Grandparents R Us

Let the parents do the hard work. We do the loving.

It’s been said for years that having grandchildren is even better than having children. There’s truth to that for two reasons. First, you’ve made all your screw-ups on your first children, so being a grandparent comes with more self-assurance. Those first kids were just for practice!

Second, we aren’t entirely enmeshed in our grandchildren’s lives. We can still have our own lives, and they can have theirs. That makes our relationship more ‘natural’. If they have issues, we don’t feel the angst, the ‘what did I do wrong?’ that the parents do.

Face it, that’s a nice feeling. We get to let them be who they are, presume that they will turn out OK one way of the other, because that’s the way it generally works out. We get to be a marginal influence, not an overbearing presence. And that influence can be very effective. Children can only guess at their future, parents are struggling to achieve their future, but grandparents have arrived, by and large. We are the future. No, we’re not their future, but we represent an established, knowable stable future.

I think that’s more important today than ever before. With all that is thrown at us, some of it valid, much of it phony, it’s nice for grandkids to see grandparents take it in stride. If you are a grandparent, do that. Take it in stride, whatever it is. For your grandkids sake. They need that. “This, too, shall pass.”

Are the kids being bullied? It’s for the parents to take wise, direct action. It’s for the grandparents to assure the grandkids that they can get past this. It’s part of growing up, and will not go on forever. Think how important it is for a kid to know that. Feeling alone and lonely? Grandparents can be a friend and a sounding board that parents sometimes can’t achieve.

We are a foundation. We are their parents’ parents; we are their cousins’ parents. We are the household that their parents talk of ‘when I was your age’. We are the refuge, physically and emotionally from much of the day to day strife.

All of this is not just what we get to do, but what we need to do.

p.s. There is a secret society of grandparents. While I am sworn to secrecy, perhaps they’ll forgive me for spilling the beans, just this once. We have no secret handshake. We are known to each other by smiles and nods. Every child is our grandchild. We feel the pain of each and all of them. We feel their joy. We wonder at the world, right along with them. I’ve belonged to various groups, but this is the one I like best.

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