“I have been very upset after a particular
incident involving my grand-daughter, Sophie, who is 8. She is a lovely girl
and we get on famously but she has just showed me a piece of writing she did
for her new class teacher on “My Grandmother”. She wrote that I was very old,
could not walk and had short white hair. In fact I teach her tennis, have my
own black hair (shoulder-length), at 58 do not consider myself particularly old
and play more games with her than my own daughter- who has multiple sclerosis.
When I raised this with my son-in-law he was just amused. My son-in-law has
increasingly been calling me “the aged one” and I am worried this will affect
Sophie.”
Mrs W.
When I was 8 many of my friends’ grandmothers
behaved in an “old” way. From their buns or short hair (never shoulder-length
like Mrs W) to their grandmother uniform of shapeless crimplene dresses and
lisle stockings they presented themselves as demanding siblings, in rivalry for
parental attention. As 8 year olds, those of us with grandparents who aged
prematurely and unhealthily longed for benign, wise, solvent, upright figures
who would give extra attention and support to our hard-working parents. Perhaps
our descriptions for school essays similarly reworked and distorted a painful
reality. Jane, aged 9, for example, wrote “My grandmother reads me a story at
bedtime” when her grandmother could not read or write. The titles of family
members- “Mother”, “grandmother”, “father”, “grandfather” have a powerful
iconic meaning over and beyond the personal characteristics of each member and
infant and junior school teachers are very aware of this.
Grandmothers in Western culture are not
expected to be physically stronger than mothers. Yet Sophie has a mother who
cannot play physically with her because of a disability and a grandmother who
can. Has she found a way of hiding her hurt about her mother’s incapacity by
transforming her grandmother instead? Is it safer to explore images of
disability on somebody physically strong without feeling disloyal? Some
children transform the image of the disabled parent instead. Mark, aged 10,
found his father’s disability so unbearable he preferred to call him “lazy”
instead. In his school essay he wrote “ My lazy Dad never helps in the house.
He doesn’t even wash himself”. His class teacher understood the meaning of this
essay as she had met his father on several occasions and they had discussed
Mark’s fear of being physically fragile like his father.
Does Sophie feel weakened by having an ill
mother? A child can feel weakened in identification with a same-sex ill parent
or, alternatively, frightened and triumphant. Perhaps these issues have not
been discussed in the family. Indeed, since Mrs W’s son-in-law also underlines
her age- “the aged one-” are the younger two generations of the family uniting
against her because they have not dealt with their own sense of loss?
Stanley Ruszczynski, of the Portman Clinic,
comments “Perhaps both of Sophie’s parents have been unable to contain their
own sense of loss and have therefore provided no containment for Sophie’s
feelings. This means all images of handicap and weakness have to be transferred
to grandmother”. The one fact that has to be true is that a grandmother is
older than a mother and emphasising that age difference hides other
differences.
However, some children age their parents or
grandparents without illness being a factor. For a small child a teenager is
old. We tend to define who is old from the perspective of where we stand. One
woman in her mid 80s did not want to go into an Old People’s Home because there
were so many “old people” in their 90s there. However, outside of egocentric
definitions, a parent’s parent is a biological point of great significance.
Sometimes, the grandparent cannot bear this
biological position. The woman who keeps saying of her child and grandchild “We
just look like sisters” is running backwards. Christina, aged 16, shocked her
mother & grandmother by dyeing her hair grey. “You two keep dyeing your
hair blonde like mine when it is really grey so what are you complaining
about?” she protested. Could Mrs W be protesting a little too much that her
hair is her own original colour? Just as a child can struggle with a painful
sense of triumph when a parent is weak a parent can feel they have triumphed
biologically over an adult child.
Joan Bakewell is now “expecting” another
grandchild. As a glamorous, intellectual grandmother who, like Mrs W, is
providing a vigorous model, how has she experienced that state or the responses
to it? “It was a condition I had not anticipated from the stereotypes
available”, she commented. “Nobody says much about grandmotherhood or
grandfatherhood. In a sense being a granny is part of the generational
structure and not necessarily attached to old age as, depending on
child-bearing patterns you could be a grandmother at 36 or 66. Commercials on
TV and posters tend to make grannies benign, wizened, unthreatening, mild, in
slippers, and in that sense relegates them into a passive function. I think
grannies can be spiteful, bossy and vigorous. Red Riding-Hood visited her
granny and saw a wolf! I’d like to become a matriarch. It is a great word and
you begin to realise that as you move towards the end of life’s spectrum you
can see the new crop coming up from down below and that is delightful.”
There are other reasons as to why it is
grandmothers who receive this treatment. Whilst grandfathers and elderly men
are capable of producing babies into their 80s women are not. Estela Welldon
comments “There is a prejudice against sexuality in any save those in fecund
groups. Post menopausal women are therefore singled out as being asexual. Could
there be an attack on Mrs W’s sexual aliveness?”
There must be good-enough relationships in Mrs W’s family for her to be able to offer and have accepted such active grandparent time. Hopefully, that will provide the base in which these other issues might be able to be gently aired.