I was in a rotten mood because I missed a 3-year-old’s tea party.
My granddaughter Dove’s birthday coincides with Juneteenth. Her mom had a tea party for her, inviting her cousin Rya, who is almost 3, Rya’s mom, Dove’s grandmothers (including my wife), a great-grandmother and a few select friends.
I didn’t make the cut even though everyone knows I’m the true tea aficionado in the family.
A tea party without me? Harrumph.
I’m the one with the tea kettle, tea pots, tea cozy, a cupboard full of bags and tins of loose teas, a dozen tea accoutrements and mint growing in a pot in the yard to augment some of the summer iced varieties.
Still, I didn’t get the invite.
I ignored the part on the invitations about it being an all-girls tea party.
I would have complained to the management, but I adore my daughters-in-law and remember how managing demanding toddlers is more demanding than most of what I do on a daily basis.
I couldn’t have gone anyway. That Thursday and Friday were dominated by graduations at Ocean City High School and Mainland Regional High School and working on even more photos from the Miss New Jersey “Show Us Your Shoes” parade.
Such is the trauma experienced by a busy grandparent.
OK, it wasn’t traumatic, but I did feel like I was missing out.
In retrospect, it’s funny. Why does missing one of a hundred events with my grandkids strike a nerve?
As grandparents know, watching our own children grow up marks time, leaving us wondering where it went. Things you didn’t want to miss with your own kids grow in importance with your grandkids.
It’s not just making up for those things you did miss the first time around, it’s wanting to be there with your kids as they enjoy their own children. It’s double the fun and only temporary work for us.
In the end, I didn’t miss much.
After Mainland’s graduation that Friday night, I rushed to the hotel in Cherry Hill where my older son’s family was staying in the room next to ours. Rya screamed for joy when she heard me knock on the door and spent the next half-hour joyfully requiring my full attention as she danced and ran around the small room.
Early the next morning my two grandsons, Zeke, 8, and Phoenix, 6, used me as their favorite tackling dummy, per usual. Their little sister, Dove, had me pick her up whenever she wasn’t playing with Rya. Then it was a few hours with them at the Please Touch Museum for children in Philadelphia, more hours in the hotel pool with all four grandkids then take-out dinner and more playtime back in the room.
That Sunday, we took our kids, their spouses and grandkids out to lunch at an Italian restaurant. Dove and Rya sat next to each other in their pink party dresses and plastic tiaras from the tea party. I spent much of lunch watching the two little girls messily share their pizza and pasta with each other and have conversations I could not understand. I relished the time. Then it was off to an ice cream shop before we all parted ways.
As I drove home, I thought of two things.
One was about the great memories I had and hoped our grandkids would have from the busy weekend.
The other was realizing the night before, after about 12 hours with grandkids on Saturday, my wife and I collapsed into bed around 8 p.m. and fell immediately asleep in the quiet, nearly empty room.
Maybe I don’t need to be invited to every tea party.
David Nahan is editor and publisher of the Ocean City Sentinel and its sister newspapers.