Perspective: Grandparenting
Luria, Yaacov
YMCDV IMA PERSPECTIVE GRANDPARENTMG Being a grandparent today is a balancing act on a high wire of complexities and frustrations. When I was a child, I saw my grandparents weekly; now, I'm lucky...
...Back then, everyone shared a standard stereotype of the grandparent, lifted out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and grandparents did their best to oblige, quavering voice, sage advice and all the rest...
...It is in the nature of sons to be iconoclasts...
...I was permitted a visit on Saturday mornings," she recalls...
...Then there will be two more candles...
...The wise Rabbi's perception that our posterity is crucial to our identity is absolutely on target, especially since he uses the term descendents rather than sons or daughters...
...After all, while they live together parents and children are like the crew of a submarine...
...Ironically, Huck has been raised as a vegetarian...
...It is natural, I think, to suspect the credibility of parents who claim 100 percent purity for the love and admiration they bear their children...
...The memory of a day I spent with Huckleberry one June day in West Virginia proves it...
...With all their advantages, they are deprived children...
...And then there won't be Chanukah any more this year...
...Simple logic should convince them: We become parents when we are young, restless and beset with illusions about our importance to the world...
...Of course I do," she admits, "but I couldn't go on being a parenthesis...
...I crowd too much of myself and the kids into too little time...
...were I boasting so shamelessly about my children, I would not fault my readers for yawning...
...And to give the distaff side recognition, I must mention how proud I am of my granddaughter, Kwala May...
...Suddenly, a long, grassy incline leading down to the town playground stirred a cob-webbed urge in me that I couldn't resist...
...Grandsons, perhaps because it is their turn to rebel, gather the shards their fathers have swept away and restore them again to wholeness...
...I am relying on my grandchildren to bring that tikun (repair) to my Jewishness...
...now, I'm lucky if I see my own grandchildren, who are growing up wild and wonderful in rural West Virginia, as often as four times a year—and then only for two or three days on each occasion...
...I offer as evidence the case of an attractive woman in her mid-sixties whtom I shall call Clara...
...They may insist that their children run the gamut from orthodontia to primal screams, but they ignore the greatest therapy of them all—frequent doses of a doting grandparent...
...Well, I began to wonder: If my daughter thought enough of what I could give her kids, wouldn't she have fed me into her computer...
...Any time they want to come down, they know where I live...
...Now, however, we grandparents are forced to define the role from scratch...
...His fiction and poetry have appeared in the New Yorker and Harper's...
...I have met parents like Clara's daughter who believe that grandparents, like bitters in mixed drinks, are good only in dashes...
...I ask him, 'How many fingers do you have, Joshie?' Remember, he can't count yet...
...Their enthusiasm seems streaked with wish fulfillment and imposture...
...If I'm sad for Clara, I'm much sadder for her grandchildren...
...My retirement has given me time for reflection...
...Not at all—he was bragging about his grandson, the post-toddler...
...It wouldn't be tasty, but you could do it...
...A man I know has a son who is a brilliant mathematician...
...There are bound to be collisions in narrow corridors, with much tangling of arms and legs...
...But I have a picture of her as a day old infant in which she is sticking her tongue out in a Bronx cheer...
...I'm ready to leave a wide time slot open for them...
...Indeed, Clara has not lopped herself off from her Connecticut branch...
...Such precocity is surely a harbinger of genius...
...As a parent, I made demands, conscious or otherwise...
...The role was well established, as was the extended family in which it was a part...
...It's so concentrated and intense...
...And another voice, equally insistent, contradicts: "What kind of fulfillment do you have in mind apart from your grandchildren...
...A mud puddle looked like the creek near his house, so he called it a "creekie...
...This year, full of curiosity at four years of age, he looked at the ocean for the first time and asked, "Are there any frogs in this pond...
...Anger and resentment can linger for years afterwards...
...And don't dawdle, or you'll be late for tennis clinic' As if I couldn't teach them at least as much as some smart alec tennis pro...
...When I spoke to Huck late on Friday afternoon of Chanukah week this year, these are the words that came tumbling over the telephone receiver: "Hey Grandpa, tonight we're lighting the sixth candle...
...I have simmered down and slowed down...
...My grandchildren take me back decades, and I grow young again with them...
...Besides being cultured, well read, and witty, Clara Yaacov Luria is a frequent contributor to Moment...
...I won't be able to run a 100-yard dash with my grandchildren, but I hope to walk many pleasant miles with them...
...What could be more important, what could be more satisfying...
...Her days are full of activity but empty of family...
...Today Clara is an "adult at play" in the retirement community in Florida where I have spent my last few winters...
...But next year...
...Grandfather' is only one of the things you are, and it's not the most important...
...Raising my children was an endurance contest...
...Afterwards there's a letdown, physically and emotionally...
...Yet the last time I saw him, did he mention his son's just-published paper on Boolean algebra...
...My grandson, Huckleberry, who had just turned three at the time, was using words as though they were parts of a tinkertoy...
...During this same visit I overheard him telling a little girl, "Oh, yes, you can eat people...
...Smiling wryly she says, "My daughter would tell them, 'Come kiss Grandma...
...On Sunday their father wanted them to himself since he was so busy the rest of the week...
...On weekdays her daughter's home was out-of-bounds to Clara...
...He grabbed my lapels and insisted, "Let me tell you what happened at Joshua's second birthday party...
...And then we were sprawled at the bottom, both of us dizzy and giggling together...
...Surely, now that I am free of the seething cauldron of ambition and vain hopes, I can be a far better influence on children than I was in my younger days as a parent...
...Will they ever find out what they missed by not being close to her during their growing years...
...Complexity, frustration...
...the children were not to be distracted from their homework, piano practice, and household chores...
...The pressure cooker togetherness sometimes explodes in tactless words...
...Once a year she goes north for a visit which is very exciting— while it's in progress...
...So he says, 'The same as you, grandpa.' Did you ever hear anything as smart—as clever?' That gave me just the opening I wanted to do some bragging of my own...
...As I ponder my own grand-parental behavior, one voice whispers to me, "Pursue your own interests—you're still a person in your own right...
...plays tennis as if she had cancelled her last forty birthdays...
...Does she miss children and grandchildren...
...It takes some time before I'm back to myself...
...Precisely because the relations between grandparents and grandchildren are not that intimate, they are likely to be more open, less ambivalent, less hedged with reservations...
...His own term for his toy guitar was "good old tire...
...We picked wild strawberries, hunted for the seed heads of dandelions, and chased young cottontails into the woods together...
...So Huck and I rolled down the hill as free as thistledown, a topsy-turvy world of sky and trees whirling around us...
...But it is the role itself, and not the frequency of contact, that has changed the most...
...as a grandfather, I am open to ecstacy...
...Until two years ago, she lived in a Connecticut suburb close to her daughter and grandchildren...
...Yes, I was afraid people would think me daft and, yes, I feared cracking my seasoned bones on a hidden rock, but I took a chance...
...Even in West Virginia...
...Only because I am speaking as a grandparent do I expect my readers to be running with me still...
...It's like an encounter marathon," she complains...
...The distinguished Israeli Talmudist Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz once characterized a Jew as "a man whose descendents are going to follow in his footsteps and remain Jewish...
...For too long they are crowded into too close quarters...
...Since she doesn't talk yet, I can't report any of her witty sayings...
...watching my grandchildren grow is a delight...
...But even on Saturdays Clara's grandchildren were tightly programmed...
Vol. 4 • July 1979 • No. 7
