Helping family members a privilege, not a hardship
Boomers benefit from looking out for aging parents and overtaxed children
As I write this, it is 7 a.m. and dark as night outside, and on the den’s big flatscreen TV are The Wiggles.
If you are unfamiliar with The Wiggles, it is, ostensibly, a children’s show out of Australia staffed by a cast of four irrepressibly and, I suspect, insanely chipper adults whose costumes resemble Star Trek uniforms, and whose singing and dancing and cloying gee-whizziness makes me want to smash them in their mouths.
They have, however, the opposite effect on toddlers, who love them. The Wiggles show — and I am not making this up — is so popular it earned almost $30 million one year. And while I say it is ostensibly for children, it is, in reality, a show for frazzled parents who resort to narcotizing their little ones with some Wiggles TV time so Mom or Dad can have Just One Damn Hour To Themselves.
If there is anyone out there who would offer the opinion that plopping your toddler in front of the TV for an hour is a bad thing, here’s a thought: Shut up. Raising toddlers is exhausting.
And so, here we are this morning watching the Wiggles sing their big hit, Romp Bomp A Stomp. My one-year-old grandson, who is sitting on my lap while I write, and whose distracted kicking of my keyboard has somehow called up a toe fungus ointment ad, stares hypnotized at the TV screen. The crayon-coloured world of the Wiggles bounces off the den walls. I sip my coffee and write. The boy’s head bobs in time to Romp Bomp A Stomp. This is my life now.
As grandparents, we have endeavoured to help his parents in the one small way we can: we babysit their child through the week. If we were salaried employees, this would be more properly called daycare.
We wake at 6 a.m. and, depending on whether we go to his house or he comes to ours, we take him off his mother’s hands at 7 a.m. She then heads off to work. (The boy’s father leaves for work at 6 a.m.) When I don’t have to write or do interviews, the babysitting chores are evenly divided between my wife and myself. She feeds, clothes and plays with him, and reads to him, and changes his diapers, and tucks him in for his nap, while it’s my job to occasionally take him for a walk through the neighbourhood so the gorgeous young mothers walking their children can smile sweetly at us and say how adorable we look together. I should be ashamed of myself, but at my age, I’m, you know, not.
His parents are in their early 30s, and they complain about the same things young parents have always complained about and always will — lack of sleep, exhaustion, the insane cost of living and the fact that, strangely, they no longer have the appetite to party like they used to. Responsibility has seeped into their bones.
My wife and I went through the same thing at their age, and as young parents, we, too, leaned heavily on our children’s grandparents. They babysat when our jobs took us away from home, and we were one of those lucky couples who never had to pony up for the cost of daycare.
There were other costs — a sometimes uncomfortable proximity, and turf wars over who had the right to say how the children should be raised — but the payoff came in the form of a strengthened sense of family, of its continuance and its generational patterns, of the mix of obligation and willingly volunteered help it demands.
We all benefited, especially the grandchildren and the grandparents, whose mutual adoration continues to this day. The grandmother, now a widow, is 90 and still lives in her house, while many of her contemporaries and friends wait for death in old-age homes where family visits are rare. Her grandchildren, meanwhile, call on her through the week and have dinner with her every Sunday, because they want to.
As we do, too. We find ourselves helping her as much as we do our children and grandchild — mowing her enormous lawn, keeping on eye on her finances, driving her to her doctors and the grocery store. I have read enough stories to know we are part of a demographic phenomenon, of boomers bemoaning the fact they are the Sandwich Generation caught between caring for their elderly parents and their own children.
I have wondered at that bemoaning. What exactly would they expect life to be otherwise? The neat excising of both generations from their lives so they might enjoy that villa in Florence? An unencumbered retirement? A cheque that can be written absolving them of all further familial obligations? I am not so saccharine to believe money doesn’t matter, but I know family matters more.
When I am old, when I am on my death bed, I want my children and grandchildren to be there for me, and none others.
I am not so saccharine to believe money doesn’t matter, but I know family matters more.