AIN'T LIFE GRAND
Grandparents work hard but reap great rewards
My grandchildren call me Boopa. I don't encourage this. But when my grandson, Ewan, was two, he believed I resembled an Oompa Loompa.
For those unfamiliar with the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa Loompas worked in Wonka's factory. The actors who played the Oompa Loompas in the film were little people who had orange skin, white eyebrows and green hair. I don't see the resemblance. But for a two-year-old, it was a short hop from Oompa Loompa to Boopa. To my chagrin, Boopa stuck.
My grandchildren call my wife Bubba. Why, is a mystery. She doesn't even faintly resemble a redneck. But for our grandchildren, there was an easy audible link between the names, and we will be forever known to them as Bubba and Boopa.
We are both in our late 60s, now retired after long careers in journalism. We raised three children of our own during those careers, and if you're a parent I won't have to tell you which of those jobs was the more exhausting.
When our grandchildren arrived, we and the other grandparents in the extended family decided to provide daycare duties for them. We did this for several reasons. We preferred that they be raised by family, not strangers. We wanted our children to avoid the high cost of daycare so they could save money for a down payment on a home. And finally, we did it for the most selfish of reasons. We loved our grandchildren. We wanted to be with them.
It's hard work. It's my job to carry them on my shoulders when they go for walks, to pull them in blankets over the hardwood floors as if they were riding sleds, to push them up the hill in their stroller when they go to the grocery store, to teach them how to dribble a basketball and catch a baseball, to dress them when they go outside, to undress them for their naps, to read them
stories before their naps, to push them on swings and rock them on teeter-totters, to hold their hands while they go up the slide to ensure they don't fall off and to go down the slide with them because, well, it's fun.
There is breakfast to be made, and the debris of breakfast to be swept up off the kitchen floor, and the grandson to take to and from kindergarten, and the two granddaughters, ages two and three, to dress up in the many sparkly princess dresses Bubba has bought for them so that they can perform ballet in the kitchen
while listening to songs from Frozen and Sleeping Beauty. (Their version of ballet consists of spinning in place until they get dizzy and fall down like drunks.)
There is potty training, and diapers to change and bums to wipe. There are tantrums to defuse. In all of this, I'm only a supporting actor. It's Bubba who shoulders the bulk of the duties, and who lavishes such huge portions of love and tenderness on the grandchildren that they cling to her.
By the time their parents pick them up in the evening, we are so
exhausted it's all we can do to eat dinner and trudge to bed. When we tell this to people our age who have no grandchildren, it's not sympathy they express but envy. They crave what we enjoy — the multi-generational contact, the second chance at parenting and the grandparents' sly joy of babying their babies' babies.
COVID-19 complicated all of this. Suddenly, we had to worry about the safety of our bubble. We also had to worry about the bubbles that touched upon our bubble — those of our children's workplaces, those of the other grandparents', and those in our grandson's school where children went unmasked. The possibilities of infection multiplied exponentially. Worse: It was an awful thing to look at one's grandchild and wonder if he or she could be a threat to one's life.
There must be thousands of grandparents in B.C. in the same situation. Yet while registered daycare staff are considered front-line workers by the B.C. government, and thus are eligible for early vaccination, grandparents aren't eligible, even though they provide the same service and are of an age where infection can be life-threatening. Bubba and I knew this going in, and entered into it voluntarily, but still, it rankled.
There is, however, a more edifying dimension in caring for our grandchildren during COVID-19. It's the perspective they have given us. They have lengthened it, and not in terms of an anticipated end to the pandemic, or in terms of months or years, or even in the length of a generation, but in generation upon generation far into the future.
The COVID-19 pandemic is, for most of us, the first concrete manifestation of the global existential threats facing mankind. More dire ones — climate change, extinctions, sea rise, ocean acidification, mass refugee migration and the tensions these phenomena cause that can ignite war — await us.
Well, maybe not Bubba and Boopa. But they certainly await our children and our grandchildren, and the children of our grandchildren, and the children of their children. For a parent and a grandparent, this forever changes their world view and informs everything they know and care about on the most personal of levels, for it's one thing to think of these dire threats as abstracts, but it's another thing entirely to look across the breakfast table one morning and watch the three little ones dawdle over their scrambled eggs, and see the future embodied there in the flesh of your flesh, and in that moment feel an almost unbearable anguish because you know your time on this earth is limited and you won't be there to protect them when their future arrives.