Jean Kittson : Love Springs Eternal
Going from caring for parents to caring for grandchildren

One day we didn’t have a grandma in the family and the next day we did and it was me. I thought I was done with my carer’s role for a time, but I wasn’t. 

A strange thing happened when I staggered from the room where my mother had just died. I passed the hospital auxiliary stall in the foyer. They were selling crocheted coat hangers. My mother always bought us crocheted coat hangers (which we all know are the ONLY coat hangers that clothes don’t fall off), and so I stopped and bought three crocheted coat hangers in her honour. One for myself and one for each of my daughters.  

Then, for no rational reason, I also bought a couple of hand-knitted baby jumpers, a baby’s bonnet and some booties. I remember as I shoved them into the back of my wardrobe thinking “Why did you do that?”. 

A few days later my daughter quietly told me she was pregnant. 

Spooky. Right?   

Mum dies; my daughter is pregnant. Isn’t this drawing the circle of life a little too tightly? Reincarnation perhaps? 

I began imagining what it might be like to peer into this new baby’s eyes and see my mother peering back. Would I ever be able to relax with this baby if I thought it was mum?  

Yes, I was clearly delusional from sleep deprivation, grief and trauma and luckily my daughter was having a boy, and even though Mum could equally have chosen to come back as a male, this was enough to ease my sharper reincarnation fears.  

Thankfully, by the time the baby was born, I was able to put the idea that mum had something to do with it almost completely out of my mind. Yet, perversely, we now spend a lot of time with this beautiful baby boy trying to identify family traits. A familiar smile or expression or head shape? Eyebrow configuration, ears, nose, feet, there is not an adorable part of him that we have not inspected and found similarities with ourselves, our parents, even family in photos from 150 years ago.  

Other grandparents tell me this familial scrutiny continues as the grandchildren grow. They love to sing – just like a grandfather sang.  Love to read – just like a great-grandmother always did. They are natural swimmers, performers, builders or bakers? Always the positive attributes are the ones inherited. If he has a temper?  That comes from the other side of the family, naturally.  

Perhaps this is a biologically irresistible ritual, identifying this baby as belonging to our tribe.  

Perhaps this is simply an outcome of the deep bond one feels with grandchildren. A peaceful, pure and healing love. 

A totally different type of caring role to one where everything is diminishing and changes are mostly in the ‘oh no’ direction. With young people it is a flourishing, where one looks forward eagerly to every new change. 

First smile. First laugh. First roll. First crawl. First spoonful of food. Exciting and wonderful.  

Obviously, I have the zeal of a newly hatched grandparent. A P-plate G-ma. In fact, L-plate. 

I have a 6-month-old grandson, a baseball hat that reads G-ma, a very nice hand-me-down pram from the neighbours, that gets wheeled from room to room, double parked against various bits of furniture, and my spectacles are bent skew-whiff from regularly being dragged off my face and dropped to the floor. 

I constantly have the urge to brag because I know that my new grandson is the most adorable and lovable baby EVER. And while I will always agree that your grandchildren are gorgeous and cute, mine is more so because he is mine.  

Sadly, I am unable to show you the latest pic where he is trying to remove my hearing aid and bottom lip with his tiny scratchy nails, which is just sooooo loveable, because he also dropped my phone.  

I am now hoping mum is here so I can share this newfound understanding of being a grandparent. Getting another go at supporting and guiding a young person. Without all the stress of parenthood. Even if it is often more washing and tidying up than dandling. It only takes a few moments of calm eye contact to feel that a deep connection is at work.  We can all do it. We don’t have to be grandparents to connect with the young people around us. We just have to be elders in their community with the opportunity, time, patience and interest. 

Once we all had elders in our lives, whether we wanted them or not. We lived in villages with elders who would teach us things about life so that we weren’t constantly crushing our limbs trying to reinvent the wheel. 

In the old days it really was a village that raised us and now in our world of nuclear families we are often scattered far and wide, away from the extended family and those who might love us, isolated and remote from that extended wisdom and guidance.  But every community; a street, a local café, a local club, has its elders, often us, often with the experience to be useful to new parents and the time to take an interest in young people for who they are and who they will eventually be, and what they may eventually contribute to the community.  

The relationship between young and old is profound and deeply valuable. And it’s not just “Old peoples’ home for 4-year-olds” – it continues to run like a river through their entire lives.  Listening to the speeches from all the grandchildren at my parents’ funerals was a revelation. A new understanding that the relationship they had with mum and dad, their grandparents, was of a very different order to the relationship I had with them. They had provided the grandchildren with an understanding of themselves and their values and given them an unconditional love. As parents we hope that is what we are providing but a loving word is often dependent on whether or not they have picked up their wet towels.  

Elders with or without grandchildren can contribute to the young people in our community. There are wonderful organisations like the Raise Foundation which provides mentoring in school and relies on volunteers. They train and support all volunteers, and I have been their ambassador for many years, and I know that the volunteers get as much benefit from mentoring as the young people do from being mentored. 

I am now consciously trying to channel both mum and dad; to access the quiet care and love they gave to their grandchildren and also importantly, to get a few tips on how to replicate the little cart that dad built to drag them gently around the garden.  

The original was sadly thrown out when they moved. I knew it would come in handy!  

Just as an idea – please look at the wonderful RAISE FOUNDATION – they need you.