We grandparents all hope we learned something from wrecking our own kids, and that we'll do better with our grandkids.
We forget that it's the same old us.
Okay, maybe my kids aren't wrecked, but I gave it the old college try. I yielded to my daughter Morgan's passionate argument that she should stay home from school to finish her tadpole report. I found it easier to sweep the front walk myself than spend three times as long nagging her brother Patrick to do it. I was too sleepy to wait up to confront them when they came home at 3 am. I never took them to a soup kitchen. I let five-year-old Morgan stumble into the living room and see me, too soon after the divorce, in the arms of a man she thought had come to install a window shade.
I could keep typing this list forever. The point is, now I have two grandchildren and I am the same old easygoing, lazy parent I always was. The grandkids don't have chores at my house. Ryan, eight, makes me stay with her in the bathroom to provide company while she poops. I draw pictures with Maggie instead of taking her to the library to work on her reading. I am for them, as I was for their mother and uncle, a combination ATM machine, clothes pole, and trash bucket. Maggie will stuff her Popsicle wrapper into my pocket even if she's standing next to a garbage can.
A Day at the Pool
I took the girls to a public pool not long ago, on one of those late Indian summer afternoons we have in San Francisco. There was another woman there with her own grandchildren – five of them, actually. As we talked, a grandkid approached her from time to time.
"Grandma, where's my towel?" a girl of about four said, clutching her arms around her waist, dripping wet.
"I haven't the vaguest idea," her grandmother said, and turned back to our conversation.
Looking at the little girl's goosebumped arms, I couldn't help myself: "Oh, Sweetie," I called. "They're probably over by your chair where you put them when you first came in." The girl scurried off.
"She'll find it," my new friend said calmly. Her name was Terry.
A little boy with green goggles climbed out of the water. "Grandma, I want a sandwich!"
"Well, why are you asking me?" she asked him. "You know where the lunch is. Go get one!" She waved toward a table where a blue cooler sat among a jumble of lotions and books.
The boy stood his ground, looking confused. "But I'm not supposed to eat here." (A sign said
No Eating by the Pool).
"Go on over to the grass. You can figure it out." He trundled off, too.
Is It Really That Simple?
My eight-year-old granddaughter Ryan joined us. She'd worried all day about the following weekend, when she was invited to two different birthday parties at the same time. "Now I have to choose between Ellie's party and Rose's party," she lamented to us both. I opened my mouth to offer suggestions for solving the problem, but Terry spoke first. "Yeah, it's tough. Life is full of choices, isn't it?"
"It is tough," Ryan agreed. "I'll have to think about this a lot." She jumped back in the water.
Terry went over to the diving area to take some pictures of her grandkids waving at her while they did silly jumps and dives. I remained in place, marveling at how she had managed to teach kids about personal responsibility in a single afternoon.
Then Maggie came squishing up, doing that little dance they do. "Bobbie, will you take me to the bathroom?"
She's six. The restroom was right there. She could have gone by herself.
But of course I took her.
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