhythms of their grandkids.
“You think when your children have children that you need to be there all the time, and then you realize what good parents they are and ease into this place where grandparenting happens,” Robinson says. “It’s a wonderful place. Except when it’s time to go home and I’m crying in their closet.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
