Grandfather Clause
Annegret Hunter on Grumpy Old Men & Their Grandchildren
I wonder sometimes, what they teach these days. My granddaughter does not even know how to lay a table. Imagine, a teenager! Her mother never taught her,” remarks an unhappy friend. “Why don’t you do it?” I say. She gasps: “Oh no, I would never do that. My daughter-in-law would not allow it.”
“What could she possibly have against that?” I counter, astonished. “Just take the girl aside and show her. You are the grandmother.”
My friend shakes her head grimly. “I would never see my granddaughter again.” She drops her voice and painfully goes on: “It already happened with my son. Oh, he takes good care of me, financially, but I am never invited. Haven’t seen his children in years.”
Old Mr. T. has heard the last remarks, nods sadly, and turns away. A few years ago, he used to tell me proudly that he would visit his son and family in the summer, and it changed from “Maybe next year” into “I’ll be around this summer.”
“I gave my child the choice to pick her religion,” once said another friend, also very vocal on another pro-choice issue: “Had that been available when I was young, I would not be a mother now.”
When I met up with her years later, she told me, “I refused to do cheap childcare for a daughter who only wanted money from me, so we lost touch. I went by their place the other day, on a lark. My daughter wasn’t in, her kids were. Adults now, strangers. I said, ‘Hey, you don’t know me, but I’m your grandmother!’ They just gawked, didn’t say a word, so I left.” She laughed, a brittle sound, and bitter.
The saddest truth of all is the fact that, only too often, the grandparents supported their children into what they became.
The Grandfather’s Mystery
My father was cut off from his own son’s children, a very painful event, though he never mentioned it. When his second grandson, our first offspring, arrived, there was an ocean between us, and half a year went by before the initial encounter.
We dreaded it. Our bundle of joy turned out to be extremely sensitive to noises, and when startled—a loud laugh might set him off—he would throw up his arms and howl at the top of his well-developed lungs, and it took a long time to calm him down. This made for a very quiet house, where I would stiffen when my well-beloved clanked the cutlery too energetically, and he would go for a walk with the little spoilsport so I could use the vacuum cleaner and rattle the pots.
Annegret Hunter recovered after homeschooling two boys and was pleased to discover she was still a Christian, a wife, and a bookbinder. Her husband Graeme is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
19.4—May 2006
The Culture War Is Between Religious Believers on Both Sides by Howard P. Kainz
14.1—January/February 2001
The Christian Heart of Fatherhood
The Place of Marriage, Authority & Service in the Recovery of Fatherhood by John M. Haas
16.5—June 2003
on the Importance of Fathers to Churchgoing by Robbie Low
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