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Grandparenting is a job

WE all know the stereotypes. Parents work, grandparents “shep nachas.” Parents discipline, grandparents hand out candy. Parents’ lives revolve around their children; grandparents go their merry way. Parents struggle to pay five-figure tuitions; grandparents are heroes if they give three-figure presents. Parents know what they’re doing; grandparents can’t even remember.

Like all stereotypes, there’s probably some truth in all of the above. However, grandparenting, if done right, is also work. Grandparenting, done right, is just as vital as parenting, and a lot more than “shepping nachas.”

A grandparent’s bedtime story is not just an entertaining time with the grandkids, but a way of showing children that they are part of a much larger chain than their immediate family.

A grandparent’s trip is not just a fun thing to do, but a chance to extend the mental universe of the grandchild.

A grandparent’s candy is not just another present, but a transaction most likely to reflect unrestricted love.

A grandparent’s jokes about how much he no longer remembers, or evasions about what is not yet age-appropriate to reveal, convey a sense that there is something big and mysterious out there for a grandchild to discover.

A grandparent’s babysitting, however limited, is a valuable breather for parents to regain some sanity, and for children to step out of the seeming lockbox of their immediate relationships.

A grandparent, in a word, has a job.

Not as full time or all encompassing as a parent’s job, but a serious job nonetheless.

This is quite apart from those family structures in which one or both parents are absent and grandparents assume the parental role. Otherwise, a grandparent should not and, in fact, cannot, play the parental role.

Still, a grandparent has . . . a job.

Something that occupies the mind, that has its own strategizing, that dominates certain discussions, that requires planning, albeit a lot less intense than  parents’ planning.

Yes, a grandparent is vital to the growth of a child. Certain things a child learns, sees, wonders about, questions and objects to in a grandparent do not occur in the parent-child relationship.

The same can be said for aunts and uncles and even other more distant relatives, though their relationships also have their own dynamics.

I GREW up with two grandmothers and no grandfathers. (In fact, I am named after one of them.)

I definitely gained from my grandmothers, each so different. One was German-speaking, stemming two generations earlier from Frankfurt; the other Yiddish-speaking, stemming personally from Brisk in then Lithuania. One was a stickler for order and the other a poetic soul. One, Minnie Harris, could laugh uproariously; the other, Anna Goldberg, was given more to irony. One said exactly what she meant, the other’s silences conveyed a pre-Holocaust world gone forever.

And I definitely lost out from the absence of grandfathers.

I wonder about them to this day. What were they like? How would they have related to me? How much of what I have heard about them would I actually have perceived in them?

And how would my parents have seem in the presence of their fathers?

To be told about one grandfather, Charles Goldberg, that he was “very religious,” or about the other, Harry Harris, that he was “extraordinarily kind,” are descriptions that surely meant a lot to those who knew them, but convey very little to me.

There is no way to make up for the absence of a grandparent.

When I married and acquired a father-in-law, it meant more to me than it might to someone who grew up with one or two grandfathers. My father-in-law, Herman Silberstein, who was not my grandfather, nonetheless was another, senior male figure in my life. A very welcome addition to my universe.

Grandchildren are an inestimable blessing; also, a heavy responsibility. They, too, require their own attention, own expenditure, own mental commitment.

And the gifts that grandparents can give them are likewise inestimable.

P.S. In case you haven’t guessed, we were inundated with grandchildren over Sukkos.

Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News



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IJN Executive Editor | [email protected]


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