“Heirlooms we don’t have in our family. But stories we’ve got.” —Rose Chernin
“You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.” —Eleanor Roosevelt
In Austin, Sylvia continued to journal, swim, and meet with her women’s group on Sunday mornings. Even though she had significantly less pain, Sylvia saw Megan, her pain therapist, every few months. She liked talking to her and needed that prescription for the therapeutic swimming pool. Every night she gave Lewis a short report on her physical pain and every night he listened carefully, then sweetly acknowledged what she had said.
As her mental and physical health improved, she became more grateful for her custodial grandchildren. Too often in the past, she had allowed herself to think of them as a burden when, in fact, they were the best thing in her life.
Gracie liked art and animals and she made friends easily. Max was a tall, skinny kid with big ears and an awkward gait. He reminded Sylvia of a baby giraffe—gangly, well-meaning, but unintentionally destructive. When he first came to live with Lewis and Sylvia, he had a dozen meltdowns a day, but now he only had one every few days. He was a restless, moody boy, but also warmhearted and funny. Sylvia took pride in how much better Max was now.
While she did her chores, Gracie sang tunes from Annie and Mary Poppins. She was full of life, a beam of sunshine that Sylvia could bask in whenever she wanted. Max read her jokes from his corny joke books while she cooked. One night, she heard him singing to himself while he played with Legos in his bedroom. That night she felt that she was a lucky woman.
• • •
Of course, not everyone who has grandchildren is lucky. One of my friends is estranged from her daughter and is no longer able to see her grandchildren. She is so lonely that she has adopted three cats and named them after her two granddaughters and grandson. Another friend loves her grandchild, but he lives in Hong Kong and she has seen him twice since he was born five years ago. Some grandchildren are so badly behaved that it’s painful to be with them. When adult children are not parenting well because of drug or alcohol abuse, criminal behavior, or mental health problems, grandmothers can feel despair. But these are the exceptions. Most of us are delighted by our grandchildren. They make us happier than we ever realized we could be.
I remember a story about Queen Marie Antoinette, who possessed an enormous collection of rubies and diamonds. One day a visitor asked to see her jewels. She had a servant bring in her children and said, “These are my jewels.” That is how I feel about my grandchildren.
If we are lucky, our grandchildren light up when they see us. At least when they are young, we may be their favorite people. Unlike their parents, we don’t have to be responsible for their daily lives. We can love them and they can love us back. At best, this relationship is one of the purest and most golden relationships possible. It has a sacred quality. We have special names for each other and many of our activities become ritualized.
Part of what sanctifies these relationships is that we have learned to let our grandchildren be perfectly themselves. We may have tried to shape and form our own children into mini-versions of ourselves, but by now, we know better. Instead, we accept our grandchildren for the unique beings they are. This acceptance gives them the confidence to feel they are worthy of the deep love they are given. It helps them see the universe as safe. It is the psychological equivalent of being given milk and cookies before bed and tucked in with a story and a kiss. This core confidence and sense of self-worth stay with children for the rest of their lives.
If we are fortunate, we remember our own grandmothers with whom we had special relationships. As a grandmother now, I am realizing how much my grandmothers loved me. The good things that happened when I was with them were not accidents. Rather, when I was there, my grandmother would decide she wanted to make gooseberry pie. Then she and I could sit under her ash tree and de-stem the gooseberries while we visited. Later we could enjoy the delicious pie together.
The picnics and the trips to the river with my Ozark grandmother required work and planning on her part. She was intentional when she asked me to talk to her while she weeded her garden or ironed other people’s clothes in her dark kitchen. As a grandmother now, I know how much work it takes to make events for children “just happen.”
My grandmothers bequeathed me memories around specific activities, places, and conversations. I treasure these memories. I’ve passed on to my own grandchildren some of their songs, stories, and card games. As I grew older, both grandmothers asked me questions about myself, such as how did I choose my friends, what did I feel passionate about, what books I enjoyed and why, and what did I think my talents were? I grew after these questions. I have tried to ask my own grandchildren questions of a similar caliber.
We grandmothers can ponder what it is we most want to teach our grandchildren, what activities will give them the most joy, and in what ways can we prepare them for life in our complicated world. As we think through these big questions, we will be able to, day by day, share with our grandchildren what we most want them to experience.
We can offer our grandchildren the gift of slow time, something schools and busy parents are not always able to do. We can allow children to live in the present with uninterrupted attention from us. Children appreciate unscheduled time and the opportunity to complete tasks without being interrupted.
We can also help parents keep things in perspective. We can remind them that they were fidgety at the dinner table, too, and hard to get to bed at night when they were toddlers. And we can reassure them that as parents we made many mistakes and yet they managed to survive our parental imperfections to become the wonderful people they are today.
We can invent new rituals. When I am with my grandchildren, we take nature walks with our water bottles, bird books, and paper bags for carrying the treasures we find. We pick up colorful stones, acorns, and leaves. When the children go on vacations they bring back these kinds of treasures to me. In the summer, we deadhead the red and pink hibiscus and have flower fights with the soft fallen flowers. In the autumn, when ginkgo leaves turn golden, I gather a few and mail them to the children.
My grandchildren have their favorite foods that I keep handy for them. For my son’s children, it is bagels, yogurt, and oranges. My daughter’s children like pitas, Goldfish crackers, and applesauce. I do not run out of these foods. They are sacramental.
Glenda and Doug are retired grandparents who live five blocks from their grandchildren. Like many boomer grandparents, they are deeply engaged with their grandchildren. Last summer, when the grandchildren were too old for daycare, Glenda and Doug offered to watch them. They planned a summer of exploration. They wanted the children to see new places, experience new activities, and learn about their city.
They picked up the kids around nine a.m. with a plan for the day. They took them to museums, bookstores, and free concerts in the park. They drove to a climbing wall, a zip line course, and a weekly karate class. Glenda wasn’t fond of martial arts, but the kids loved it.
As they drove around their city, Glenda and Doug would point to things the children might not notice on their own. One day they looked at streetcar tracks and talked to the children about why streetcars were such a good idea. Another day they took the children to the farmers market and encouraged them to choose one vegetable they didn’t think they would like. Glenda cooked it for lunch and let them see if they were right. After each day’s activities, they all wrote about their experiences.
And the children give back to them. One day their granddaughter said, “I want to live with you when I go to college. I’ll take care of you then.” Another day, their grandson looked at Glenda and said, “Grandmother, you have a lot of wrinkles.” Glenda replied, “I know. I am getting old.” Then her grandson said, “I call them ‘wrinkles of love.’ ”
We can offer our grandchildren a moral education, deepen their sense of connection to all living things, and help them learn to find comfort in reading, people, the natural world, and creative works. One of the best ways to do this is simply talking through questions about life. One day Coltrane asked me, “Do you believe God created the world?” and I responded, “I don’t know.” Then he said, “Maybe little specks came together and created it.” Again I said, “I don’t know.” He asked me, “But who created the specks?” “My question exactly,” I replied. We then talked for fifteen more minutes about the nature of believing, the existence of spiritual life, and our lack of certainty about both God and the creation of the universe.
Plato taught, “Education is teaching children to find pleasure in the right things.” Grandmothers can be teachers about how to lead an ethical life. Partly we can do this by modeling kind and respectful behavior toward all living beings. We can also do this by storytelling. For all of my grandchildren I created a long and endlessly useful story about the Lovelies and the McGarigles. The Lovelies are a well-behaved family who are kind and sensible and know how to act in public. On the other hand, the McGarigles are rude, messy, lazy, and mean to each other. Before any new event such as attending a wedding, going to a new museum, or having a birthday party, I tell the children both versions of how the event goes. They find the McGarigles, who throw around their food and scream at their parents and sometimes belch and swear in public, to be hilarious. And they all promise they will act like the Lovelies at whatever event is coming next. Whenever I want those kids to behave, all I have to say is, “Act like a Lovely.”
Another way to teach moral behavior is to tell what I call crucible stories about how people act when their backs are to the wall. Children love stories about orphans or any children who are brave and self-sufficient in difficult situations. I tell my grandchildren stories of adults who behaved well on the Titanic or an expedition to the South Pole or in modern disasters such as the Chilean mining accident where the miners took care of each other for many days before their rescue.
We also play a game called What If? I ask the children questions and allow them to tell me how they would behave in a challenging situation. For example, “What would you do if you were about to get in a car with an adult, but you realized she had been drinking?” “What would you do if you found $1,000 sitting on the sidewalk?” or “What action would you take if you woke in the night and smelled smoke in your house?”
Children love these games because they give them a chance to work out complicated and practical problems. This gives them more confidence in facing their future and prepares them for the events that might occur.
I favor conversations about how to protect a child who is being bullied, how to lose gracefully at games, and how to help people in need without offending them. My oldest grandchildren and I have discussed what to do if someone says something hateful or racist. We have discussed war as a terrible and often avoidable way to solve conflicts. We have talked about what it means to be a citizen.
Children have lives just as complicated as adults and face many of the same existential quandaries. Most are capable of empathy, reflection, and action for the good. Grandmothers can teach children to work by loving work themselves. Both of my grandmothers worked all the time, but while they worked, they had lovely lives of visiting and laughing. That is the kind of life I want to show my grandchildren. I talk to them enthusiastically about my writing and my volunteer projects and, when the children are here, I often suggest we work together. When we work with them, children love to work.
Grandmothers give children the great safety net of an inborn identity, woven of time, place, and people. One of our most important jobs is to talk to children about the six generations of family that we may know. The more storied a child’s life is, the stronger and deeper are his or her possibilities for a rich sense of self.
We can teach our grandchildren the family value systems that span generations. All families worship at some church, be it a literal church, synagogue, temple, or mosque or the church of sports, music, fly-fishing, or good works. I watched my Colorado grandmother work as a volunteer at her church and library. I observed my own mother’s constant generosity with others. When she left the house every morning for work, she would say, “Be kind to each other.”
Far back in time, our family held certain values. We believed in hard work and kindness. We valued education, good food, and being outdoors. We treasured experiences over objects. We loved birds and we gathered to observe big storms and express wonder as the lightning crackled and the thunder boomed. I hope my grandchildren learn our values by watching me.
One night our tornado sirens twice interrupted our Mother’s Day dinner. We raced to the basement. Four-year-old Coltrane had never experienced our trips to the basement with cats, flashlights, and cell phones. He’d never seen a meteorologist live on TV showing maps and red zones and warning people to seek shelter.
I was grateful to be with Coltrane on his first tornado night. That gave me a chance to educate him about our family’s love of big storms. After the storm moved east of us, we walked around outside looking at the clouds. We marveled at the wind and the temperature drops. I said, “Storms are when nature shows us all it can do.”
Children love to hear what their parents did when they were young and especially how they misbehaved. They like to hear about themselves—stories about their births, their early words, and their funny habits.
We are all cultural historians for our grandchildren. We remember the Mickey Mouse Club, drive-in theaters, John F. Kennedy’s election, the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, the Democratic convention of 1968, the Black Panthers, and the popularization of granola, yogurt, and, of course, kale.
We can tell them about the much slower and quieter world we lived in. My grandchildren can hardly believe my parents let me ride my bike down to a creek with only a book, a can of soda pop, and a peanut butter sandwich. I would spend the day reading under a tree. They are surprised to know that many houses didn’t have locks on the doors and that people left their keys in their cars overnight.
I have told them about ten-acre prairie dog villages, bookmobiles, and teachers having to resign when they were pregnant. I have explained that girls had to wear skirts to school even on the coldest days of winter and that severely disabled children stayed home from school. And I have taught them the games from my rural childhood—Red Rover; Run, Sheep, Run; Statues; jacks; hopscotch; and tiddlywinks.
My grandchildren can barely comprehend a world without television, microwave ovens, power windows in cars, cell phones, computers, and air-conditioning. That is the world I grew up in. To them, my history is ancient history.
Our stories help children develop identity, perspective, and a point of view that will shape the way they understand their experiences for the rest of their lives.
Of course, grandchildren bring us as many gifts as we carry to them. Being around grandchildren rekindles our love for children, and reminds us of our own and our children’s childhoods. Children also tend to bring a great deal of sheer goofiness into our lives. No matter how rough a day my husband and I have had, we can change the topic and cheer up by starting to talk about something funny one of our grandchildren said or did.
Grandchildren combat loneliness, make us feel young again, and give us a mission. In my own experience, there’s nothing like a newborn baby. I love the pleasure of rocking an infant and feeling his or her head on my shoulder close to my neck. I enjoy the sound of babies breathing and, even though it means a bad night’s sleep, I love to sleep with a baby curled beside me. And I will never forget the joy of walking around a garden with Kate in my arms.
No one but one-year-old Otis enjoys my singing and dancing to show tunes from the 1950s and 1960s—“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair,” and “76 Trombones.” Babies have a lot to teach us—to love the people we love radiantly, be direct about our needs, and that the time to enjoy life is NOW.
Who is more fun than a three-year-old? At that age, Coltrane spent the night and woke me at five a.m. It was still dark and I seized the opportunity to take him stargazing in my front yard. We spread out a blanket and looked at the universe. Both of us were awestruck by the silvery moon, the many constellations visible in the pre-dawn sky and, well, by the bigness of it all. Later, I fixed cinnamon toast and we watched the sunrise. I hope to remember this on my deathbed.
At five, Coltrane discovered air quotes. We had a hilarious afternoon in which anything we said was in air quotes. It is astonishing how funny most ordinary sentences can be if they are air-quoted. Even the sentence “I want a snack” can be hilarious with the word “snack” in air quotes.
Ten-year-old girls are marvelous. When my granddaughter Claire was ten, she came in to visit for a week of art camp and swimming. One sunny afternoon, just before she dived into the pool, she gave me a hug and said, “I am the luckiest girl alive.” I realized at that moment that I was the luckiest nonna alive to be with such a joy-filled and grateful granddaughter.
When my grandson Aidan was in middle school, he sustained a concussion. He was on a strict regimen for two weeks—no television, no school, no friends, and not much moving around. I called him every day and sent him packs of licorice in the mail. But finally, I just needed to go see him.
I drove ninety miles to his farm. When Aidan saw me, he walked toward me surrounded by a golden light. I could feel my heart open and my love for him beam out into his heart and beyond. We were so grateful to see each other and to hug. We needed to be together that day.
Aidan suggested we go fishing, one of the few activities he was allowed to do. I drove him to a little farm pond nearby and watched as he casted for fish. I spotted fish for him and admired his skills. But truly, all that mattered for either of us was just being together. I will remember all of my life that afternoon with Aidan fishing in the sunlight filtered through the light green leaves of spring.
Teenagers are fun too, although we grandparents stop being the center of their universe. Friends and activities replace us. It’s hard to let go of the physically affectionate, crazy-about-me grandchildren that my teenage grandchildren once were. A part of me wants to hold on to the loving and deeply connected children of the past.
However, I have worked to adapt to their changes. I’ve told them that I want them to be honest and authentic with me. I want to know what they really feel and think. I don’t want the edited version of their lives. I feel closer to them when I hear of their struggles. That is the only way we can stay truly connected as people.
I am working to find new ways of being with them. I don’t want to just love the memories of my young grandchildren. I want to love and understand the people my grandchildren are becoming. I stay engaged by going to their sports events and by learning about what they are interested in. Kate and I sometimes read the same book at the same time so that we can discuss it. Aidan and I like board games. When the family visits, I try to find half an hour to be alone with each of the teenagers. My husband and I also have a custom of taking each of our grandchildren on a trip when they are in high school.
Grandmothering requires constant adjustment. Children change and so do we. I am not the same grandmother for toddler Otis that I was for Kate, my oldest grandchild. When Kate was a baby I was fifty-four; now I am seventy.
As the children have changed, I have worked to keep my expectations reasonable, not too high or too low. For example, at age three, children are old enough to help set and clear the table and they should be contributing to family work. On the other hand, I know that children don’t always enjoy what I hope they will enjoy. When we took our thirteen-year-old grandson to an old-growth forest, he loved to find and hold banana slugs. By the time our hike was over, he had counted seventy-five banana slugs and been photographed with many of them. I might have focused on the lovely moss backlit by sunlight or the redwood branches swaying gently in the wind, but he was a young kid and slugs were more exciting.
Even in the best situations, grandmothering is complicated. My multigenerational family can make me happier and drive me crazier than anything else on earth. I look forward to family gatherings and often have a glossy fantasy about how they will be. At the same time I am fearful because historically family gatherings are sometimes fraught with hard moments. High expectations can cause me trouble. Unless I control that, I can end up weeping after a big family holiday.
Grandmothering requires great diplomatic skills and self-discipline. We learn to be quiet. We learn that our main talking points need to be “You have wonderful children” or “You are great parents.”
My friend Regina plans to have her grandchildren call her Grandma Chocolate-money. My friend Jane recommends keeping your criticism to yourself, but being generous when it comes to picking up the tab at the ice-cream shop or paying for special learning opportunities for the grandchildren.
Roles have switched and now our children are the authorities. We do as they wish with the grandchildren and we don’t question their authority. Unless asked, we don’t offer advice. As my Buddhist friend said, “My mantra is ‘I am not being called upon to issue an opinion.’ ”
Somehow, we must learn to balance our great love and concern for our grandchildren with the acceptance that we are not in charge. We control almost nothing. Especially when we feel like we know something that could be helpful, it’s hard not to share our thoughts. But, as my daughter once told me, “Mom, none of my friends want their mother’s advice on parenting unless they ask for it.”
We can be most helpful when we are praising, chauffeuring, preparing food, introducing children to cultural events, and supporting tired and stressed parents.
Children who are loved and well-parented can survive a considerable number of parental errors in judgment. It helps to remind ourselves that we don’t know everything and that our opinions are not always correct. We can remember the many mistakes we made as mothers. We wish we could save our children from trial and error learning, but we cannot.
Our grandchildren grow up so quickly. With each developmental leap they make, we lose the child we were in love with. We lose the three-year-old who likes to sit on our lap and read library books or the eight-year-old who is endlessly performing magic tricks. Those children disappear and new ones appear. I am already through the baby stage of my life. Unless I live to be very old, I will never have another grandbaby to rock.
When my husband and I were the parents of younger children, we often commented on how much our parents wanted to see us. They were always urging us to visit, and when we arrived they would be standing on the porch or looking out the window, waiting for our car. When we left, they would walk us to our car and talk as we fastened our seat belts. We had a hard time extricating ourselves and driving away. Now I am like my parents, watching out the window and crying when the family leaves.