She is looking forward to her mom’s next visit. Lauren Apfel is co-founder and executive editor of Motherwell. It was fine, I realized, because the person my mom comes to mother, when she visits, is the person she has always mothered. This trip, she opted out of much of the scut work of childcare and that was fine: the kids are older now, they are in school most of the day, I’m not so run ragged anymore.
My mom will take the baby, in other words, she will take him so that I can have a break, so that I can go back to sleep. We laughed when my twins were born, my third and fourth children it was the first time she had changed any of their tiny diapers, it was the first time I had explicitly asked her to.
Not because her perspective changes, mind you, but because what I need changes. But how involved she will be on a given occasion, how dirty she is willing to get her hands so to speak, does vary. My mother has been clear about her role as Bubbe from day one-that unlike 72% of her peers, she does not consider being a grandparent the single most important and satisfying aspect of her life. Her guilt for not being more present, where “present” has multiple meanings. Would she babysit for me on a random Tuesday afternoon or would she offer to pay somebody else to do it instead? My mom has often said, and I understand the sentiment, that contributing financially is a way of assuaging her guilt. I wonder what the dynamic would be like if I lived nearer to my mom, less than a plane ride away. Desire and personality are a large part of it, but so too are age, employment status, health and proximity. There are many factors that determine what kind of grandma a mother will in turn become-and the opportunity to become a grandma at all is a great fortune. The selfish grandmas, the grandmas who can’t be bothered. Or grievances against the grandmothers who don’t do enough, according to their offspring, who do less than was expected, less than was promised. Scan the message boards and you will find, repeatedly, either complaints about grandmothers who are hyper-involved with their grandkids, meddling far beyond the pale and driving the parents themselves batty in the process. And as hard as most grandmas try to strike that elusive middle ground of involvement, the reality is that their efforts seem to bunch at the ends of the spectrum. They will probably want different things from each other. Because, personally, I would trade a hundred meals cooked for an extra hour or two of sleep.īut my kids might want something else entirely from me, when they are parents. It was a list of the sort of grandparental services I myself would provide, if I was lucky enough to see the day, and at the top of it was this: when the mother of a newborn baby walks into the kitchen in the morning looking like death warmed over, offer to take said baby and send said mother back to bed. I remember once, during a particularly trying visit with my in-laws amidst the topsy turviness of early parenthood, making a mental list of my own. The one who serves up just the right stew of helpfulness and detachment. We’d all to like to envisage ourselves, down the road, as the prize-winning Nana: the one who advises without overstepping, who spoils without undermining. “I don’t need to re-live having children through yours.” “I have my own life,” she reminds me, with perfect kindness and accuracy. She watches some of her friends “grandparent” in a way she finds unappealing, women, she says, who are attempting motherhood all over again. She did everything for us as we grew up-playdates, parties, projects-everything. She is the mother of three children, across eight years and two marriages. This is the privilege you earn with the prefix “Grand.” “I’ve done my time,” she says, and she certainly has. In so far as it is possible to engineer, my mother, at 70, is looking to experience the good bits associated with young children, the fun bits, and not the slog.įor her, this is the line between what it is to be a grandparent and what it is to be a parent. But she is not interested in participating in the grunt work of raising them: the tasks that include bodily fluids and flailing limbs, tears and stall tactics and four outfit changes in as many minutes. She cares about their well-being and what is happening in their lives. She enjoys spending time with them, in small doses. Here is a list of the things she did vis-a-vis my four children:Īnd here is a list of the things she didn’t do:īased on these lists, my mom is what you might call a “hands-off” Grandma-or Bubbe, as she is affectionately referred to. By Lauren mother recently came to visit me and my family for ten days.
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