What Exactly does a Grandparent Do Anyway?
By Chuck Tanowitz
A change came over my mother with the birth of her first grandchild. The other day I walked in as she was speaking to my son.
"My little Lungo Lokshen," she called him, grinning like any proud grandma.
"Excuse me?" I said with a strange, contorted look on my face.
"It means Long Noodle in Yiddish," she replied matter-of-factly. It makes sense, Alex is a long, thin little baby.
"I’ve never heard you speak Yiddish," said I again, my quizzical look turning to utter fascination.
Her grin turned into a broad smile. "But all grandmothers speak Yiddish!"
There is a special bond between a grandparent and a grandchild that simply cannot be duplicated anywhere else in family life. It is that feeling of unconditional love, the child knowing that he or she will never be punished by this kind, older couple, and the grandparents knowing they’ll rarely have to change a dirty diaper.
This love shows up in the names we give our grandparents. Each person names his or her own. My wife had a "Nana", "Grandmom" and "Grandpop", while I had two grandfathers with women’s names: Grandpa Ruth and Grandpa Rose. The legend is such: my grandpas were always calling for their wives. "Ruth! Ruth!" or "Rose! Rose!" And so I began using those names. But I think that since they were both named Meyer, I probably figured Meyer was another name for Grandpa and that the only way to differentiate them was to call them by my grandmothers' names.
When I first started calling for Grandpa Ruth, my family tried to correct me. "No," my parents, aunts, uncles and cousins said. "He’s Grandpa Meyer."
"That’s okay," Grandpa Ruth said with a smile. "He can call me whatever he wants."
That was the kind of unconditional love my grandfather gave to all his grandchildren. He’d take us out on weekends, spoil us, take us gun shopping. Everything seemed fun as long as Grandpa Ruth was involved. I know that my father has been looking forward to spoiling my son just the same way. I can see him slowly taking the cue from his father, though it’s nothing I can put my finger on directly.
But many grandparents aren’t as lucky. According to the US Census, about 4 million children lived with their grandparents full time in 1996 -- that's 6 percent of the younger population. In 1980, that figure was just 2.3 million. That means there are children who must be disciplined by their grandparents, who can’t see them as these special people who offer unconditional love. That also means there are grandparents who simply can’t afford to spoil their grandchildren because they’re too busy spending their retirement dollars on basics such as food, clothing and hanging onto that big, old house so they have enough room for the extra children.
True, that is just a small percentage of the population. But consider this: In 1997, Roper Research, a marketing research firm, found that Grandparents are spending more time and money on their grandchildren. They’re taking the little ones to restaurants and caring for them while mom and dad are at work. The money spent on grandchildren jumped from a median of $250 a year in 1988 to $505 a decade later. Sounds good, right?
But all this time and money also changed the relationship, from one of relaxed and pure love, to one that had more of a parental edge. (It’s always dangerous to say that "all" of any group does anything, but I’ve found that individuals base reactions on their life experience.)
My relationship with my grandparents had no parental edge. When it came to lunch, we could order whatever we wanted. In fact, when tagging along one day, my father found himself scolded when he tried to suggest something for my brother to eat. We were never scolded.
As for my mother, her experience with her own grandparents was centered on Yiddish: all had Yiddish accents. Mom even went so far as to wonder how her own mother would develop her accent upon becoming a Grandmother. Grandma Rose still doesn’t have any Yiddish in her voice, though she does speak with a Boston accent.
Now my mom seems to be getting a Yiddish accent of her own.
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