Parenting Grown Children: What Dr. Spock Forgot to Tell Us

Grandparenting: The moments they'll remember us by

When my daughter asked if I would come up and "babysit" her daughter--my Grand--for three days, she had her reasons. She had to travel for her job. Ordinarily, if she had to be away, she and my son-in-law would patch together a series of babysitters and play dates to cover the time away. But it was the first week of school. That can be traumatic any time, but even more so this year. Not only would my Grand be going back to school, she would be returning after a year in Berlin. I understood the request. I made it my business to get there.

It may sound like the easiest, most natural thing for a grandparent to do--grannie as nanny for three days--but it's not necessarily that simple. Work files have to be loaded on jump drives;  bags have to be packed and spouses/grandfathers persuaded (that wasn't too hard) to drive you to the airport.

It may sound like a lark--taking over the care and maintenance of a child in school--but it has its not-so-easy moments. It can be a long day from 2:00, when I pick her up from school, until 6:30, when her dad comes home. And then there's the pressure to get my own work done. 

So there we were, 4:00 on a rainy afternoon. She is banging out some songs on the piano and asking me if I think she's playing from sheet music or it's something she made up. I call out random answers while I have my laptop open and I edit a Q&A story on the mortgage interest deduction. She wanders over, pulls up a chair and asks me what I'm doing. I tell her I have to shorten a story I wrote--it has to lose about 200 words. She wants to help. We start with the introduction and I let her delete the phrases and sentences that can come out. As we move along, we come to a word, "sacrosanct" that I used to describe the deduction's place in the political pantheon. She doesn't know what it means. I tell her it is sort of like "holy." Well, she says, why didn't you say holy? I tell her some of the other subtle meanings sacrosanct has and why it seemed like just the right word to choose. We talk about it some more and then move on to another unusual word choice. She's interested in discussing why I called the deduction "the darling" of homeowning taxpayers. When I have to fact-check the year the mortgage interest deduction became law, she knows exactly how to go to Google, and we find the answer together: 1913.

Since this is a Q&A in which I have interviewed four experts, I have set it up so that each interview has a section of its own. The name and title of the person heads up each section. When we get to the first one, she wants to know if she can change the font for the name. Why not? She fiddles around and soon the name of the first interview--a housing economist--is maroon with a double underline. On we go, she deleting words as I tell her to, she redesigning the look of each name and title.

I can't say how long we worked on my story--an hour maybe--but it turned out to be the highlight of my visit. I was able to share with her a little bit of what I do--what writers and editors do--and she was able to show me how adept and creative she is at the computer. It was fun for both of us. But more than that, it made me realize that memories are made of this. Certainly, it was memorable for me--sitting side by side at the kitchen table, heads bent together, concentrating on what we were doing.

The three days may have had their tedious hours, but the reality is, you can't get to the heights of a memorable moment without trudging in the valley.

What did my editor think of the colorful copy I sent in the next day? He didn't say. But how often does he get copy with the name of the chief economist of Fannie Mae all dressed up in maroon Tahoma type with a double underline. For all I know, it may have been a memorable moment for him as well.

Life with 20-Somethings: Is this the happy ending to a job search?

My friend Carol and I are starting out on a walk-and-talk when she blurts out this admission: "I'm a nervous wreck." Carol is normally a no-nonsense, assertive person; her remark is out of keeping with her hard-driving persona. The reason for the agita? Her 23-year-old son--he who graduated from a top college and has just finished up a low-paying internship with a nonprofit; he who she has been prodding and pushing to get off his duff and find a job--has finally been offered one and accepted it. He started working a week ago--when Carol and her husband took their son to the airport to catch a flight to the city where he'll be employed. A flight to Juba. Yes. Juba, the capital of southern Sudan--the country that broke away from northern Sudan, won its independence and is just beginning to set up a government and infrastructure. Juba does not have much of a Western presence--although that is growing. Carol's son is part of the opening wedge of that growth.

I think back to my own anxieties when my daughter went to live in Berlin for a year. But Berlin is an international capital and my daughter was attached to a major education institution. My worries were about missing her and her family--not about whether she would be safe or whether Americans would be welcome. Carol's son is attached to an NGO (Non Government Organization) that is in Juba on its first mission there.

I try to ease her worries. I talk about what an adventure this is for her son, what a challenge. If he doesn't do something like this at 23, when will he? Certainly not when he's started a family and has a mortgage and children to support. I tell her about the recent NYTimes article "What if the Secret to Success is Failure," which posits that happy, successful people tend to be ones who face challenges--even if they fail at them. I also remind her that her son is smart, that he lived in an Arab-speaking country for a semester, has studied Arabic and is an athlete who's used to team play--all of which will help keep him safe.

It is cold comfort. There's only so much positive you can say to the parent of a grown child who has put himself in a potentially dangerous situation--not out of some sense of adventure but to get a job. The latter was made particularly clear the night before he left. A neighbor who has a son the same age as Carol's, stopped by to wish him well and tell him how much she admired what he was doing. "My son is hanging around here, doing the boring city thing," she told him. His response: "I wish I were doing the boring city thing, but this is the only job I was offered."

No wonder Carol is a nervous wreck. It's not like her son is going off to pursue a dream he's had all his life--to walk across India or climb the Chilean Andes. He's no happier about this "great adventure" than his parents are. That's the reality of the Great Recession, and its follow-up, the Great Contraction. Jobs are hard to find. Our grown children are shipping out to the far reaches of the Third World to make a living--even though they would really, really rather not go there.

 

Leaving a Legacy: Something to remember us by

My mother's tea cups: three cups and saucers, gilt edged and hand-painted--each with a different flower. When my mother died several years ago and I flew down to Florida to clean and clear her apartment, I placed those tea cups on a heap marked "donate." When Alpha Daughter arrived to help out, she scarfed them up.  She loved them. Of course, as a grad student living in a one-room apartment, she hardly had room for them. So they were boxed up with rolls of bubble wrap and shipped to my home to store until the she was ready for them. A child, dog and small house later, the time was still not right. The tea cups are still boxed up in my basement, awaiting the right and safe place to display them.

And they are a reminder to me of the power of a legacy. My daughter wanted those tea cups not for any inherent material value. She wanted them as a reminder of her grandmother, of my mother's love for things delicate, her desire to surround herself with things of  beauty, no matter how fragile. When she was alive, the tea cups sat on dainty wood stands, two in little niches on her desk-armoire and one on the side table, next to the porcelain lamp with the pleated silk shade. My mother and daughter shared an aesthetic--among many other things. No wonder my daughter wanted the tea cups, even as I saw them as so much stuff to be cleared away.

They are also a reminder to me to figure out what I want my legacy to be--to my children and grandchildren. Paterfamilias has already started down that road. When he found in his files a 5-page, typewritten manuscript--A Portrait of Courage, it was entitled--he knew what he wanted to do with it. The manuscript had arrived years ago from a neighbor of his father. PF's parents had lived in a garden apartment in a working class neighborhood in Queens. His neighbor, typing the story out on a manual typewriter, wrote about how she saw my father-in-law leave for work every morning, dressed immaculately in suit and tie. They would greet each other with a good morning and go on their way. When she found out, she wrote, that he was dying of cancer, she would stop to ask how he was. He never complained, she wrote. He talked about the weather and the fine day it was. As he grew thinner and thinner, she worried about him. A few days before he died, she saw him walking to his car to go to work and asked how he was. "Not so good," he said. "But it's a beautiful day."

PF scanned that manuscript into his computer and sent the pdf off to Uber Son and Alpha Daughter. He wanted them to remember who their grandfather was--and, when the time came, for his grandchildren to read this simple tribute to him and his courage. It is part of a broader legacy PF is working on: Letting his children and grandchildren know from whence and what they came. His most recent "legacy:" a book he wrote about the congressman he worked for in the 1970s. [People's Warrior: John Moss and the Fight for Freedom of Information and Consumer Rights.]

I am finding the road to legacy more slowly. I doubt I will do what some friends are doing: recording a disc that their children and grandchildren can play years later that holds words of advice or wisdom from them. It's a fine idea for the right person, (remember Alex Baldwin as Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock, spelling out "advice" to his unborn son?). It is not my kind of thing. And just when I thought I was coming up empty, I realized that my legacy has been simmering for years. I've been keeping a collection of notes on all the funny and clever things my children said when they were small--and still say now, my grandchildren as well. One of these days, I'll write up all those stories. We're an anecdotal family that loves a short, punchy story. I'll leave them all the evidence.

Legacy lived.

 

Why do we go to all this bother? PSYCHOtherapist or other expert on what it all means.

Dana Points, the editor in chief of Parents magazine. “Today’s grandparents don’t feel like they look or act like the grandparents of a generation ago,” she said, “so there can be a weird disconnect with the official term.”

Grandparent Rivalry: The perils of proximity vs the longings of long-distance

When Lola's daughter had Lola's first set of grandchildren, Lola was just a tiny bit jealous of the other set of grandparents. They had sold their condo in Florida and moved to Nashville to be close to their only son and his children. They were there to do the burping and diaper changing; they were available for babysitting. They were there to see the first steps and hear the first words. They bought the pretty yellow and pink quilt for the granddaughter's first bed and, when their son and his family went away on vacation, they painted the child's room to match the quilt.

Lola, who lives 700 miles away, is the visiting grandparent. She sees all the other grandparent's influences and it makes her wonder whether her grandchildren will know and love her as much as they do the other grandparents. And even more to the point, whether she will have the same influence over them--the same input on family history and family values. 

If that was her concern when her grandchildren were toddlers, it is less so now. The grandchildren are teens and pre-teens. They no longer want their room painted by grandpa when they go out of town. And even more, Lola's daughter has her hands full with a mother-in-law who believes in order and imposes it wherever she goes--even in her son's house. She has redone kitchen closets, alphabetized the spice shelf, re-ordered her grandson's bookshelf and refolded her granddaughter's clothes.

This is not to say that either the grandchildren or the grown children love one set of parents/grandparents less. Only that there are irritations in proximity. The visiting grandparents are like visiting firemen--a novelty, a treat--and people whose advice or remembrance-of-things-past may come as a refreshing moment rather than an "here they go again."

A two-week stay with her daughter may be intense, but Lola leaves with the hope that they'll be glad to see her come again. And that her closeness to her grandchildren has nothing whatsoever to do with their relationship with the other grandparents. There's room for both. And just because they live nearby, doesn't mean they have more input into the way the grandchildren think about life, values and all the other important ways we hope to influence our children's children. One quality conversation with a child who's troubled about some issue can be the important idea that child carries with him or her. You never know where or when that moment is coming. It doesn't matter if we're a constant presence or a sometimes visitor to have it happen.

 

 

Emerging Adults: Even if they do get a job, there's plenty to worry about

A major concern for most of us whose children graduated from college recently is whether they'll get a job. It's a nasty market out there. Sometimes we blame our kids for not trying hard enough --it may seem like they're doing nothing but they probably are checking those job-search Web sites regularly.

Here's a point to remember when they finally to do find employment: The pay may be puny--way below what a college grad has been led to expect. A recent study found that, after adjusting for inflation, entry-level wages for students who graduated from college in 2010 was lower than a decade earlier. Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute, found that after gains in the 1980s and 1990s, entry-level hourly wages for college-educated men (without advanced degrees) were down 4.5 percent from 2000. For college-educated women, they were down 5.2 percent from 10 years earlier.

If that isn't discouraging enough, her study concludes on an even more pessimistic note: “With unemployment expected to remain above 8 percent well into 2014, it will likely be many years before young college graduates — or any workers — see substantial wage growth.”

Makes it tough for a college grad to pay off those college loans--they are kind of underwater, just like some homeowners--or for the parents to feel the college bill they paid will pay for itself in no time. It may be quite some time.

Grandparenting: How to talk to a 12-year-old

When my granddaughter was 8, she and her parents lived in Berlin for a year. It wasn't easy having meaningful or even fun conversations with her when we were limited to a time certain and to a not-in-the-same-room factor. One couldn't just wait for an entry point to make its way known. I did discover some techniques but those were conversation openers for young children.

A friend, whose eldest grandchild is 12, says it is no longer easy to sit down with her and have a chatty conversation in which the grandmother asks her beloved granddaughter questions about the granddaughter's life. "She's a good kid," says this grandma,"but she's very pre-teen. She no longer likes the direct inquiry"--what are you reading? how's your best friend? are you going out for soccer this year?--an approach that worked well in earlier years.

Now, if she wants to know anything, this grandmother holds off until she picks her grandchild up from her weekly piano lesson. "There's something about talking to each other through the rear view mirror that makes it easier to ask questions," she tells me. For instance, when she heard from the piano teacher--who happens to be my friend's friend--that the grandchild greatly preferred to play works in minor keys, grandmother asked grandchild (via the rear view mirror) why music that was on the depressing side had more appeal. Her granddaughter was amenable to this intrusion into her inner soul and, through the rear view mirror of the car, answered quickly. "I like the music because it sounds scary."

The grandfather has found the same rear-view mirror, alone in the car situation his best chance to find out what his granddaughter is thinking, doing, reading, studying at school. Now the grandparents fight over who will pick their granddaughter up at piano lessons.  They both covet the chance to talk to her in a way they can't when they're face to face.