I became a grandparent at 52 — and I had no idea where I fitted in

When my daughter rang to tell me I was going to be a grandmother, I was standing in the frozen aisle at Sainsbury's in Chislehurst, trying to decide between two types of fish pie. I remember this because my first thought — before the joy, before the tears, before anything remotely grandmotherly — was: I'm fifty-two. Surely there's been some kind of administrative error.

I wasn't ready. Not emotionally — I was thrilled, truly — but in the sense that I didn't look like a grandmother, didn't feel like a grandmother, and had absolutely no intention of becoming the kind of person who carries boiled sweets in their handbag and refers to themselves in the third person. "Nanny would love a cup of tea." No. Absolutely not.

The gap nobody warns you about

Here's the thing nobody tells you about becoming a young grandparent: you don't fit anywhere. You're too young for the traditional grandmother crowd — the ones who've been doing this for a decade and have very strong opinions about sleep training. But you're also not quite in the same place as your friends who are still raising teenagers or planning gap years they never took at eighteen.

You're in a strange middle ground. Still working, still going to the gym (well, mostly), still wanting to go out on a Friday evening. But now you've also got a car seat in the back and a muslin cloth that you keep finding in your coat pocket at inopportune moments.

My friends were brilliant, of course. Lots of congratulations. But I could sense a certain look — the one that says rather you than me mixed with does this mean we're old now? We were all thinking it. Nobody wanted to say it out loud.

The rocking chair can wait

I'd always imagined grandparenthood as something that happened to you when you were properly old. When you'd finished doing things. When the rocking chair and the knitting and the gentle dozing in front of Antiques Roadshow felt like a natural next step rather than a prison sentence.

At fifty-two, I was nowhere near finished. I'd just signed up for a ceramics class. I was training for a half marathon (alright, a 10K — let's not get carried away). I had plans. Grandmotherhood wasn't in the diary until at least sixty-five, pencilled in somewhere between "learn Italian" and "finally read War and Peace."

But babies, it turns out, don't consult your five-year plan.

Finding my people (eventually)

The first few months were wonderful and isolating in roughly equal measure. I adored my grandson — obviously — but I found myself retreating a bit. The baby groups were full of parents half my age. The "grandparent and me" sessions at the library felt like they'd been designed for people twenty years my senior. I didn't want to sit in a circle singing "Wind the Bobbin Up" while someone explained what WhatsApp was.

What actually helped, and I say this without a shred of exaggeration, was getting involved in things that had nothing whatsoever to do with being a grandparent.

I started going to a few community events around Chislehurst — a walking group that meets on the Common, a supper club that someone had started at one of the local pubs, a craft market where I discovered that my ceramics were, charitably, "rustic." These weren't grandparent things. They weren't retirement things. They were just things — activities where people turned up, had a laugh, and nobody asked you to define yourself by your relationship to a small child.

That was the revelation, honestly. I didn't need a grandparents' support group. I needed to be around people who were roughly my age, roughly my stage, and interested in doing something with their week beyond waiting for the next babysitting request.

The identity question

Becoming a grandparent young forces you to confront something that most people get to avoid for another decade or so: who are you, now? Not what's your job title, not what's your family role — but who are you when you walk into a room full of strangers?

For a while, I didn't know. I was a mother, yes. A grandmother, apparently. A marketing consultant three days a week. A woman who liked running and ceramics and couldn't cook a risotto without burning the bottom of the pan. But none of those things quite captured it.

What helped was realising that I wasn't the only one feeling a bit at sea. At that walking group on the Common, I met a woman who'd just taken early retirement and had no idea what to do with herself. At the supper club, there was a man who'd moved to Chislehurst after his divorce and didn't know a soul. We were all, in our different ways, trying to figure out where we fitted in.

Community doesn't solve everything. It won't fix your identity crisis or stop you from having a minor existential wobble in the biscuit aisle. But it does something almost as useful: it gives you somewhere to be, with people who are glad you've turned up.

What I'd tell someone in my shoes

If you've recently become a grandparent and you're thinking hang on, I'm far too young for this — you're not alone, and you're not wrong. You can be a brilliant grandparent and still have your own life. You can love your grandchildren fiercely and still want an evening where nobody mentions Peppa Pig.

Find things to do that are yours. Not grandparent things, not retirement things — just things you enjoy, with people whose company you like. Chislehurst is quietly full of them if you look, and most of them don't require you to own a single piece of knitwear.

I'm fifty-three now. My grandson thinks I'm hilarious, which is more than most people in my life can say. I still run (slowly). I still make ceramics (badly). And I still refuse to refer to myself in the third person.

But I have, I'll admit, started carrying boiled sweets in my handbag. Some stereotypes, it turns out, exist for a reason.