My friend Gerry used to say the reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is because they have a common enemy. After I stop laughing, I think, Yes, that’s absolutely true.
I am a grandmother, and I can tell you there is no right and wrong when it comes to the child. How many times have I sided with my grandson even when he was somewhat wrong?
We grandmothers get in trouble with our adult children. My friend Denise gets chastised by her daughter when she buys too many gifts for her little princess.
My friend Merle, whose kids told her not to spoil their son, is taking him to Italy because he wants to see what pizza is like in its origin country.
My husband, as you know if you’ve been reading my column, is in love with this planet, and his Prius, I might add (in fact, he should have bought stock in Toyota). And yet the man just wished our grandson the best of luck with his new F-150 truck. You heard me (read me) — I said truck. Of course, the good-luck wish came followed by this dialogue.
“So, a truck, huh? Ya’ hauling a lot of stuff?” And then, “So how many miles do you get to the gallon?18? 20? 21? I get 49.”
But then he softened, because that’s what grandkids do to you. They soften you until you are just a mass of protoplasm saying yes.
My friend Linda was at my house yesterday morning, and we talked about being grammas. I jumped up and grabbed the two pictures of my two grandmothers. In the photograph I have, Gramma Slonim is blind and deaf, and has the sweet face with the same sweetness she always had. She is wearing a faded cotton apron and sitting on a bench, probably resting for the first time in her full 90 years.
My Gramma Wachtel is a small chunk of square, squat humanity, and is wearing those black shoes with the rolled-up stockings, the legs far apart, the short silver hair pinned with tortoise-shell combs, the glasses, and no smile, because they must have been told in the early days of photography: No smiling.
Grammas don’t even look like grammas anymore. Linda and I looked at each other. She was wearing jeans and a cool, stylish jacket. I was wearing yoga pants and a T shirt. These days you can barely tell a gramma from her granddaughter.
I think a lot has been lost since the immigrant days when grandparents lived in the same spaces as their offspring, when grandparents lived on the bottom floor of the three-family wooden houses in East Boston, the garden apartments on Blue Hills Avenue in Hartford, the row houses of East Baltimore. Those were dwellings where multigenerational families lived in the early 20th century, where the little ones could just run downstairs or down the hall or right next door for comfort, for food, for unconditional love.
Now Gramma is in Florida, or on a cruise, or in graduate school, or on a dating ap.
Linda and I clinked our teacups in collective gratitude that we live so close to our babies.
And we’re honored to be suckers, if that’s your take on our continued pathological generosity.
Here’s to saying yes.
