Grandparenting in the Twenty First Century

The husband and I don’t have grandchildren, not a single one, in fact none of our children seem to fully understand how to procreate.  The other day somebody gently suggested that it might have something to do with all the years of home schooling and added that you learn more than how to be a good loser and part of a team at primary school but I don’t subscribe to that idea.

The fact remains that ALL of my friends have grandchildren.  I’m not talking about a trifling one or two here because several people I know have five or six, even seven of them.   Grandmothers are no longer apple cheeked white haired old dears baking muffins.  They are today much more inclined to sport trendy hairdos and have regular injections of botox.   Some have jobs – and one or two run businesses.   Not full time jobs though because today’s grandchild requires a greater investment of time and energy than yesteryear’s.   

In fact if I could be re-assured that I wouldn’t be rendered totally friendless, I would almost say that there is a whole generation of over sixties who are actually being exploited.  Yes, exploited!

A decidedly different set of grandparent rules seem to apply than those of past years and some are difficult to navigate.

For one thing there are new names to be chosen because being known as Granny and Grandpa or Nanny and Grand-dad  no longer appears to be appropriate.    The more avant-garde are Josie and Tom or Mary and Bill.   More often they are Momma and Poppa or Ma and Pa, possibly in the vain hope that those within earshot in parks and cafes will mistake them for the child’s parents.   One couple I came across recently have chosen to call themselves Oma and Opa, and my neighbour along the road assures me that the three year old twins themselves chose Nonna and Nonno.   There doesn’t appear to be a solitary Dutch or Italian gene in either of these families at first glance but of course you can never be absolutely sure.

However, they have a perfect right to decide what they want to be known as of course and more especially since many of these older couples spend far more time caring for the grandchildren than they did for the children’s parents.  I know for a fact that Nonna and Nonno employed a full time Nanny in the early eighties.

Because of the inordinate amount of time that is taken up with grand-parenting, from time to time theatre and dinner dates have to be cancelled at the last moment.   There are also occasions when they  are forced to bring the children along on lunch dates or shopping expeditions, often dressed in new outfits flown in from Marks & Spencers or in one case Harrods, and looking very endearing, like fashion statements from the pages of Hello Magazine.  One local grandfather frequently takes little Jemima-Jane with him to tennis games with his friends.   He says they find her absolutely adorable.

Social liability aside, a grandchild can be an expensive luxury, what with the mounting cost of grandma hosted birthday parties, flights to London to visit Santa in Selfridges Grotto,  birthday laptops and school fees.  More prosaically as mothers themselves are generally working full time in corporate law or accountancy, the subsequent calls upon the time of the older generation for child care grow daily more demanding.   It could almost be called `Elder Abuse’.

And the abused elders are only too aware of the fact that they are being maltreated – you can tell by the way their eyes harden and glitter whenever a well-meaning friend strays anywhere near the topic of how exhausting it must be spending three weekends in a row taking half a dozen assorted under eights to swimming galas.   They usually hasten to assure you that they love every minute of it and it keeps them young.   Occasionally they are more honest.

`My choice,’ snapped one tired and drained looking seventy year old, more aggressively than I thought was really necessary.

`D’you have a problem with it?’ another who had recently gone back to smoking, demanded.

See what I mean about losing friends?

Despite all this, I cannot help thinking that it would be rather nice to have just one under five year old on hand for Christmas because there’s something very engaging about a tousle headed small person in pink pajamas helping to decorate a real pine tree.

If only it was possible to hire one for a day or two.

Quite Without Informed Consent!

I watched a programme on the History Channel the other evening featuring newly discovered film of Holocaust victims.  We have, of course, mostly seen it, or its like,  before if we watch that particular channel and so feelings are blunted.  It’s not quite as easy to be disturbed by the horrifying content as it once was.

Nevertheless, I was taken aback by the tale of a young woman, forced to strip naked at Babi Yar and kneel in a ravine with hundreds of others waiting to be shot in the head.    She was one of the lucky survivors and somehow or other when hours had passed, disentangled herself from the bodies about her, climbed out of the gargantuan grave and after the war began to live her life once more – normally, it appears.

I could not help wondering how she did so and what nightmares lay in wait for her. How did she cope with the infiltrating memories of her unspeakable ordeal and suffering?  Then I began to wonder what makes some people more than capable of handling indescribable trauma.  What gives them the strength to adapt and consider themselves lucky to be living – whilst others seek counseling because their parents did not pay them enough attention for their liking, perhaps because a career structure claimed the larger part of their focus and the quality time just didn’t cut the mustard.   One middle aged man noted recently, with a great deal of bitterness and anger,  that during his childhood and adolescence his mother had been far too smothering to be ideal whilst his father was largely absent on account of work commitments.  To add insult to injury, as helpless infants he and his siblings had been immunized against killer diseases totally without their consent!

It was difficult to know how to respond.

Oh Happiest of Valleys

I am tempted to say that `Happy Valley’ is quite the best thing I have watched on television for many a long evening -  (mustn’t count Coronation Street because that’s simply an addiction no matter how good the acting is and whichever way you look at it).

Sarah Lancashire is superb in the role of the small town police officer Catherine Cawood.  None of the characters are one dimensional and their lives meld in a terrifying way as the plot evolves and each character begins to take the consequences of poor decision making. The appalling story fascinates as it moves uncompromisingly to its inevitable conclusion, almost reminiscent of  a tragedy that William Shakespeare himself might have been proud of.

Dose Daily With Dyslexia

The early morning caller sounded relieved because she had a diagnosis.   Her child has dyslexia – and ADHD – or maybe even Aspergers Syndrome.    I could hear her breathe several huge sighs of relief.  She said that at least now she understood why learning was so difficult for him.

I was pleased for her too because having been through much the same quagmire myself with one of my own sons I felt in a position to advise. 

I chattered happily on about the many children who went on to achieve significant successes in life but had first to struggle with major learning difficulties.

Her boy couldn't cope with mathematics - a subject that proved to be beyond many of them, including Schubert, Gogol, Wagner, Conan Doyle, Ghandi, Alfred Adler, Picasso, Epstein and Jung. But mathematics is not the basis of every satisfactory career I assured her. 

And never mind that her son was doing poorly in his weekly German class. Wellington, Thomas Carlyle, Darwin, Nehru and Churchill had all found languages all but impossible and it hadn't held them back had it?

As for reading,  spelling and grammar, so many students had suffered sleepless nights on their account – George Stephenson, Henry Ford, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Napoleon.  They all did all right in the end didn’t they?

And what of those who were very slow to speak or had major speech impediments – Alessandro Volta, Einstein, Somerset Maugham, Emile Zola, Michael Faraday for example?  They overcame their difficulties too as did the clumsy kids at the back of the class – Napoleon, Beethoven, Oscar Wilde, G.K. Chesterton, Leonardo, Branwell Bronte and Baden-Powell.

My caller was growing more relaxed by the minute because her boy was no longer a complete oddity.  He was in excellent company.

Finally she asked how my own son had fared in the end, the boy with all the difficulties, the quagmire one.  I told her he had become a violinist. She was impressed and said she had often thought about signing her lad up for violin lessons.

When I put the phone down, I began to wonder exactly how it was he had managed mastery over the violin.  He had certainly been a very clumsy child, totally unable to manage a knife and fork, unable to write more than his name with any legibility.  And yet, somehow or other he had indeed learned to play the instrument to a significantly high standard, performing virtuoso pieces seemingly with considerable ease.   It didn’t make sense, even after all the intervening years,  even to me.

Be a More Successful Blogger

My blogger friend Jessica, domiciled in the depths of Southern Ireland, pointed out to me that this  blog was not getting enough comments.

`You’re obviously not writing stuff that people want to read,’ she observed kindly and went on to tell me that her own gets several comments daily.    I said that was possibly because she blogs about knitting and lots of people in the British Isles and indeed many more in North America, are fanatical knitters.

`I think that’s where you are going wrong,’ she pronounced, `You don’t have a focus – if you want to be a successful blogger you have to cultivate a niche.’

I said that this particular platform did not make it particularly easy to work out how to make comments in the first place.  How many people  immediately realise that a comment is made via `No Comments'.

She ignored me and repeated that I needed a niche.

`A niche,’ I echoed and she said, `Yes, a niche.  The trouble with you is that you just seem to spew out what’s on your mind at the time – you’re all over the place.’

Oh yes, she's always had a lovely turn of phrase.

It’s quite hard to be affronted via Skype, especially when the reception is not at its best so I remained silent until she chose to speak again.

`Concentrate on just one area,’ she suggested helpfully, `Do New Zealanders crochet for example?’

I said yes they did, as well as knit, and what was more I was competent in both crafts myself. 

I told her that just before I decided I had to go because I could hear someone downstairs trying to deliver a book from Amazon.  Then I stared at the laptop for a while. 

I was still staring when the husband appeared to tell me he was going into town to get a haircut and that his tablet needed re-charging; he thought there might be something wrong with the battery.

`By the way, I didn’t think much of your post on Bill Cosby,’ he said, shrugging on his jacket, `I couldn’t work out what your point was’.

As he went down the stairs he added, `Maybe your blog needs more of a focus.' 

 I visualized with relish penetrating the space between his bony shoulders with a kitchen knife.