Despite common, ill-informed assumptions, being a grandparent is a serious role requiring challenging and demanding competencies, and not everyone is qualified. In fact, grandparenthood should not be conferred merely by the birth of grandchildren. Rather, potential grandparents should be required to take a test.
When it was announced that my daughter was going to produce grandchildren, I had misgivings. What if I didn’t like them? I had had the same reservations when we had children, but it turned out that I adjusted quickly, liked them a lot and did not return them. Fortunately, the same happened with my grandchildren. So, the first test is: Do you, in fact, like your grandchildren?
Additional determinants of grandparenthood suitability include responding appropriately to the following incisive questions: Are you willing to change diapers? Wipe snotty noses? Tolerate whining, yelling, toddler tantrums, giggling hysterically over potty-focused humor or singing the same three notes over and over?
Can you sympathize with your grandchildren’s overwhelming fascination with stomping in puddles? Can you suppress your impatience with your grandchildren’s inability to drink liquids without spilling? Are you willing to audition playgrounds for swing and slide quality? Can you control your amazement that your four-year-old grandchild has a better grasp of the U.S. Constitution than the ignoramus in the White House?
Furthermore, are you skilled enough to convince your grandchildren that chores like sweeping or putting away toys and clothing are adventures equivalent to conquering the Himalayas? (Alas, that gambit only works for about a year before they get wise your insidious deception.)
As a grandparent, are you up to meeting the following intellectual challenges: can you read, often repeatedly, books that give new meaning to the words insipid and inane, inexpressibly stupid books laden with heavy-handed, trite moral messages? What do you do when, despite your attempts to steer your grandchildren to the brilliance of “In the Night Kitchen,” “Goodnight Moon,” or anything by Sandra Boynton, they are drawn to some dreck about bears who, after some idiot encounter with an adorable war criminal aardvark, learn that you should always listen to your elders and brush after every meal?
Incidentally, grandchildren can provide you with a genuine living literary experience. Lying on the floor and allowing them to crawl over you almost exactly replicates Gulliver’s experience among the Lilliputians.
An even greater test of grandparenting skills is the ability to put up with newfangled noisy toys including ghastly stuffed animals that sing, in ghastly unnatural voices, ghastly songs like, “The wheels on the bus go round and round / Making me quite nauseous.” Just push a button, and these battery-driven monsters will explain the meaning of life. Where is the button to dispose of these toys? Can you adapt to the inevitability that grandchildren find the packaging more engaging than the dumb toy wrapped in it?
There are certain absolute grandparent-suitability disqualifiers. First on the list is spouting the cliché that the best thing about grandchildren is that when you’ve had enough, you can just leave and turn them back over to their parents. Shame! Face your grandparently responsibilities like an [old] man or woman!
A major test (also a gift to the rest of the world), can you resist being one of those abusive grandparents who, with unbearable enthusiasm, go up to most anyone—friends, relatives, vagrants or Martians—and say, “Would you like to see a hundred pictures of my wonderful grandchildren?”
I invariably respond, “No, I don’t want to see even one picture of your runny-nosed little hellions, nor do I want to hear your tedious tales about how precocious, athletic, or gorgeous they are or their latest incredibly clever comment about peanut butter sandwiches, beluga whales, or quantum mechanics.”
On a different note, keep in mind that grandchildren are an immense source of comfort. Studies have shown (there’s a suspect line) that there is therapeutic value in having a cat sit in your lap, that it lowers blood pressure and assists at being at peace with the world. (Therapy porcupines work nowhere near as well.) How much better to have a grandchild sit in your lap. So much more soothing than any creature, and they keep you warm in winter. And after a surprisingly short time, they develop into brilliant conversationalists.
You’ll never get even minimal conversation from any therapy animal, certainly not from dogs, those barking, slobbering creatures with sharp teeth, or from other currently favored companion exotics like boa constrictors or peacocks. And you’ll have no trouble bringing a grandchild on an airplane. Just don’t sit next to me.
Incidentally, did I mention that I love my grandchildren, spend countless hours with them and really like hugging them? Besides, who else would laugh when I announce that it’s squid and eel stew for dinner again?
Robin Schore lives in Titusville.
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