Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Ray answers a question about best practices in being a grandparent.
Name Withheld By Request:
My child and his wife just produced their first child, which means that we are now considered, ick, "grandparents." This seems like easy work, but we're kind of freaking out because we don't know how much we should take on with the job. We don't want to do too much and become meddlesome, but we don't want to do too little and have them think we don't care. They are already having us wait until the kid's been around a few weeks, apparently so we don't see them freaking out on an hourly basis, but we'll have to do helpful things when we get there (they live in another state), and we're not sure how much of that is chores and how much is character development and bonding, but we fear that we are flying without instruments. We can't even figure out what we should be called, and our friends tease us about that all the time. Are we out of our depth here?
First, some good news: You're spot on. You are out of your depth, almost hopelessly so. All potential grandparents are, and for the same reason that you were out of your depth when you first created life yourself. Even the standard pediatrician's advice, "It's really hard to break a baby as long as you love them," doesn't help here, because it's more likely that the baby will break you first. You were a prohibitive underdog as a parent, as you no doubt recall, and you played to an undeserved nil-nil draw that cost you about $800,000 from cradle to college graduation. The good thing is that, as a grandparent, you have the most compelling out: "Sorry, not my puppy." But you can only get away with that one once.
So let us start this with a simple proposition. This isn't about you on any level at any time, and your children and your children's children are going to remind you of that every single stinking day in a million unintended but very real ways. If you think it is even tangentially about you, then you are an idiot; if you feel like contradicting this notion with more attention, love, reading time, gifts, or unrequested life lessons, you are an idiot's idiot.
Face it, you fossil, you are an antediluvian daywalker, and that's it. You should understand immediately that for the foreseeable future there's little more to your role than that.
For starters, as you noted in your pathetic missive, you have been endlessly ribbed, messed with, and mocked by your less reputable friends with versions of "Grandma," or worse and less appealing, "Grandpa." There's nothing grand about it, and anyway you don't get a vote, so it won't be anything so traditional or lofty. Your name as Backup Daddy/Training Camp Mommy will actually be decided by Little Algonquin while it is still devoid of even rudimentary language skills, and the baby's actual parents—those cloth-eared tuition vacuums you call your children—will seize on the first noise their little bundle of sleep deprivation emits as evidence of your new name, even if all it resembles is the hacking cough of a retired Welsh coal miner, because they think it's cute and empowering or some equally ridiculous pediatric platitude. So don't get your hopes up for something heartwarming, cool, or traditional, Skipper. If your name ends up sounding like a sheep with an ingrown hoof, then that's just how the game is played. If the kid decides you're Gamby or Horkus, then Gamby or Horkus you will be.
Second, you will stumble trying to figure out what you can and cannot provide as service to the actual parents. This will be because you are offering your help on a minute-by-minute basis to sleep-deprived zombies who 1) know even less than you did when it comes to caring for and nurturing young Turniphead Junior, and 2) cannot focus on anything for more than three seconds because their eyelids are on fire. One of the things they don't know is what the baby needs, and another is what they as parents need. The mother cannot drink yet, because the child's nourishment base must not have a Scottish-sounding name on the label; the father cannot drink yet because the mother will brain him if he even tries, and you cannot drink because then they won't let you near the baby.
But we digress. Your job is to sit and make small talk with them until one or both of them dozes off in mid-sentence. At that point, your number has been called, and your job will be to take care of the young'un, if holding a barely sensate lump while it sleeps, fidgets, or evacuates is your version of care. You won't know what you will be permitted to do at any moment, and worse, you actually will know everything that needs to be done because you did this drill yourself. You just won't be able to share your wisdom with either parent because they're too maniacal about their own roles to properly delegate any to you. When it seems like it would be fun for you to hold little Inertiette in a particular moment, that's the time when they need to hold her, so don't take a position any more strident than a shrug.
Above all else, you must understand that you're just an animatronic prop in a bigger drama. The only conversation allowed or pursued circles tenaciously around the center of all attention—the bright new life wailing and pooping and refusing to sleep at a decent hour. Nothing else qualifies as interesting in comparison, and certainly not anything you've been doing. This ain't bridge club, Rodolfo, and you're the oldest person in the room by 30 years, so nothing you say will have any real relevance to your audience. If you have a narcissist's self-importance and need them to know what you think, maybe don't bother turning up at all; the kids may hate you for not paying proper deference to the star of the show, but if you're that me-centric, you won't notice. These are the best times for a baby to have all its comforts satisfied, and the irony is that it is also the one time in their lives that they're not making memories. The one benefit you get is that if you are deemed qualified to hold the infant, you can still keep a free hand for the remote. This is only true until it transforms from swaddled potato to squirming eel at about seven months, but for the time being their general inertia makes them faux-adorable.
So the question has arisen for you: "What's in this for me then? Why am I expending all this care, and where do I fit in all of it?" You know the answer already because we just told you, and yet there is still a payoff. It just comes a lot later than you will want it to happen, and probably years after you've given up caring. It definitely won't be any time soon. At one year, Rolling Thunder is just starting to walk, which means every new step is a potential trip to the emergency room even after you've padded all the furniture corners. Being resourceful harm magnets, they can find more places to bash their skulls than you can childproof—it's what keeps Home Depot out of insolvency. And if the child is walking at, say, 10 months or so, it will find enough hazards to develop wrestler's forehead by kindergarten. Years two through three are a total loss on all levels, so don't even try. They subsist on chicken nuggets and human dreams at that age, so you don't want to be around for any of it.
But there will be a day sometime after that, when you least expect it and when your will has fully eroded, when they will sit next to you of their own volition and engage in a conversation that does not begin with "Gimme." They will, against all odds, become actually tolerable human beings and recognize you as a wizened benefactor of sorts. There will be a level of satisfaction to their Sesame Street–level grift that you forgot existed, probably because your own children were such galactic ingrates through their first 20 years of existence, otherwise known as The Sponging Years. And that's only if you had the good sense to stop at two of the little marsupials. Anything more than that, and you're no longer a parent but a bankrupted zookeeper running a cageless reserve for wolverines and vipers, and you deserve the sense of perpetual danger you created for yourselves.
Also, don't try too hard to seem wise and knowledgeable, because the new parents' math is not your math, and a three may as well be a seven to them for all the good it will do you. Do not try to operate any of the ridiculous technological boobytraps everyone else gave them while you were buying them the digestible books and clothing items they outgrew in an hour; you do not know how to do any of those things, and if you try to learn them they will shut down in minutes and leave you with both a shrieking baby and an annoyed parent. You will simply have to wait for your window, and if you wait long enough, you might get what you thought you were going to get at the start of this.
This will happen when they approach and ask you to play a game with them at a time when you're not watching cars going fast in a circle, or a stupid Netflix movie, or a Tiff Stevenson standup clip. Or when you say they cannot have quesadillas at 10:30 p.m. and they say "OK" without protest. Or when they call you by a name that actually sounds like it has properly assembled vowels and consonants—even if it's just "Bluey" or "Dora." The odds are good that they will ask you all these things while you're asleep in a big chair, so you may miss your moment now and then, but they will keep coming back. They're irritating, and relentless, and relentlessly irritating all at once.
In short, it's when they start acting like they have finally been domesticated that the dividends will begin to flow. Well, drip, more like. None of that will be due to anything you did, because you learned early on that most important of grandparenting rules: "Hear a cry, time to fly." Ultimately you're not making an imprint on them when you mean to do so, and so you don't have to volunteer for anything beyond the minimum level of involvement, which is you saying, "Something's going on in the crib. If I were you, I'd look into that."
The kid has parents and they're not you, so don't take on a job you don't need, and which they already have. You'll be given plenty to do, and if you do it cheerfully and semi-efficiently, you'll be welcomed back. You will get not only a child's tolerance—love is probably too strong a word at this stage without money as an added emolument—but the thanks of the somewhat older children you actually assembled, the ones you'd given up as hopelessly feral when the puberty fairy arrived. You might be up there in years, but you're still playing the long game here. I mean, it's not like you have anything better to do. So just wait everyone out. The little snotlocker will eventually come around, and your presence will at some point be required for something more rewarding than folding diapers.
And if that time isn't now, don't sweat it. Just don't go see the kids until all of you are ready, and spend the airfare you save on a trip to the Adriatic with your spouse. And if the new parents say they're planning to have a second child within two years, change your phone number and living will. Kid or no kid, Dubrovnik in the spring is still a hell of a lot better than Buckethead Flats, Montana, on Christmas morning. Now get to work on pretending that this is all meant to be fun, and until that sinks in, go away.
