Hello, Grandma?

Glenn links to this interesting post at Dr. Helen's site about Grandparents who don't have time to grandparent, based on this article. He asks if these are the same parents who were too busy to be parents, and Dr. Helen wonders if the lack of relationship between children and the extended family keeps them from understanding close human interactions or makes them believe that love is really only about material things. The answer is: well, DUH.

I can just see these women who don't want to be Grandma. Twenty years ago, these were the self-obsessed, career driven mothers of my friends. Trying to be there for the after-school pick up and the PTA, but not worrying overly much if the kids had to walk home or the PTA brownies came from the grocery store. Too busy with their own lives to consider that the "safe" neighborhood the kids walked home through was still dangerous after dark, that the grocery store brownies told all the other kids that you didn't really care, that you were too busy for your kid.

And Hell Yes, we made fun of those kids.

The 80s was all about the Superwoman. Could Mom work outside the home and still have a clean house and take care of the kids? The consensus was that something had to give. For a lot of these women, it was the precious moments with their kids, the small kindnesses that mean so much, and the closeness that the rest of us shared with our moms. Yet they fooled themselves that because the house was clean and the kids were doing well in school that they could have it all.

Somehow it was never important to be there, to make time. And now that their children are parents, these now grown-up children realize what they missed, and they want that for their own children. So they make time, they skip meetings and make brownies, they ask Grandma and Grandpa to spend time with the kids, and they are still disappointed.

But it's more than that. Being Grandma is being old. Hell, most of our grandmothers were at least in their 70s. For the most part, they weren't active, independently wealthy, and still working in their chosen career. Our grandmas were cooks and knitters and nurturers, with their silver hair and never ending fount of kleenex and hard candies. Today's grandmas are tech-saavy, go to work every morning, and command respect outside the home. If you were a balls-to-the-wall coroporate type, would you want to be called ANYTHING that brings to mind a blue haired woman in a rocker?

And being Grandma is an imposition. After all, it wasn't their choice to have babies, toddlers, and children around again. Their kids did this to them. The author of the article even says this in reference to her grandchildren:

Look, I'd love to nip over and whisper secrets into 1-month-old Maggie's ears, or to dress 2-year-old Ryan in the black leather jacket I bought her recently and take her to look for late blackberries in Golden Gate Park on my bike (with its deluxe new kid seat). But I have a job. I'm a reporter, I have two books to write, a husband who wants to go to France, and I just bought an investment property in Portland, Oregon. I love my grandchildren, but being a grandmother got added to my to-do list.
[emphasis mine]

Added to her to-do list. As if she only is Grandma because she has to be. As if she never expected her own children to grow up and have children of their own. Maybe she just doesn't see her own children as self-actualized individuals with lives and loves of their own. Or maybe she didn't want her children to be tied down the way she was. Another Grandma in the article is quoted as saying (paraphrasing here) that while she loves her grandbabies and wants to be a part of their lives, she's not willing to give up her life to deal with them.

If being a grandma is so damn inconvenient, it's a wonder some of the parents of these grandkids were even born so their moms could be grandmas. Hell, Roe has been the law of the land for more than 30 years.