For nearly a year I have adhered to a Saturday night ritual. It involves a pen, sheets of stationery, often a glass of wine. It calls for the peaceful silence of my sleeping children.

Saturday night is the night I write to my grandmother. I tell her about my children: their sayings and their schoolwork, their games and their growth.

My grandmother lives in California and I live in Maryland. We have met in person only half a dozen times since I was born, yet we are not strangers. We have written to each other since I first penned clumsy thank-you notes for the gifts she sent at Christmastime and my birthday.

When I went off to college my grandmother assuaged my loneliness by sending letters and her own miniature watercolors of flowers and animals. She has been wheelchair-bound with rheumatoid arthritis since my babyhood and writing or painting were slow processes, but ones she enjoyed.

In my twenties I married and got a low-level job in the publications department of a trade association. I arrived home in the evenings tired and hungry, ready to eat dinner with my husband and then slump on the couch with a book or a rented movie. Often I felt I couldn't muster the energy to compose bright, lively prose, even for an audience of one. Too, most elements of my life were not very interesting. Those that were--my sex life, the gangster movies I loved, workplace gossip--were not ones I felt I could discuss with an elderly relative. As a result, my letters had an artificial, unnatural tone I despised. Caught in this net of self-absorption and self-consciousness, I wrote less often. My grandmother, on her end, was suffering health problems, including the loss of most of her eyesight. Even when I did write she was unable to answer without help.

Then I had twins and, twenty-one months later, another baby. In the course of an ordinary day, doing laundry and changing diapers and pressing the toaster plunger, I felt I was running as fast as I could and getting nowhere. I still sent my grandmother Christmas gifts and birthday cards, but mostly I relied on my mother to pass news between us.

Finally, last year, my mother persuaded me to accompany her on one of her frequent trips to California. With us we took my younger daughter, Camille, then eighteen months old.

We drove through groves of almond trees to the assisted living community where my grandmother lived. My mother led to way to her room. There she was: smaller than I remembered her, sitting in her wheelchair, nearly blind. Because of her arthritis she was unable to move around the building at will, and because of her blindness she was unable to read or paint.

But she took great pleasure in our company and especially in Camille's presence. As Camille explored the room my grandmother was full of praise. "She's the prettiest little girl I've ever seen," she said again and again. Once, after Camille lifted her arms to me and said in her tiny voice, "Pick me up," my grandmother remarked, "She speaks as well as a four-year-old!"

My grandmother is normally quite reserved; she is not one for superlatives. Her words, combined with my view of her isolation, made me realize how hungry she was for contact with her family, especially her great-grandchildren.

During the four days we were with her my grandmother told stories about her own children: five babies born in eight years. One story was about a morning when she had been trying to cook breakfast while my mother's middle sister, then just an infant, was crying in the bedroom. At the time my mother was about four years old, her younger brother two. My grandmother decided to finish preparing their breakfast before attending to the baby. As she stood at the stove my uncle came struggling out of the bedroom, dragging my aunt in his arms. "You take care of this baby," he said to my grandmother. "Take care of the baby!"

For me this is a story about the combined stress and pleasure that make up young motherhood, especially for a woman with more than one child. Your attention is always divided; you always feel you are neglecting at least one needy baby. Sometimes that feeling makes you want to jump out of your skin. And then suddenly your kids will give you a path to follow; they will make you laugh. The thread of that recognition had run to me from my grandmother. She told her story with a smile.

When we were alone in our hotel room my mother mentioned that every time she visited my grandmother would ask her to check her mailbox--a wooden pigeonhole--to see if anything had arrived. Usually, my mother said, the mailbox was empty, but my grandmother had never ceased hoping.

I felt this statement keenly. At the time I myself was often lonely. Taking my children out was a struggle, and often I felt penned in my house. The mail carrier's arrival was frequently the high point of my afternoon. I returned home determined to give my grandmother something to find in her mailbox, and put aside my worries about whether my letters would be entertaining or well-written.

I started timidly enough, penning stiff little missives that listed the places I'd taken the children during the week, highlighting the more typically "interesting" expeditions, such as a preschool field trip or a classmate's birthday party. But soon the familiarity of writing, "Dear Grandmom . . " freed me, and my pen swung far and wide in my effort to convey a sense of our lives to this woman who could not see us.

I told my grandmother about the homey pleasures of co-oping in my twins' preschool and about playdates that ended with my son biting one of his friends. I told her about going strawberry picking, when my kids picked so fast we ended up with fourteen pounds of berries and I spent days making pies and smoothies. I told her how hard it was to get little sleep, then to rise at dawn and take care of small children all day. It was comforting to think that I wasn't telling her anything she didn't know.

Recently my grandmother enlisted one of my aunts to write me a note on her behalf. "I enjoy your letters about the children," it said. "I am saving them for you." In an odd way we have become a repository for each other's memories. I hold in my mind the ones she told me, like that of my two-year-old uncle commanding, "Take care of the baby!" She holds in a drawer in her room the memories I have written, ones I would not have taken time to write for myself but which I will nonetheless treasure when I read them again. What began as an act of altruism has become a lifeline: messages to myself, written in the midst of chaos.

Elizabeth Roca's essays have appeared in The Washington Post and Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers. She lives with her family in Silver Spring, Maryland.