This is the story of how for one half hour I, a card-carrying grandmother, was asked for her advice.
Grandparents.com arranged for me to be interviewed by Marlo Thomas on her AOL website. Yes, That Girl herself. The weekly online broadcast is called Mondays with Marlo, and has had guests such as Martha Stewart, Suze Orman, Cindy Crawford, Ina Garten, and, now, me. I reported to an AOL studio in Beverly Hills, where I was hooked up to a microphone and a laptop. Marlo was in New York. We would do our chat via Skype, which is fitting because it's the same way so many long-distance grandparents talk to their grandchildren.
On the trip down, I nervously made notes: What could I work into my chat? Could I include that someone compared having a child to marriage, and having a grandchild to having a love affair?
Yes, I wrote a book about being a grandmother, but that was about my own experience. If there's anything a grandmother is not, it's an expert. To me, it's like trying to tend the garden next door without intruding — you have to have really long arms to do that, like Mr. Fantastic. So how did it go? See for yourself. Here's an excerpt:
And here are three questions submitted by Marlo audience members that I didn't have time to answer but which deserve responses:
How should grandparents talk to grandchildren about death?
My friend Jane says you ideally start with something small, like a family pet, whose demise, and perhaps backyard funeral, can be turned into a teachable moment. Out goes Scotty the hamster in a shoebox, blanketed with a Kleenex, and there are you, sharing your views on this passage. Of course, if all your family pets are well, and you don't want to nudge one along just for the sake of this lesson, this won't work. I remember when my nine-year-old son's turtle disappeared from the wading pool outside. A trail of wet raccoon-like prints led up the walk, but I gazed into the empty pool and said, "Look, Patrick. He got his wings."
Seriously, of all people, little kids seem the ones who can best accept death as a natural event. My granddaughters' great-grandmother, my mother, died three years ago, and even then they tended to say, matter-of-factly, "Nana's dead." My daughter brought them to my mother's house the morning she died after two years in home hospice, and they were there for the crying and the crazy dancing. (When we get together we turn the music up, no matter the occasion. My mother is dancing in a video on her 80th birthday, two months earlier, saying, "I made it!") The grandkids miss Nana, but they are not mystified. Nana was going to die for a long time, and then she did.
I have my granddaughter overnights most weekends, because my daughter works third shift at her second job. My granddaughter told me that she has had sex and that everyone does and I am just too old to see that it's no big deal. I told my daughter about this, and my daughter says it's no big deal, that she was doing it at 14, too. I feel like I failed my daughter in so many ways, and I want to make a difference with my granddaughter. How can I help when I only have quality time with her two days a week?
Boy, I can relate to this. I mean, I feel as if I blew it with my daughter, my first child, in many ways. I praised her too much. Somewhere I had read that kids grow up to be the person they were born to be, and your job was to keep them from playing in traffic in the meantime. I'm trying to be different with the granddaughters, five-year-old Maggie and eight-year-old Ryan. I don't tell Maggie how pretty she is (she is very pretty) and I ask others not to. I tell her how good she is at remembering facts and that she should be a scientist. When she brags that she can play the violin, I say, "I notice you hold it exactly the way the teacher showed you, and that you have already learned some things about playing it." If, when they are 14, they casually mention that they are having sex, I hope I will ask a lot of questions, maybe some of them designed to show the sex at 14 is usually terrible sex, perhaps taken up for reasons that don't look as good under close examination. We can't stop it, but we can say, "How did you feel about it afterward?"
Our child has no living grandparents — how can we make up for this?
There are grandparents out there — find them! My husband Bill and I are close friends with another couple, Monique and Cesar, who have no extended family, except for one aunt. Since their two kids were born, we have been Auntie Dee and Uncle Bee (19-month-old Julian named us), and though we're called aunt and uncle, we act in every way as grandparents. We are there for every school play, every birthday, every Christmas morning. I take them for special days and events, like overnight skiing or just hanging out for the weekend. I buy them clothes, as I do for my grandchildren, and their pictures hang in every room of our house. Their mother has in every way nurtured this relationship as being precious to her children and therefore precious to her, and that has brought us through some fights that might have ended another relationship. You want to find someone, too, someone who loves your child, and who knows not to take on such a commitment lightly. You don't implicitly promise a child that you will be in his life forever, by calling yourself his aunt or his grandmother, and then disappear. Children give their hearts away, and those must be handled as the most precious things in your possession.
Adair Lara
is the author of The Granny Diaries (Chronicle Books, 2007). An author, writing teacher, and a former San Francisco Chronicle columnist, she and her husband live in San Francisco, three blocks from the grandchildren.
Home
