Lesley Stahl: Brought to her knees by grandmotherhood

Tough, feisty, and steely are common descriptions people use for Lesley Stahl - the broadcast journalist who was a CBS News White House correspondent under three presidents, hosted Face the Nation from 1983 to 1991, and travels the world for 60 Minutes.

So it's a bit startling that she's been brought to her knees by becoming a grandmother.

But, then again, greeting the child of one's child can have a strange and unexpected impact.

"I was totally and completely turned to mush," Stahl has said. "I was bowled over. And, frankly, I didn't expect any of it."

So Stahl went out there and did what she knows: investigated. The result is her book Becoming Grandma: The Joys and Science of the New Grandparenting (Blue Rider Press, $27), and it's already hit the New York Times best-seller list.

She's not the only one skeptical of this sea change. After reading Stahl's confessions about the emotional depth she felt at the birth of her first grandchild, and more recently, her second, Charlie Rose on PBS asked, "Where did this side come from?"

"Once I had the feeling of that first baby in my arms," Stahl says of the birth of Jordan, now 5, "I would sometimes lie in bed at night and pretend she was in my arms again. It felt like infatuation."

Stahl's only child, daughter Taylor, she admits, did not elicit those feelings. "That was totally different. I was not infatuated, but I was sometimes overwhelmed and anxious."

At lunch one day with a publisher friend, Stahl was asked whether she'd consider writing a book about 60 Minutes. She knew: No.

But as she continued to talk about grandmothering, the friend noted she probably was on the right subject.

"I instantly realized then that writing a book felt right as long as it was about this amazing, new experience I was having."

Stahl's own relationship with her mother inevitably surfaces in the book. Her mother had encouraged her to discover and establish herself before she turned to motherhood, and Stahl didn't have a child until she was 37.

Conversely, she recalls thinking when Taylor was only 10 about how she'd relish becoming a grandmother. "It was just there," she muses. "I'm not sure why."

When she and her husband, author and screenwriter Aaron Latham, rushed across the country from their New York City home to Los Angeles to meet their first grandchild, she remembers how grudgingly she handed over the precious infant for her husband's turn. Stahl learned semi-shameless greediness is an occupational hazard of new grandmothers.

And there have been many other lessons along the way.

Through her interviews with scores of celebrity and regular-people grandmothers, she learned that rights to these coveted creatures come from staying on the right side of their parents.

"We see clearly how they hold a new card - the power to deny us access to the most precious thing on earth," Stahl observes, adding, "This walking-on-eggshells stage means living by their rules now. And rule No. 1 is: Do it their way."

If new grandparents learn their lessons well, they generally avoid skirmishes. And like so many of today's grandparents, they are slightly awed by how well-informed this new generation is about parenting.

She also explores the challenges of grandparents who are still working and therefore are often deprived of the quality time hailed as the best and only way to connect the generations.

In their case, Stahl and her husband have the challenge of geography - their two granddaughters still live on the other side of the country. There's also the fact that Latham has Parkinson's disease. A solution has been long summer vacations together, mostly on the East Coast.

She gives attention to the plight of grandparents disenfranchised from their grandchildren because of family rifts.

"In so many cases, there's both shame - and bewilderment - about being 'banished' for reasons that are not always clear," she explains. "For me, that was one of the greatest shocks in researching this book."

When Stahl's daughter was giving birth to her first child, Stahl's mother, in her 90s, was dying. The split loyalties and needs on both sides were draining and deeply painful. Matriarch Dolly did get glimpses of Jordan, thanks to technology, but she never saw Chloe, now 2.

It's a metaphor for what happens when you become a grandparent, Stahl writes. There's a dual sense of mortality and immortality: Immortality knowing that your offspring will persist into the future; mortality that you've reached an older stage, with an end in sight.

At the end of the book, she quotes Steve Leber, founder of Grandparents.com, an online community for grandparent resources:

"God gave us grandchildren to make up for aging."