There are many points of difference between children and their

grandparents – at least as many as between children and their

parents. Ideally, the roles for the several characters in this human

drama should be specific and different. As grandparents, we are no

longer charged with the responsibility of bringing children up. Even

when they are temporarily left with us, we are not stand-ins, parent

substitutes. It’s a mistake to use such a time to start teaching them

what we feel their parents have not. We corrupt our role and our

relationship with them by becoming authoritative, demanding and

punitive. It’s good for the children to have a relationship free of

authority somewhere along the line while growing up in a world

governed by adults. The experience is not unlike being served a

filleted fish: you get a better chance to learn to like fish, uncluttered

by its bones. Children obviously welcome this treatment – as they

would a visit from Santa Claus. It’s grandparents who all to

frequently don’t know how to stop being parents.

Allan Fromme, 60+, Planning It, Living It,

Loving It, New York:Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

1984, p103

~~~

No matter how many grandchildren we have, our love encompasses

them all, as if it were from a bottomless pit.

Every time a grandchild is born, there is a wonderful sense of

achievement, of having started something that is flowing through to

future generations. The tiny baby is bonded to us, and one of the

greatest pleasures in life is watching them grow.

Grandparents are usually the first ones recognized by the baby other

than its own parents and siblings. Even those grandparents who for

various reasons do not want to achieve that status at that stage of

their lives are transformed into devoted slaves by that first smile.

Leila Freidman, Why Can’t I Sleep At Nana’s

Anymore?, South Melbourne:Matchbooks,

Magistra Publishing Co., 1990, p.17

~~~

Becoming a grandparent for the first time is a big emotional

experience, usually first met in middle age. But if we had more than

one child and they married at different times, the appearance of

new grandchildren and, eventually, great-grandchildren is an

experience covering many years. Welcoming in a new generation is,

take it from me, an almost dizzying experience. As I walked out of

the hospital that morning of the first grandchild, I knew at last what

the word ‘giddy’ means. My feet seemed not quite to touch the

ground!

We don’t need to become self-conscious or hide our feelings just

because the not-yet-old regard them as comic. Grandmother jokes

are almost as ubiquitous as Scotchman or psychiatrist jokes.

Grandfathers do not figure so largely in folk humor, but they are

equally and sometimes more absurd. Almost all that can be said for

us is that most of us know that we are absurd and couldn’t care less.

Avis D. Carlson, In The Fullness Of Time,

Chicago:Henry Regnery Co., 1977, p.95

~~~

In view of all the millions of pages that have celebrated young love

and married love and illicit love and parental love, it really seems

strange that so little has been said about grandparental love…

Some of its quality is undoubtedly conveyed by the old cliche, ‘all

the pleasure and none of the responsibility.’ Although Margaret

Mead has taken us severely to task for that irresponsibility, it is for

most of us at least part fact. Being a parent involves a staggering

amount of work. The days are crammed, and in the early months no

night yields unbroken sleep. ..The typical grandparent is a little

smug in his reflection that he has served his turn at all the messy

chores, back-breaking lifting, unremitting watchfulness, broken

sleep, noise and confusion. All such matters are for parents, he

thinks…

It is my experience, however, that the bromide about pleasure and

nonresponsibility only touches the surface of the experience. I was

prepared to enjoy my spectator status, for everybody talks about

that. But nobody told me how my eyes would swim when I first saw

the baby at her mother’s breast and noticed the expression on my

child’s face had become maternal. Nobody told me how excited I

would be at each new small accomplishment or what swelling

delight I would feel when a toothless grin announced that I was

recognized. Nor was I prepared for the fun it would be to converse

with budding minds that seemed to enjoy my stories of ‘how it

was’. I knew from my own childhood that listening to tales of a

parent’s childhood can be a means of widening a young child’s

sense of reality. That the godlike, Benign-Giant figure he knows as

Daddy or Mommy was once small and defenseless as he feels

himself to be, once had adventures like his own, once made

mistakes and got into trouble just as he does – all this is like a

reassuring fairy tale. I knew it to be a service the child needs, but

nobody had given me the faintest idea of what fun it would be to

supply the service…

Such emotions are pure joy, adulterated by nothing. They are a

wonderful new dividend clipped from the long investment of work

and love that went into one of the children’s parents. Here are new

human beings starting on their long journey . A new generation is

on its way and I am so incredibly lucky as to be near enough to

observe it. Time, for me, is merging into eternity . Bit I am a part of

it, and why should I mind?

Avis D. Carlson, In The Fullness Of Time,

Chicago:Henry Regnery Co., 1977, pp.96-98