JANUARY 21, 2024 – Almost everyone I know who is a grandparent shares the same sentiment: grandparenthood is bonus land, where the grandparents get a second chance to correct all the mistakes they made as parents.
I say that facetiously. You’re fooling yourself if you think that in your capacity as a grandparent you’re going to make good on what you screwed up the first time around. Moreover, “bonus land” is a bed of daisies compared to the rough terrain of parenthood. Picking flowers from someone else’s garden isn’t the same project as cultivating wheat on the stony hilly ground of your own farm.
As a stay-at-home mom, my wife was in the trenches of parenthood. When our two sons were infants, toddlers, and young kids, Beth lived very much “in the moment” of their lives, juggling endless concurrent childcare needs. When an infant is screaming and its two-year-old sibling is throwing a tantrum, all while the soup is about to boil over, the parent in charge can’t simply call a personal time-out. However stressful I thought my work was, for years she had the far tougher, more critical role, always living . . . “in the moment” and often on the edge of sanity.
As I recall through a blurry lens my own passage through parenthood, I regret that my interactions with our two sons weren’t more “in the moment”; not to suggest that I wasn’t actively present in their young lives. I attended all or nearly all of their soccer and baseball games; I took them to Suzuki violin lessons and monitored their daily practice—while that form of punishment lasted; I read them bedtime stories, took them for bike rides, towed them on x-c skis, gave them downhill ski lessons, played dad/kid pickup hockey games down at the local rink, and went on a thousand boat rides with them up at the lake. But too much of the time I was preoccupied not with where I was but where I wasn’t.
Outside pressures and anxieties intruded relentlessly. What of quandaries and looming deadlines I had to confront in my work? What about uncertainties regarding my career? What about preparation for upcoming meetings in my volunteer work? How would I find time to finish construction projects I’d started up at the cabin? What of our finances—maintaining what we had, affording more, saving for education—let alone retirement? What about keeping up with friends and extended family members near and far? How would I make time for daily workouts, reading, and writing? Thank goodness I escaped dinner responsibilities: otherwise it would’ve been chicken broth and carrots—milk, if I remembered.
One evening when I felt desperate to fit everything in, I sat with our then infant older son, feeding him a bottle, while I read to him aloud—not Goodnight Moon but an article from the latest issue of The Economist, which I read in the manner of Goodnight Moon. Beth laughed at the comedic scene, but I was dead serious about multi-tasking, trying hard to optimize productivity, always cramming for the future, it seemed, in an uncharted sea of anxiety.
One consequence of growing older is that the shortened future improves one’s view of it. The spectrum of anxieties that loomed over earlier decades is reduced to concerns about chronic health conditions and keeping critical passwords current and accessible to spouse and trustee. Instead of worrying about funding our kids’ educations, over which funding we had little control but total responsibility, we can worry about next November’s election, over which we have neither control nor responsibility beyond the right and duty of one-person, one-vote.
I’ve mellowed considerably with compression of the anxiety-ridden “future.” When our eight-year old granddaughter crosses our threshold, all other demands, diversions, and distractions vanish. Very much “in the moment” are the second grader’s cheerfulness, curiosity, and imagination. She is not yet jaded by the realities that smother dreams and idealism; not yet worried about college, career, or how she’ll navigate through life in a rapidly changing world. She is a bundle of delightful energy, filled with love, humor, and kindness. How long will this disposition last? Not long enough, which is why as a grandparent I refuse to let anything interfere with my embrace of life “in the moment.”
If my highest expectation for our sons was academic achievement, my loftiest aspiration for our grandchildren is their continually cultivated happiness, rooted not in arid superficiality but in meaningful experiences and relationships. I revel in our grandchildren’s two achievements, one proven, one fully predictable, and over which I expect to have no influence: 1. Our granddaughter’s proven artistic and creative proclivity; and 2. Our grandson’s certain bilingual command of language, thanks to his mother’s intentional and exclusive use of French when she speaks to him and the use of English by both his parents the rest of the time.
Late last week said parents and not-quite-six-month-old grandson flew out for a brief visit. On Friday night, our granddaughter joined us for an overnight. At about 3:00 a.m. Saturday morning, we could hear the little one cry from the guest room down the hall. The parents attended to his needs, and in short order, the wee one returned to nod. His cousin had elected to sleep in the tent that I’d set up for her in the dining room (!). Sound asleep among a bundle of pillows and blankets and a menagerie of stuffed animals, she was oblivious to the brief commotion upstairs.
The crying had woken me from a deep sleep. I was fully conscious but felt as though I’d simply transitioned from one happy dream world to another. I pondered the first intersection of our grandchildren’s lives . . . and of their lives with ours. The crying was like music; the song, really, of new beginnings, a proclamation of life’s resilience.
With the resumption of silence, I slipped out of bed, crept down the stairs and tip-toed to the dining room “camp site” to check on Illiana. My pathway was lit by a lamp in the adjoining room. Given the absence of insects, the netting had been turned away from the entrance. I peered inside and saw Illiana’s angelic face poking out from the covers. Her bespectacled professorial stuffed elephant sat nearby on high alert, guarding the domain from intruders. In the steady rise and fall of the blankets atop our granddaughter’s dreaming heart I found assurance that despite my many errors and omissions “the first time around,” fate had given me special dispensation and blessed me a million-fold.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
