Deadbeat grandparents
The Boomer Gap has corroded our tribes
Lucy Lanier was an imaginative writer, a skilled photographer who developed her own photos in her home dark room, a knitter, painter, a baker of bread and pies. She had a wild and unpredictable sense of humor, and long white hair almost to her knees which she wore in a tight bun by day, and would unwind from its bobby pins before bed and brush 100 times with a silver handled brush. She had lost most of her her teeth early in her 20’s and decided to have the rest pulled to stop the pain, so wore dentures for much of her life. I would stand at the sink in her pink tiled bathroom in Mesa, Arizona, my chin barely reaching the edge of the porcelain basin, and watch with freakish 5 year old delight as she yanked her dentures out of her mouth and dropped them into a glass full of foaming denture cleaner.
Lucy was my great grandmother, and I am closely acquainted with the details of who she was as a woman, and what her life had been, not because I read about it or was told secondhand. No, I spent my childhood in her shadow, toddling and then walking beside her. I had watched from the foot of her bed the unwinding of the hair, had held the silver brush in my own hand, swiping it across my own platinum scalp when she had finished. I can still close my eyes and smell her cinnamon rolls, could sketch out the floor plans of her two homes, can describe intimately the copper streak that surrounded the pupils of her sea blue eyes. Lucy, and the other older members of my family, were my friends, my mentors, and my frequent companions. I was raised by a tribe, grandparents and greats uncles, siblings, great grandmas, and second cousins 3 generations removed, verses the very isolating mom/dad or mom/step dad, or single mom with no dad or whatever watery version of human family structure the majority of children have today. My childhood was very intergenerational, and I assumed that my children would have the same, that that was just how families worked. But, the Boomers created a gap in the fabric of family, and it has proven difficult to repair.
My great grandmother shaped my life so much that her impact is still felt today. Lucy was obsessed with communism and the Soviet Bloc, as were many Americans in her generation. She was born in 1903. I often think about the timeline of her life. She saw Kaiser Wilhelm’s assassination, WWI, the Bolshevik coup, Spanish flu, the Great Depression which is when she was getting married and having babies, WWII, with Pearl Harbor being a day she never forgot and spoke of often, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, Korea, the creation of the modern nuclear family and our migration from farms to suburbs, inventions like airplanes and TV and phone systems and credit cards and mortgages, the spread of communism and the rise of nations like China, the assassination of Johnny Kennedy as she called him, the popularity of MLK and Rosa Parks, the massive cultural revolution of the 60’s with hippies and Roe v Wade, Women’s Lib, man on the moon. Her life was lived in one of the greatest and most perilous centuries in our modern history, and she was marked by it all, resulting in frequent casual conversations about hydrogen bombs and oppressive dictators, which had underscored almost everything from Lucy’s early adulthood onward.
I can remember her world view shaping mine, as she told me stories about Russia, the vast kingdom that had been overthrown by tyrants and which was run by “satanic atheists” who had burned great onion domed cathedrals and murdered priests. As her Alzheimer’s worsened during my early teen years, Lucy spoke to me about a few things regularly: the Civil War, which her parents and grandparents had survived; her farm; and the Iron Curtain. She showed me a newspaper article at the kitchen table one day and taught me my first Russian word: Pravda, the name of the paper.
It’s profound looking back and seeing how the simple fact that I was influenced by my great grandmother meant that I would absorb ideas which were not typical for someone in my generation, and which I wouldn’t have gotten from my peers. Fear of nuclear war, which made me literally obsessively watch the evening news during the Iran Contra scandal as a first grader, and made me write a letter to Gorbechev in middle school asking him to please stand down or cease his rapid nuclear arms race. The influence of my great grandmother made me ask to leave cheer practice early on the afternoon that the Iron Curtain fell so I could rush home to see the TV coverage, cheering for the freedom I hoped democracy would bring the people of the USSR. That I understood at all what was happening in the world as a 16 year old girl, is partly because my great grandmother took the time to let her grandchildren shadow her.
Lucy’s influence gave me form. It was because of Lucy that I went to college for a few short years before getting caught in the Mormon trad wife trap, majoring in Russian, hoping to transition into an international law major at BYU two years later. I wanted to hop into the very unique field of trade coming out of the formerly communist Russian territories. And though she has been dead almost 30 years now, I can still hear Lucy’s voice, still see bits of her face when I look in the mirror at my own. This morning I baked a loaf of sourdough in her bread pan, a treasure I inherited when my grandmother died. Her milk glass centerpiece still sits on my kitchen island.
Tragically, when Lucy’s generation died, things began to shift. Families disconnected ever so slightly. Her children, the Greatest Generation, would still be solid grandparents, but they seem to have forgotten to pass the grand parenting baton on to the next wave of older adults.
Two weeks ago I asked my 14 year old son when the last time was that he had heard from his dad’s dad, Grandpa Steve. Brody looked genuinely shocked by my question. He asked, “Are you messing with me?”
I told him no, that I was honestly curious, to which he replied that he thought Grandpa Steve had died 6 years ago. He was even more shocked to find out that grandpa is still alive, but has inexplicably ghosted his grandson. Brody is still grappling with the newly discovered situation two weeks later.
We are seeing, regrettably, a wave of dead beat grandparents who are too busy playing pickle ball, cycling, and cruising Alaska to bother with sitting down to dinner with the children of their tribe, who have never and would never let a small child sit at the foot of their bed and watch their night time grooming routines, who assume that Google and tik tok are capable of educating the youngsters about history, and whose health and independence have given them the opportunity to explore the world far into their later years. And it’s impacting all of us.
South Korea currently has some of the lowest birth rates in the world, and one of the major reasons cited by young adults is the lack of grandparent involvement. Young Koreans simply choose not to have children if the nuclear family model is their only option. Americans are pushing back too, with Millennials in particular venting across social media about the stresses of raising children without their parents’ involvement.
And perhaps the saddest effects are those things which are hard to measure and report on. The absence of the wisdom, experience, world view, love, and correction of familial elders in the lives of our youth, who don’t even know what they’re missing out on.
I am one of the last in my family to have a tribal childhood, and my children enjoyed a few years of it too. My granddad had a scheduled day every week to spend with my oldest two, hiking or hitting golf balls in his back yard, or eating hot oatmeal cookies that grandma shaped a little extra large because she was grandma and didn’t have to care about a bedtime sugar rush. I treasure the last photo I have of my grandfather on the top of Piestewa Peak with two rowdy toddlers, and honestly wish there was a way to create this tribe for my younger children, but it has eluded too many of my generation, and I have no hope.
We are in fact the hope, it turns out. They say that grand parenting is making a resurgence as the Boomers begin to die, precisely because my generation has been so let down by the dead beats and are committed to reconstructing our tribes for the next generation. Perhaps we will be the first in decades to schedule cookie baking and golf ball hitting with grandkids in our back yards. I hope so. I would’t be the woman I am without my elders.
