For CBS’s Lesley Stahl, nothing beats the joy of ‘Becoming Grandma’
There is no relationship quite like the one between a grandparent and grandchild. That’s not exactly a stop-the-presses assertion, of course. But in the hands of Lesley Stahl,
60 Minutes correspondent and, more recently, besotted grandmother, it grows stronger and broader.
With enormous personal honesty, Stahl in Becoming Grandma: The Joys and Science of the New
Grandparenting (Blue Rider Press, 271 pp., out of eee E four) presents an overview of the emotion, sociology and history relating to this sweetest of relationships.
The book is expansive in scope and approach: It’s a mini-memoir on the unexpectedly intense relationship Stahl instantly forms with her two granddaughters, Jordan, 5, and Chloe, 2 (their mother is Stahl’s daughter, Taylor); a paean to the rapturous joys that arise from being a grandparent; a description of research into the benefits of the grandparent bond for grown-up and child; and an essay on new ways of grandparenting.
Much of what she shares is not so much revelatory as validating for all of us who have been surprised by the unanticipated fierceness of our feelings for these new creatures.
She calls on some of her friends and contacts to explain their own post-grandchild metamorphoses, including Tom Brokaw, who acknowledges that when his own children were young, he was too busy “chasing my career and traveling to have a lot of time to spend with them. But now I can make up for that with my grandchildren.”
It’s a regularly repeated refrain.
She writes of that puzzling phenomenon we’ve all noticed: women who were strict, mostly joyless moms (which Stahl’s own mother was) who become fun-loving, ball-of-mush grannies (which Stahl’s mother did). Stahl also observes that some women who never bore children of their own often wind up becoming especially involved and gleeful grandparents to their stepchildren’s kids. That was true of Diane Sawyer, Stahl writes, who, as step-granny to four young ones, relishes her role and acts “just as goofy as the rest of us grans.”
She insists that grandchildren can be curative, writing of a colleague with depression, and her own husband, with Parkinson’s, as having experienced relief from their symptoms with the simple addition of a grandchild to their lives.
There are some sweeping generalizations in her writing that seem uncharacteristic of her reputation — even given her obvious enthusiasm for her grandma role. And the book covers a huge amount of territory, some of which can feel tenuously connected to the theme.
But readers will be hardpressed not to get caught up in her obvious zest for the topic.