The Joy of Being Grandparents

Parents’ responsibilities for their children persist like the ocean’s surf that repeatedly laps upon their shore.

Grandparents sit on higher ground.   We find relief from the physical demands of our grandchildren—and they do wear us out—when we return them to their parents.  Our time with them has limits, which generally arrives when enjoyment turns to grind.  As often said, if we knew being grandparents was going to be so much fun, we would have skipped being parents and moved right on up to grandparents.   But that old saw explains only a part of the benefit of being parental emeritus.

We acquired a windfall through age and our own past parental experiences that can be summarized in one word:  Perspective.   Elders pause before fretting.   Urgent issues that bedeviled us as parents—will junior or little miss make the A team or score A’s in school, make and keep friends, stay out of trouble, and on and on—prove less compelling from our perspective.    As Innkeeper Patel said in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel:  “Everything will be all right in the end.  If it’s not all right, it is not yet the end.”

We have seen this rodeo before, and understand that when life’s bucking bronco throws the child, more often than not he or she re-boards the horse with better or at least acceptable results.  What seemed monumentally important oft proves only a momentary setback.   The gathering clouds of uncertainty that block the sunlight scatter more quickly for grandparents.

Grandparents also gain perspective by means of simple geography.  We reside separate and apart, removed from the daily fracas of living with them, and less involved in enforcing day-to-day discipline and the conflicts that arise between parent and child.  Hence, our adjacent position affords a less complicated view of the their lives and associated growing pains.   Standing apart from the trees affords a better view of the forest.   From our vantage point, we offer occasional insight and understanding that hopefully serve to some advantage.

Grandparents receive as well as bestow.  Oscar Wilde wrote:  “For those who say they have become world-weary, in fact the world has become weary of them.”  Our symbiotic relationship with our grandchildren relieves that sense of weariness.  Our constancy settles the hyper kinetic youth as their vim and vigor recharge us.

While we cannot re-capture our youth, we can re-live it vicariously through our kindred youth.   They are the loin of our loin, the fruit of our womb’s womb, a piece of us where we see our children in their children. 

Our grandchildren’s innocence and curiosity, their thirst for new experiences and acquisition of knowledge, their amusing malapropisms and precocious insights, their wondrous growth and hug-ability imbue us with optimism that would otherwise ebb with the passing of time.   Their fountain of youth cannot reverse our aging, but slackens the speed of its descent.    Their Springtime brightens our Autumn colors.

In the 1990 Italian film Stanno Tutti Bene (Everybody’s Fine), the grandfather—wearied from his complicated relations with his own children—speaks to his late wife’s spirit at her gravesite, and reports not altogether truthfully that all is well with their children.   The movie closes with the grandfather placing a small roll of currency in his infant grandchild’s reflexively grasping hand.  That symbolic gesture reflects the seed money of eternal hope that comes with the sprout of new life.   

We grow to love and cherish our own offspring’s brood, and they in turn learn to love and cherish us. As we witness our grandchildren’s development, aching to be older, aspiring to be free and fully grown adults, we recall the tale from Fractured Fairytales where kindly Geppetto implores Pinocchio: “Stay wood, kid.  Stay wood.”

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{with thanks to Lorraine and Leona}