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According to the song I loved to sing in elementary school, Grandmother’s
house is reached by going “over the river and through the woods” in a
horse-drawn sleigh. I remember wondering while singing the song where
this house was located that there would be enough snow on the ground to
travel to it by sleigh at Thanksgiving time every year.Certainly not in
Manhattan, where I lived!Yet, I don’t remember questioning the song’s
validity.
Americans subscribe to a “suburban myth” about grandparents. We accept
it as truth even though our own experiences may be very different. The
myth depicts a generic grandmother as a cross between the Pillsbury Dough
Boy and Betty Crocker, with a dash of Mrs. Doubtfire. She is depicted
as a wise, warm, nurturing person, who stays home and loves to cook for
her family.Whenever I sang the song about going to Grandmother’s house,
I could imagine the smells of all the ingredients for a wonderful Thanksgiving
feast filling grandmother’s house.
The identity of the American grandfather in the myth is even more vague
than that of the grandmother. He is envisioned as hanging around the house,
not working at a job away from the home, and is seen as available to show
his grandchildren how to build or repair things, or possibly to take them
fishing.
The notion of what American grandparents are like may originate in the
agricultural past of our country. When I was a child, many of my friends’
grandparents and extended families lived in small towns or rural areas
or on farms. My friends lived in nuclear households in New York City where
their parents’ careers had led them, but many of them went to stay with
their grandparents in the country during the summers. While they were
visiting, they would help out with the farm chores, take part in rural
activities like swimming in the local swimming hole, and get to know the
members of their extended family.
But my grandparents were nothing like the mythical grandparents of American
culture. My father’s parents were not part of my life. My father was the
youngest of eleven children. His mother died before I was born; his father,
when I was three years old. All I remember of my paternal grandfather
is a vague image of Grandpa’s successfully hitting his spittoon from the
far side of his living room with a stream of tobacco juice and my mother’s
disgust at this display of expertise.
My mother’s parents lived in Long Beach, California—not a destination reached
by a sleigh!We seldom saw them and never visited them in California until
I was in college. They lived until their late 70’s and we saw them every
few years when they made the cross-country drive to visit us in New York.They
didn’t live on a farm—my grandfather worked on the oil rigs my grandmother
worked full-time in the drapery department of a department store. We never
ate a holiday meal at their home. My grandmother was a terrible cook; she
didn’t like to bake and she did not take care of her kitchen tools. When,
as a young adult, I visited her several times, my first chore would be to
scrub her pots and pans so I could stand to eat the food cooked in them.
Somehow, I don’t remember being disturbed that my grandparents did not
fit the image I had learned from songs and books.They were very satisfactory
grandparents in their own way. They were exotic and yet familiar.My grandmother
had been a concert pianist until she married secretly—a very adventurous
woman—yet she knew my parents and siblings intimately. My grandparents
lived in California, a fabled destination for a New Yorker in those days,
even had an orange tree in their front yard, and yet they were familiar
with the East Coast and snow. I was particularly pleased that Grandma
was right-handed and could teach me to knit and crochet, something my
left-handed mother was unable to do. Grandma introduced me to crossword
puzzles, which are still one of my favorite leisure activities.Although
I appreciated clean pots and pans in the kitchen, I appreciated even more
being allowed to leave them soaking after we finished a meal while we
did something “more important” like going for a walk in the California
dusk. My grandfather liked to paint-by-number on black velvet canvases.
He enjoyed the results and didn’t worry about the purity of his technique.
Most important, though, was the fact that my grandparents really liked
me and cared for my happiness.They were able to give me a perspective
on my family life that no one else could. The Thanksgiving song seemed
to me to be a metaphor for the feelings of home, a safe place, and special
love and caring that grandparents gave.
Because Americans are marrying later than they did thirty years ago and
having families at a more advanced age than their parents did, today’s
grandparents tend to be older than their predecessors, but are very likely
to be more healthy and active.They may run in marathons; they may well
still be working outside the home; they are likely to travel for enjoyment;
they probably have more financial resources than their children have and
their grandparents had.A grandchild is more likely to receive as a gift
a t-shirt saying, “My grandma went to Billabong and all I got was this
lousy t-shirt” than a batch of homemade cookies.Grandparents are quite
unlikely to live in the same community as their grandchildren. Visiting
them is more likely to involve an airplane trip than a sleigh ride. When
my second child was born, her grandmother flew in from Texas to help me
with our transition from a one-child to a two-child household.Our next
get-together as an extended family occurred nearly one year later, when
we stopped in Texas on our way to our new home in Phoenix.
It is wonderful for children to have a relationship with their grandparents.
There is a strong, innate urge to form the bonds of grandparent/grandchild.
The most common motivation senior citizens mention for taking computer
classes is the desire to be able to exchange e-mail with their grandchildren.
And left to their own devices, children will seek out stable relationships
with older adults. My children adopted substitute grandparents from our
neighborhood. One child would spend a lot of time visiting a pair of retired
professors who lived down the block. The husband would let her play his
wind chimes and often talked to her about China, his favorite travel destination.His
wife would stage snail races with my child on the sidewalk. Both “grandparents”
liked to have her draw with chalk on the sidewalk in front of their home.They
liked the cheery decorations; she liked to escape to another point of
view, a family situation where she wasn’t expected to be the responsible
older sister.
The other child adopted a couple who were much more politically conservative—he
was a retired admiral and she was a housewife who had worked for many
years before becoming his second wife.Surprisingly, their political views
did not rub off on my child. This couple liked to play board games and
card games with my daughter. Sadly, she also learned a lot about alcoholism
and Alzheimer’s disease from them.I think she liked to go to their home
to get attention without having to compete with her more outgoing older
sister. This couple did not like to have chalk drawings on their sidewalk.
They also did not like the racket our family’s Big Wheel’s noisemaker
made. One time when the Big Wheel was carelessly left in their driveway
overnight, its noisemaker mysteriously disappeared.
Both children first experienced the death of a loved one when one of
their adopted grandparents died. At the memorial service for her snail
race partner, my older child spoke beautifully about cirrus clouds as
steps ascending into Heaven.Her adopted “grandmother” had told my child
about this notion and my child remembered seeing such clouds on the day
of her friend’s death.
With increasing frequency, grandparents are acting as parents to children
whose biological parents are absent or unable to care for them because
of drug dependency or incarceration.In America today, two million children
live in homes headed by grandparents.Also, in Asian-American families
there is a cultural tradition that grandparents may take on the role of
caretaker for their grandchildren, even in families where the grandparents
are highly educated and have significant job responsibilities outside
the home.These are not traditional roles for grandparents, but occur because
of the bonds that are built between the generations.
As a society, we need to let go of our mythic grandparents and redefine
the role of grandparent to reflect more accurately the realities of today’s
America.Grandparenting is a role that may or may not be chosen by those
who meet the definition of grandparent.There is no inevitability about
playing it. Those who enjoy cooking big holiday meals will do so, but
many others will not.It is not likely that our grandchildren will be spending
summers with us—or any long periods of time. And yet, we don’t want to
throw away the many benefits of contact with another generation for the
perspective it can give, the advocacy role a grandparent can have. We
need to be more flexible in assigning the role—blood relatives need not
fill it—and we need to reduce our expectations of those who are not suited
to be grandparents. Today’s grandparent may be as likely to transfer knowledge
of how to be a marathon runner or a successful business leader as hand
down recipes for pumpkin pie. What is truly important is the contact with
a caring person of an older generation to give love and share with the
child a different and unique view of the world.
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