Most young girls feel as they approach womanhood the sweetest day of their life
Will be when they hear the minister say “I pronounce you man and wife.”
But you’ll find there is a sweeter day, one that will fill your soul with joy,
That’s when you hear the doctor say you’re the mother of a baby girl or boy.
Then you’ll play the part of motherhood for twenty years or more,
With all its thrills, joys and heartaches marked up on the score.
You will feel you’ve learned all life’s sweet mysteries — there are no new thrills to come,
But again you are mistaken, for there is another one.
That’s when you become a grandma — it’s a thrill that’s very sweet,
That rejuvenates a mother’s soul and makes her life complete.
When we reach the autumn of our lives and our children have grown,
Stepped out on life’s pathways to build homes of their own.
If God in His goodness has kept you from being parted,
Then you and the pal of your heart are right back where you started.
Oh, it’s sweet but lonely with the children gone, and home seems kind of cold
And you begin to realize that you are growing old.
And then one day you are a grandma and every now and then,
You hold a baby in your arms and you are young again.
There is just one sad thing about it, and I think it is a shame
For all the spoiled babies in the world the grandmas get the blame.
These new-fangled mothers raise their children by the book,
Grandma mustn’t pick them up, sometimes she’s not allowed to look!
I’ve heard “now don’t you touch her, grandma; you just let her cry It out,
The book says that’s the best way to teach her what it’s all about.”
“I just can’t let you spoil her, I know you think I’m mean,
But I’m the one who has to worry when she gets off the beam.”
There’s just lots of books to tell us how to train our children the right way,
But someone ought to write a book to train the grandmas of today.
So with heart and hands aching to dry those baby tears,
And the harsh words of my daughter still ringing in my ears,
I stand there reprimanded with my thoughts running wild
And a hearty disapproval of how my daughter trains her child.
But, there are times they find it quite convenient to leave the baby in my care.
It is then I have my moments when her mother isn’t there.
For I pick her up and hold her tight and dream of long ago,
When her mother was a little girl and I had held her so.
And I rock her and I dry her tears, and I steal a kiss or two,
And I do a lot of other things I’m not supposed to do.
O, we grandmas do not need a book of rules to play a mother’s part,
Why the rules that God has given us are written in our heart.
We grandmas have raised children, and we’ve raised some fine ones, too.
We didn’t need a book of rules to tell us what to do.
So, it might sound a bit old fashioned, but I hope to see the day
That these young mothers will decide to throw that book of rules away,
And raise their child by God’s rules. Then Grandmas will be free
To be the kind of “Grandma” that we’d really like to be.
