Grandchildren

If you had asked me about the importance of Grandchildren when I was 20, I would have laughed at the 2 words being used in the same sentence.

I was thirty before anyone said a word about wanting grandchildren or wishing for a bunch of grandchildren or how they believed that grandchildren might be a very important part of getting old.

I now realize that a lot of my human interaction is based on having grandkids--from their birthday parties to their parents needing help balancing the work/school time schedules, to just plain weird conversations with them or about them.

When I woke up this morning, I realized my own parents have been gone almost 20 years.
Neither of my children were grown when they died, and my oldest granddaughter is now the age my own daughter was when they were both gone.  Their father's mother was 1500 miles away and rarely visited.

I remember the awful sound of my daughter crying at her grandmothers funeral---a terrible moment when I realized that I was not really present for my kids during that time, and that they were losing the 2 people besides their mother that had always been their for them. And yet, I was as lost as that poor tween girl sounded.

I didn't have a firm grasp of the importance of grandparents from my own childhood. My fathers parents and grandparents were long gone when I came onto this earth.  My mother's father died when I was two, and while I have vague recollections, I didn't fully grasp it all.  My maternal grandmother's father was in his nineties when he died, but I was 7 and he had 10 kids and so many grandkids that I'm sure he felt surrounded by grandkids all the time although I probably only saw him a dozen times in my life.  My one grandmother had three kids, but had been the oldest girl of those 10 kids mentioned, and was pretty straightforward about not wanting to spend any more time on child rearing.

That was fine with me, given more than 30 minutes, we usually ended up clashing about everything, which was apparently not how things were supposed to be done. While I saw her a about every other weekend with family visits for my entire childhood she actually babysat me 2 times, at age 2 and at age 3 when my mother was having GB surgery, and giving birth to my sister.  Neither of us enjoyed those to visits very much.

I realize, my two grandkids have no idea who my parents were---they don't know much about them, wouldn't recognize them if they walked into the room, and will never miss them.

My kids sometimes bring up stories, but what they don't get very well is that both of them were retired by the  time the my kids were born, and both retired for health reasons. While my father just became more and more like his own crankiest self, my mother changed so much that who they knew and who I knew were almost unrecognizable as the same person.

My granddaughter and I discuss things, like how her mother is or how her uncle is, and we talk about when they were kids and how their grandparents were and how that affected my kids and how that affected my sister and I, and I think she might see them more clearly than my own children, since they spent so much time with them but only at a certain time in their life.

Then I realize my own grandkids are also getting that very view of my life, as if I sprouted up not just fully grown and looking like an old lady, never a wayward or difficult child, never a silly teenager or argumentative college student.  Never worried about makeup or dates or were my clothes in style.

I don't know.  Maybe that is just the way it is. Maybe it is just the way it is supposed to be
My own grandmother, who by my college years, wrote back and forth with me for a few years till I got to busy to keep up, and who regularly warned me about just about everything I believed and she felt was wrong or dangerous, seemed eternally the same.  Only after her death, and then so many other deaths that somehow I had  I had a 2 car garage filled with other people's memories, furniture and fruit jars, did I get a chance to realize she had been young in hard times, young and idealistic, young before women could vote and before---well, before just about any of the things I took for granted were even possible.

She had been a serious child, a girl that got to learn to wash dishes by 4 and change diapers by 5 and clean and cook and make soap and do laundry when all of those things were much tougher than playing a game on Nintendo (that was how I decided the kids were old enough to do laundry, run the microwave and vacuum cleaners and dishwasher, their game controls were more complicated than the knobs on the appliances).  But they had a hand pump on a well for water, and cooking started with "wring the chicken's neck and pluck the feathers".  The stove was not about knobs but instead involved controlling the wood to air mix for a slow stove versus and hot stove.  And soap making started not with measure the fats and lye---all highly scientific and using a metric scale that measures to the hundredth gram, but with "fill the pot behind the house with ashes, after a few rains, check it to see if the lye is strong enough, then render some lard after we butcher the next cow.

My grandkids would stare at me with raised eyebrows if I told them about that.  They might ask some questions or might just change the subject because grandma had to be joking.

I meet children that currently have up to 8 grandmothers, and many have 6 grandmothers, and 6 grandfathers.  I'm sure that is also just part of the norm, what with steps and halfs and teen births and living longer lives.  These days the hardest part for many grandparents is what to let the grandkids call you--mimi, gigi, pa--pa--, bami, bampi, grannie, gramps, but I kept the old Grandma, not as formal as grandmother, but very old-fashioned.  And, I knew how to spell it.

Enough of this, got to go grab the grandson, we are mapping the backyard today--a little leaf tracing, a little cut and paste.  Then identify all those trees that currently all look the same.