Our Yay (our host grandmother)

A funny lady she is. She’s pretty with it, at age 90. She still weeds in the garden every morning and she still does her own laundry by hand. While I don’t understand much of what she says…….. every once in a while I try and make some sort of conversation with her.

She thinks it’s great I take sewing classes. One day, I asked her if she’d like me to make her a shirt. Her response: “A shirt!? To wear where?” … I guess her point of view is that she’s this very old woman who rarely-to-never leaves the house and why on earth would she need a new shirt!

Then one day I was painting my toe-nails, and I asked her if she’d like me to paint hers…. and her response with her quiet scratchy old voice and a giggle was, “No,….I’m too old.”

Then one afternoon we got on the conversation of having children. I think I’ve mentioned before that she has had 10 of them herself. She told me she started having children at age 20 and stopped at age 34. Then, she asked me how many children I thought I would like to have. I said probably two. She said (with direct translation), “Two?? Good. Easy.” The fact that I’m 28, and have been married for 2 years and don’t have children yet, is a bit odd for most Cambodians as its customary for most to have children right away. But I try to explain to them that I don’t have time to have children right now; but will probably have them once when we go back to the states. In response to that comment, my host grandmother told me something along the lines of: I shouldn’t worry; as she continued to have children until she was 34, and since I only want to have 2 children, it shouldn’t be a problem to wait to start having them until I get home. I told her, “thanks” for the words of advice.