Chapter 6

It's a Girl!

No matter what the family dynamic, the world changes when the first grandchild is born. When people joke that they are too young to be grandparents, they are paying heed to the generational shift. When we realize that our grandchildren will be living another eighty or ninety years we imagine ourselves living long enough to attend their graduations, weddings, and the birth of their own children. Grandchildren offer the additional benefit of slowing down our sense of ageing, because they grow up so much faster than we grow old. Watching them in their family gives us the opportunity to reconnect with the years when we were young parents, just as raising our children allowed us to revisit our own childhoods. I remember realizing, when I had my first child, that I could undo the mistakes I thought my parents had made with me. Like most people, I raised my children in light of what I remembered about what I liked and didn’t like -- doing the same or the opposite, depending.

Babies are not born into a family consisting of just a mother and father. They are embedded in the family structure, its conflicts and its history. Watching the grandkids and dealing with their parents gives us another shot at getting things right, because of course we remember the mistakes we made with our kids, and so do they. So it’s fascinating -- and somewhat daunting -- to watch our children correcting what they didn’t like about their childhoods. A young father raised in a family that fought and screamed will not allow such behavior in his home, once he has kids. A woman who grew up in a family of psychiatrists banned all psychobabble from her family table when she had children. Sometimes we can even catch them repeating what they enjoyed, and it feels wonderful. A new father planned a family vacation just like the ones he took with his parents -- to their quiet delight. Sometimes you can hear a child singing a lullaby that you sang to her when she was a baby; family rituals that grow up in the new household may look suspiciously like ones you handed down from your parents. The arrival of grandchildren gives us two-way vision. We can watch the new family and look back into the old one.

Many people tell me how much they treasure the fact that they can be better grandparents than they were parents. Now they are not so busy, so engaged in their own lives and careers; most don’t have to take care of the grandchildren when they feel exhausted and grumpy; their patience for these young creatures is much greater than it was for their own children.

If the style of parenting that we observe in our children, it may feel like a judgment on us, and that’s painful. Changing times and childrearing views can feel like attacks: “If it was good enough for you, it’s good enough for your baby,” we can’t help thinking. So arguments about everything, from food (sweets are out, avocados are in), to discipline, to television, become personal and painful. And when the parents of our grandchildren seem ready to judge us at every turn, it’s painful.

The best way to handle this is to heed the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not give your grown children advice. But there is a corrective to that ban on criticism. We can support the new parents in every imaginable way, not necessarily with time and money, but with a recognition that babies and small children are hard to raise, exhausting, and sometimes scary. If we can remember how hard it was for us when our children were little, we can comfort a scared new parent with a sympathetic word or a small kindness. This is different from approving of everything they do. But the act of retroactive empathy goes a long way toward encouraging the young parents. They not only to feel less at sea, but they come back for more. Bingo.

Since the parents control access to the grandchildren, and we want to be with them, we need to make sure that we’re getting along well with both new parents. Mothers of sons have the task of making sure they get along with their daughters-in-law, and mothers of daughters need to figure out what they want and how to meet their needs.

Stopped at the Gates

The family table is already set when the baby arrives, and the standing relationships between parents and their grown children, both within the nuclear family and with the in-laws, have an enormous impact. Patricia is a smart, witty, edgy woman with six grandchildren, five boys and a girl. A government official, she lives in the Washington DC area. Her two sons live nearby. She has always been closer to her younger son, and things with the older son have always been tense. This difference played out when each of her sons became fathers, a year apart. The arrival of the elder son’s baby was a train wreck for the family, although the newborn was fine.

Excerpted from 'Walking on Eggshells: Staying Close to Your Adult Children' by Jane Isay. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday/Flying Dolphin Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.