By
Dawn Sinclair
As
all grandparents will testify, there are benefits to having appreciative
grandchildren. By which I don’t mean they say thank you constantly for all you
give them because let’s be honest there is a limit to how many times you can
slip a kid a backhander without him expecting it as a right.
I
know this for a fact because when we were kids, both my husband and I used to
visit our respective grandparents in order to top-up the Saturday morning
cinema funds. (It’s one of those quirky coincidences we’ve discovered in our
backgrounds over the 42 years of our marriage). Had our grandparents not been
forthcoming with the loot, we’d have had to find less comfortable ways to get
in than through the front door of our local flea-pit and indeed both of us
recall doing so on the odd occasion (never at the same time or we’d have met
long before we did – 16 and 18 years respectively).
Grandparents
are handy to have as a back-up to parents, it’s true, but when I said
“appreciative” I was in fact referring more to their appreciation of our
diverse talents than the money in our pockets. For some reason, and I speaking
for myself here and not for everyone else, our own children are not in thrall
of our talents in the same way the grandkids are.
Perhaps
this is due to the fact that our talents have been learned gradually in front
of them, while they were doing more important things like making height-notches
on the door frame or easing wallpaper off the walls surreptitiously right under
our noses. Never mind the fact that they were too busy honing their own skills
and coercing their parents into appreciating the genius behind the excruciating
noises they were making doing it to notice mum’s efforts at becoming the next
Agatha Christie or dad’s frustrated attempts at drumming using empty boxes and
a couple of spare bamboo twigs.
Indeed,
our own offspring were probably mortified by our unending attempts to grow up
quicker than their kids because we were hardly more than kids ourselves when
they joined our household. So holding us in thrall was never part of their
remit and to this day, they are less impressed with what we’ve achieved than
our grandsons are.
Grandparents
are supposed to be go-to guys in times of crisis. “Mum and Dad grounded me so
can you explain to them I only did what they were doing at my age?” or “There
aren’t that many years left for you to have the energy to watch me play soccer
Granny and Granddad – and if you don’t come, I’ll have no one there cheering me
on.” Or “All the other kids are going to France this year but Dad says we’ve
got to cut back and stay with you two for the whole summer – I’ll try not to
make your lives hell but you’ve got to understand folks, it’s not my fault I
got hormones!”
We
want to oblige, of course, but we mustn’t let down all the other grandparents
out there. It’s our sworn duty to maintain the illusion that “We’ve done our
fair share of raising kids and now we’re just going to have all the benefits
without the responsibility”. Ha! What a get-out clause (thanks to all our
predecessors). I am sure there are paragons amongst you who don’t ever use the
expression “We love being grandparents because we can give them back when we
are exhausted” but it is one tradition that I am happy to maintain.
However…
There
are definitely moments which make everything worthwhile – every favour granted,
every slight taken, every joke at our expense easy to swallow and every “Yes”
worth a million “No”s.
For
instance, when a grandchild looks up with rounded eyes and says, “Wow, I didn’t
know you’d even heard of rap Nanna” upon listening to a song I’d written being
performed by a really cool dude 40 years my junior. Like for instance, when a
grandchild tells his best friend in front of you, “This is my Nanna – the one I
told you about who writes books.” Or like for instance, the day your grandson
tells his granddad “I want to to be as good a drummer as you one day Granddad”.
I
am sure all of you have instances you can quote like these but I sincerely hope
every one of you grandparents can say that they recall the day one or more of
their grandchildren said “I love coming to see you because are so cool Nanna
and/or Poppa”.
Certainly
happens to us all the time. Thanks Michael and James!
Poems:
Songs
Novels
The Eternal Question
Children of Hamelin
Both available on Amazon.com (Kindle)
1 comment:
Thanks for these words of wisdom!
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