Generational Drift

We are lucky to have our oldest granddaughter (18) spending a month with us before she makes her way off to UC Berkeley. It’s oddly difficult being a grandparent. Well, it’s easy when the grandchildren are little because mostly you hold them and then you play with them. Then as they get a little older, you still play with them, but the games are more complex, and you marvel—to put it kindly--at the way their parents are raising them. A little later, you are still restraining yourself from criticizing the parents, but you are beginning to think about starting to criticize the grandchildren (these are the early teenage years). But the thing about it is, I have very little idea of what the grandparent role is actually supposed to be about. I don’t know whether I’ve been badly cast or this is just one more of those things (like being a parent) that you just have to invent as you go along. And good luck!

I had only one set of grandparents and mostly that involved my grandmother cooking for me and my grandfather frightening me because he tended to yell. Not so much at me, but it always seemed possible that I might be next. I saw them occasionally when I was in my 20’s and after my grandmother had a stroke and my grandfather took over housekeeping, our conversations were fairly limited. With my grandmother, who had lost most of her ability to get around, there was TV to talk about; with my grandfather, it was more like talking about grocery shopping and exchanging recipes, since each of us was fairly new to housekeeping.

When a grandchild comes to spend a month with us, she gets the full range of our isolation of our mobility: the two weeks on the Sunshine Coast and then the two+weeks in Point Roberts, the ferry rides, the border crossing, the whole 9 yards, our entire peculiar set of arrangements. Fortunately, kids come equipped with computers nowadays and that engages quite a bit of their time. I mostly read and sew and garden and cross international borders, and so I offer those activities if they have any appeal. And all three of us cook for one another. But Ed comes into his own in this situation. For the past week, the granddaughter has been rock climbing and kayaking on alternate days. And as preparation, she climbs the side of our two-story log house.

This is how the culture has changed, maybe. Or maybe, it’s just chance variation. But I simply cannot imagine any of the grandparent people I ever knew 54 years ago (not my grandparents or the grandparents of friends) doing these things with their 18 year-old grandchildren. And perhaps that’s why we have to invent what the grandparent role is each generation. But, neither can I imagine any of the 18-year-olds that I knew or the one that I was 54 years ago even thinking of spending a month of summer with their grandparents. So, perhaps the grandchildren are having to invent their role as well. Many thanks to this granddaughter for inventing a role that gives us so very much pleasure.