My Story Is Different
For reasons made clearer below, I have often felt distanced from the other grandparents I have relationships with. Many of my friends had children young. They expected to see them grow up and marry and then to participate in their grandchildren’s lives.
My story is different. I married late. I married because I wanted to have a child, and I was blessed with two children. My husband had a daughter. She was ten years old when her father and I married and fourteen years old when I adopted her. Then a month after I adopted her, I gave birth to my second daughter.
I became a mom at forty. Four years later, my adopted daughter had a child, and I became a grandmother at age forty-four. Then she had three more children over the next several years. My birth daughter was nineteen when the last grandchild was born, so the demands of parenting affected what I could offer as a grandparent.
My older daughter and her children have lived in a different class context than my birth child. I have given financial support at points to all the grandchildren but have focused mostly on supporting their mom, both financially and emotionally, trusting that that would help overall. It has, and she has done an amazing job as a working, poor, single mom.
One of the most important decisions I ever made, beyond committing to discharging everything I could to be able to play a good role in this unconventional situation, was to see all of these wonderful people—daughters, grandchildren, and now three great-grandchildren—as my teachers.
USA
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC Community members
(Present Time 206, January 2022)