IF MOM AND DAD SAY NO, ASK GRANDMA!

UUCL - March 2, 2003

Brenda J. Davis

My name is Brenda, and I am a doting grandmother! Now, if this were a real 12-step program you would respond - “hi Brenda.”

I am Callista’s grandmother, but in our family she calls me Oma and she calls Dan - my husband - Opa. Oma and Opa are German for grandma and grandpa and since I have some German heritage and we also lived in Germany for four years when our daughter Amanda (Callista’s mommy) was between the ages of 6-10 - we thought it was appropriate. The names are also different enough to help Callista differentiate between the many grandparents in the family.

Grand parenting from my perspective as a first time grandmother, soon to be second time grandmother (T minus 11 weeks and counting!), is one of absolute wonder and joy. I had heard people say, “grand parenting is way better than being a parent,” and I never really understood why they would say that. But it is absolutely true. Grand parenting is so much more enjoyable than parenting. The reason for this (unscientifically you understand) I believe is because you get the best of the relationship.

I thoroughly enjoy being a mother and enjoyed watching my daughter grow up. I can still remember listening to her little voice and thinking that I’d never heard anything so beautiful in my life. But now that I have a grandchild, I look back and worry that maybe I didn’t stop and smell the roses enough with Amanda when she was little. I think it’s easy to figure out why I, and perhaps other, parents feel this way - the everyday craziness of life takes over like balancing work and home, finding time to just breathe deeply and relax together, fevers and chicken pox, money pressures, in my case - being a young mother, finding time to sit down and eat a meal together without juggling ten other things at the same time. But this is what it’s like to be a parent and this is why grand-parenting is so much easier and I think (and others might agree) WAY MORE FUN!!!

I really do have a need for a 12-step program - I have a hard time passing a Carter’s or Osh Kosh B’Gosh, or (hmm) a Little Me without going in to see if there is something that would look just precious on Callista. I definitely need therapy for this shopping habit. And what about Amanda - well, after you have grandchildren - your children officially become chopped liver. I have to remind myself to think of nice things to do for Amanda too every now and then. I remember that happening after I had Amanda - I would walk into my mother’s house and she’d barely acknowledge me and run over to Amanda and grab her and kiss her. In fact, I noticed this in both my mother and my father, but I now do the exact same thing with Callista. I can’t help it - I seriously cannot help myself. Dan and I were babysitting her last weekend and while she playing with some toys, she suddenly said, “Oh my goursh!” - I almost cried it was so cute - I could have kissed the lips right off of her!

As a grandmother I get to dip into Callista’s life and show her all the love and affection and attention I have for her in a finite amount of time. And that’s all I have to do - it is all that is required of me as a grandparent. It’s a beautiful deal. But parenting is infinite - not finite. Even when I spend longer amounts of time with her when I baby-sit, I don’t have the same worries as a parent because I know my very capable daughter and son-in-law will be home and I’ll go home - no dirty diapers, no waking up at night, no temper tantrums - you get the picture. That said, I readily admit that I believe there is a reason women cannot bear children after a certain age - chasing after a two-year-old is definitely a young woman’s sport!

And for Callista, Oma translates to, “magnificent one who loves me no matter what, and brings presents in her bag, and thinks I’m a genius because I can use a fork to eat my green beans!”

Being a grandparent has thrown me back into a world I hadn’t experienced for a while - the world of baby paraphernalia. I’ve learned a lot about new baby “technology.” Dan and I learned quickly that we had a lot to learn. For example - we never had these cool ear thermometers when Amanda was a baby. We had to take temperatures the old fashioned way - if ya know what I mean. And there are special “Boppy” pillows now to support the child while the mother is breast feeding - you can‘t just use a bed pillow like we did; And forget winding a baby swing (which I thought was pretty cool when Amanda was little) they are now powered - you just stick the baby in the swing, press a button and they swing until you hit stop; and don’t even think about carrying a baby around in your arms anymore - you need a “snuggly” thingy or one of those scarves (like Andrea has).

Being a grandparent also reminded me of how special my grandparents were to me. My grandparents had a way of making us feel like we were the center of their universe. There were a lot of girls in our family and we used to have family gatherings a lot at my grandparents place in the country in NH. I remember my grandfather rounding up all the granddaughters and having a “beauty” contest. Although this now runs counter to my feminist sensibilities, we loved it! He would walk around and say, “Brenda has beautiful eyes, and Lorraine has beautiful hair, and etc, etc, then he would crown each of us a winner and give us a nickel or a dime - which we immediately took to the country store to buy penny candy. And my grandmother always had a hand-made outfit for my doll or a new doll with a hand made outfit with lace and even a little pearl necklace as a gift for Christmas or a birthday. She even gave me a wedding doll with a beautiful hand-made lace gown when I got married.

And - remember when your grandparents would say things like, “When I went to school we had to walk five miles in the snow every day (and we’d say to ourselves - even in the summer grandpa?), or my grandfather’s favorite - “we didn’t have a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of!” Well, Dan and I decided one night to make a list of all the things we can tell our grandchildren about the differences between life when we were kids and their lives today:

Ÿ We had to get off the couch to change channels on the TV- we didn’t have a remote control - and we only had 3 channels - ABC, NBC, CBS

Ÿ Candy bars cost a nickel

Ÿ We had penny candy

Ÿ A nickel or ten cents would buy a bottle of soda and you got a penny or two back if you returned the bottle - yeah, we recycled back then and we got paid for it!

Ÿ We had record players and they played 45’s, 33’s (called LP’s for Long Playing) and even some of our parents’ 78’s.

Ÿ Every pump was a full service pump at the gas stations and we didn’t pay extra - in fact, you couldn’t even pump your own gas if you wanted to!

Ÿ The gas station also didn’t have doughnuts, sandwiches, toiletries, beer, and other grocery store items - they had gas, oil and a bay or two to service your car

Ÿ You had to actually DIAL a telephone AND if you weren’t home to catch someone’s call they just had to call you back because there were no answering machines

Ÿ And we didn’t have phones that you could take with you everywhere - just imagine life without cell phones (although - I really can’t imagine life now without cell phones - even my 76-year old father has a cell phone)

Ÿ Cup holders in cars - we didn’t even have seatbelts in the first car I have a memory of in my family - never mind cup holders!

Ÿ Calculators, computers and walkman did not exist

Ÿ Neither did CD’s, we had eight-track tape players and they were pretty far out man

Ÿ Forget DVD’s and video tapes - we had drive-in theaters and great movies like Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and It’s a Wonderful Life replaying on our TV sets once a year.

Ÿ And finally - I typed my first college paper on a typewriter and I was darned happy it was electric - spell-check was done by me and correction tape (not even white out)

I’ll never forget (another grandparent saying) when my sister agreed to babysit a neighbor’s little boy about eight years ago and when she realized she didn’t have many things still in the house from when her two boys were little. She asked Sammy if he wanted to listen to some records and Sammy promptly replied - “what’s a record?” But that’s okay - Sammy didn’t know what an record was because his mother listened to music on cassette tapes - when he grows up - kids are going to ask him, “what’s a cassette tape?”

I’ve been talking with people about their memories of grandparents and most everyone agrees grandparents made a positive impact in their lives. A study of college aged students, printed in the International Journal of Aging and Human Development, showed that most of the respondents perceived their grandparents had at least some influence on the formation of their values, ideals and beliefs. Another study published in that same Journal indicates that grandparents place a priority on building a relationship with their grandchildren and seem to suffer when social structure hinders their opportunities to do so.

Like everything else, however, American grandparenting has been defined by the changes in our society. It has had to adjust to the maturing of the Baby Boomers and to various social and political movements that altered American values including the feminist movement, civil rights the Vietnam war. The impact of these events on American family structure was profound. Later marriage and childbearing and smaller families were strong middle-class responses in the 1980‘s and 1990‘s. Families broken by divorce increased at all economic levels and more children were born to teen and unmarried mothers.

Most studies conclude, however, that active and involved grandparents can make a major difference in their grandchildren’s lives and can produce personal fulfillment and successful aging for the grandparent. The same conclusions can be made historically as well.

In a recent article called, “The Importance of Grandma” writer Natalie Angier points to a new look at the significance of grandmothers in our evolutionary heritage. Renowned ethnographer Charles William Merton Hart studied the Tiwi hunter-gatherers in Australia in the 1920’s and described elder females as “a terrible nuisance” and “physically quite revolting.” He was so distressed in their company that he did not take the time to find any merit in recording or analyzing them in the same way he did men, young women or even the children.

I gotta tell you that, as a women’s history buff interested in crediting women for the contributions they’ve made in the world, I was tickled to find this article with a clear example as to how women‘s contributions have been overlooked. And just in time for women’s history month.

In her article - Angier points to a growing number of evolutionary biologists and cultural anthropologists who believe grandmothers present a key to understanding human prehistory. As a result, biologists, evolutionary anthropologists, sociologists and demographers are starting to pay more attention to grandmothers:

At a recent international conference - the first devoted to grandmothers - researchers concluded that grandmothers in particular, and elder female kin in general, have been an underrated source of power and sway in our evolutionary heritage. It turns out that there is a reason children are perpetually yearning for the flour-dusted, mythical figure called grandma, granny, oma or abuelita. As a number of participants at the conference demonstrated, the presence or absence of a grandmother often spelled the difference in traditional subsistence cultures between life or death for the grandchildren. In fact, having a grandmother around sometimes improved a child’s prospects to a far greater extent than did the presence of a father.

Dr. Ruth Mace and Dr. Rebecca Sear of the department of anthropology at University College in London, for example, analyzed demographic information from rural Gambia that was collected from 1950 to 1974. They found that for Gambian toddlers, the presence of a grandmother cut their chances of dying in half. It is important to note that this oma effect derived only from maternal grandmothers - the mother of one’s mother. The paternal grandmothers made no difference to a child’s outcome. What is it that grandmothers are doing that makes a difference in their families?

Dr. Cheryl Jamison, an anthropologist at Indiana University in Bloomington, and her colleagues combed through an exceptionally complete population register from a village in central Japan. The records covered a period from 1671 to 1871, when officials sought to battle the encroachment of Christianity and thus meticulously tracked everybody’s birth, death and whereabouts. As in the Gambian study, the overall mortality rate for children was substantial. Dr. Jamison and her co-workers determined that when a maternal grandmother lived in the household, boys were 52 percent less likely to die in childhood than if there was no grandmother present. Conversely, when the father’s mother lived in the house, boys were 62 percent more likely to die than were those without a resident grandma. For girls, no statistically significant benefit or detrement could be seen from grandmothers of either bloodline.

Those researchers with a Darwinian bent propose that the discrepant effects of maternal versus paternal grandparents is a result of the old evolutionary bugaboo, paternity uncertainty. Maternal grandmothers, they reason, were confident that the grandchildren in question were their blood relations, and hence worth working for, whereas the mother of a son, ever unsure of her daughter-in-law’s fidelity, may withhold her love and care, albeit unconsciously, from the grandchildren.

Dr. Harald A. Euler, a professor of psychology at the University of Kassel in Germany, believes that the maternal-paternal grandparent divide continues to this day and affects our affections. He interviewed 2,000 people in Germany about their grandparents - how much care they received from the relatives, how much affection they had for each one - and then analyzed the responses. He found that half of the respondents cited their maternal grandmother as their favorite grandparent, while only 12-14 percent named the paternal grandmother.

Others are less quick to pin everything on biology, and offer another explanation for the comparatively healthy effects of a maternal grandmother. It is no surprise, they say, that a woman would turn to the person she knows best for help with her children, and that person is much likelier to be her mother than her mother-in-law.

In my research for this talk today, I came upon a couple of interesting books:

101 Ways to Spoil Your Grandchild, by Vicki Lansky & Rondi Collette

The author argues that grandparents have the right, as well as the responsibility to spoil their grandchildren - with the parents’ permission of course - and to show their unconditional love. They have suggestions for grandparents including planting a tree on the birth of each grandchild and then taking a picture of them next to the tree to mark the child’s birthday each year and sending stamped and addressed postcards to encourage grandchildren who live far away to write.

I found lots and lots of information about long-distance grandparenting. When Amanda was two and a half, my mother recorded some songs on a cassette tape and mailed it to her for Christmas. When Amanda opened the package, she asked me what it was. When I told her that it was her nana singing songs to her for Christmas, she held the cassette up to her ear to listen. It was a Kodak moment and remains one of my favorite pictures of her as a child. Amanda loved that tape and listened to it until it was almost worn out.

There was also a large amount of information and resources on the internet for grandparents who are raising their grandchildren.

But my personal favorite is called - Contemporary Grandparenting, by Arthur Kornhaber, the book provides historical and cultural contexts of grandparenthood and examines the formation of grandparent identity and functionality. - and this is what I found so interesting - It also presents a clinical classification of grandparent disorders (I haven’t read this book but I think I should in case I qualify for any of them).

And finally, there is a “National Grandparents Day” - the first Sunday after Labor Day. The proclamation for the holiday was signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1978. The September date was chosen to signify the “autumn years” of life. The holiday has three purposes:

1. To honor grandparents everywhere

2. To give grandparents an opportunity to show love for their children’s children

3. To help children become aware of the strength, information and guidance older people can offer.

And, no, it was not started by Hallmark (as I might have guessed). In 1970, Marian McQuade of West Virginia began working with local and state legislators to recognize a special day for grandparents. Marian had very personal experiences with the trials and tribulations and joys of grandparenting. The parents of 15 children, she and her husband Joe were grandparents to 40 grandchildren.