Grandmother Coach

The Grandmother Coach

Are you hoping for grandchildren? Waiting for grandchildren? Giving up on ever having grandchildren? What would you do if in the midst of the fullness of your career you found yourself swimming in grandchildren

I wasn’t going to get married again. I was fifty-five in 1992 when Don, my husband of thirty-five years died. I was determined to learn to live alone. In 1997, at age sixty, I surprised myself by walking down the aisle to marry Chuck Finney, a seventy-two-year-old widow. I had known Chuck and his wife Jocelyn for years. She died from a lengthy illness less than a year after Don’s death from an equally drawn-out battle with cancer. Soon after both funerals, Chuck and I got together to share our stories of giving comfort to our best beloveds through months of illness and suffering. We were in contact as we each worked through our grief and the tangles of probate. Once I had sold the six-thousand square-foot home Don and I had raised our family in and shed the physical trappings of a long marriage, Chuck’s and my relationship shifted from pity-partners to lovers. Living together was not an option for him, a proper old school gentleman.

During our respective brief widowhood, our adult children had been busy. My four daughters married. Three grandchildren had been born and two more were on the way. His four children had already produced four little children and two more were on the way. At the altar we committed to co-grandparent the growing number of babies and toddlers, Bells and Finneys.

I could feel resistance to that promise in every part of my body. Wasn’t I free at age sixty to travel the world with this lovely man who had the income to do just that? The only model for grandmothering I had was my own mother. She had dropped anything and everything to take care of my four daughters, even taking them home with her two-hundred-and-fifty miles away for days, even weeks at a time. My father said to me when he visited the hospital where I gave birth to our second daughter, “Now I know what daughters are for. They give me grandchildren!”

My parents’ playbook wasn’t going to work for me. I was ready to play and expand my career. How could I find right relation, right balance between career/new marriage and our commitment to co-grandparenting when the births of these new beings thrilled me so.

Being present when these precious infants came into the world was one of the greatest experiences of my life, each a powerful birthing story. Two babies born six hours apart to my two older daughters had me sleeping a few hours between the late afternoon birth of a little girl and the early morning arrival of a baby boy. In 1998, a year after Chuck and I married, four babies were born! We were present for each of them, nine assisted by mid-wives in the home.

We both wanted to develop strong bonds with each grandchild, nurture their individuality, appreciate them unconditionally. Would that become a full-time occupation? We didn’t want that. So, what, then, would we do?

I sought out an astrologer to help me understand my future. She pointed out that the House dominated my next and last phase of life. My role: the matriarch. “No,” I wailed. “How can I do that without losing myself?” I had two friends who had left their careers to move in with their adult children and become the primary caregiver to their grandchildren. Not for me. By 2002 we had fifteen grandchildren with whom we were in close contact. They all lived in the immediate area

Together my astrologer/grandmother coach developed a handful of strategies to enhance my relationship with each grandchild while leaving plenty of space for my career and our married pleasures. The strategies have created lasting bonds. These fifteen grandchildren are in their twenties now; three are thirty-plus. Great-grandchildren number four and I am in their lives.

Strategy I: Plan events involving several of the grandchildren. Create anticipation through joint planning sessions. Organize advance preparation. Hold the event. Take lots of pictures. Create memory books and slide shows and pictures. Reminisce about the event afterward. All this without the help of Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram. One group came every Halloween to carve pumpkins. Did their mothers know eight and nine-year-olds were wielding paring knives? Another group came to dye Easter eggs before the annual Easter dinner for all eight families. We saved onion skins and found natural materials to make dye.

Strategy 2: Since our wedding anniversary was the Solstice that became the annual gathering date. When the youngest grandchild was four, we hosted them all for an outing sans parent at the Seattle Center. We stood in the parking lot at Seattle Center’s football stadium as the parents drove up and handed over their children. My Girl Scout leadership came in handy, lining the children up buddy-style, older ones taking the hand of a younger one. We marched to Center House to watch the trains. In those days, miniature train afficionados set up miles of track at eye-level, if you happen to be 8 (we had one nine-year-old, two eight-year-olds, three seven-year-olds, four six-year-olds, a five-year-old and two four-year-olds). We watched whatever show was happening on Center House stage. We rode the merry-go-round over and over. We accompanied each child to their food choice and ate as a group before taking the monorail to Westlake. Their little hands pressed the trains into action in Macy’s window. We made our way to the Sheraton Hotel to inspect the gingerbread castles created by the best chefs in town. I remember watching fifteen little children duck under the velvet rope, straining to keep their hands clasped behind their backs, eyes staring at the Sugar Plum Fairy-like castles. We rested in the Goldilocks Room at the Four Season’s Hotel and then took the bus from downtown to West Seattle, walked the mile up the hill from the bus stop and waited for parents to pick them up. Everyone loved it.

Year after year we met at the Seattle Center. When they outgrew the trains, we focused on the butterfly house and the dinosaurs in the Pacific Science Center. Later in their teens we went to the Experience Music Project, now MoPOP, squeezed into a recording studio to make music together.

Strategy 3: As each grandchild approached twelve, Chuck and I offered a one-week trip to each, alone and without parents. Our first adventure was with Elizabeth Schleh, already fourteen, one of his daughter’s eldest. She wanted to go to Mexico (we had taken the entire family-all eight of children and their children to our time-share in Mazatlán to celebrate Chuck’s eightieth). Climbing the pyramids with Elizabeth outside of Mexico City was a highlight of my life. Riding sure-footed Mexican horses on a vast ranch outside San Miguel de Allende took Chuck back to his youth.

By 2006 when we began the travel adventures, cell phones existed. We were not prepared for how hard it would be to give up daily communication with parents. In retrospect, I would limit contact to once a day at a specific time. Anxious children had difficulty staying present. Others forgot their phones completely. We were not interested in imposing rules but preferred following the interest of each child.

In the summer of 2007, Chuck became ill with cancer. While Chuck was still able to travel, we visited Washington, DC and attended the annual swim of the wild herd of horses at Chincoteague, Virginia. His granddaughter Arielle, already fifteen, loved horses and had been a fan of Misty of Chincoteague by Margaret Henry. Well past the innocence of a twelve-year-old, Arielle used her camera to remain cool in the crazy excitement of watching this annual home-town event. Her requests for activities in the Capitol introduced me to history I might not have chosen: the Holocaust Museum, newly opened—a terrible disturbing experience; the Museum of the US Postal Service described how rural Americans demanded home delivery by driving their tractors to Washington. This action led to the creation of farm-to-market rural routes all over this vast country. The government responded to the people’s demands.

Each travel adventure began with conversations about what the child imagined. Then the planning began followed by the trip itself. Later I published a book on Shutterfly with narrative and pictures. The year four children turned twelve—Grandpa Chuck had died in January 2008—I had to split them up taking two boys to the Mariners’ Spring Training in Pheonix in 2010 (who knew I would enjoy going to six baseball games in a row! And lunch with a pitcher!). The other two wanted castles so we went to Scotland and England in 2011.

I have thirteen photo books on my piano. Paris, the Galapagos, an Amazonian adventure at a research station deep in the Peruvian Amazon watershed, a Florida trip to the Everglades and Cape Canaveral, Montreal and Quebec City with the kid who loved French and learned fencing in middle school, three Hawaiian Islands, two trips to New York City with two different grandchildren, and a week in Ireland with May Killorin that ended in a women’s hostel in Dublin and a U2 concert in the band’s hometown

All these children are in their twenties or thirties now. Here’s a report of how the strategies have turned out.

Strategy I: After years of growing up and away from such things as dyeing Easter eggs or carving pumpkins recent events proved the lasting quality of these experiences. When one of the grandchildren moved to California, three other girls came over to spend their last time with her at my house. We carved pumpkins! Last fall I heard after the fact that the second oldest granddaughter, now married and living in her own house in south Seattle invited her cousins over to carve pumpkins. They don’t need me to organize them.

Strategy II: The anniversary event on or near December 21st never stopped although the number of grandchildren participating varied. Nearly all of them joined me in 2014 at the Pacific Science Center for the exhibit on Race: Are we so different? about the U.S. concept of race. Thoughtful discussions ensued. For a couple of years, the grandkids who could make it drove to the West Seattle Bowl for a hilarious evening of gutter balls and strikes and eating from the restaurant. The after-party at my house in 2021 turned out to be the most fun so in 2022 they all came here, ordered out for pizza, and played games. These gaming events happen periodically in the home of May and her boyfriend (without me). One of three born in 1997, May owns her own copy of Telestrations, a game that had a table full of children and grandchildren after Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner laughing so hard our ribs ached.

Strategy III: Chuck and I bought this house in West Seattle to be a place where the grandchildren could gather and play together on the back lawn, hold day-old chicks, hunt for Easter eggs, celebrate my summertime birthday eating watermelon and piling into the hot tub. For twenty-five years unique events brought them together. I have sold the house and am moving to a retirement community in two months. Recently nearly all of them came over to say goodbye to the house. Three or four and then others pulled their trip books off the piano comparing and commenting on each other’s experiences. When they had all gone, Alicia, my 2010 Paris companion now twenty-six, told me, “Grandma, the trips we each took when we were young were life changing.”

My memories of each trip compose a tapestry of experiences, unfolding dramas of children on the cusp of becoming young adults. I didn’t get it right every time. I failed at being unconditionally loving and present to each of them at every moment. An often-tight budget forced me to say no to some of the adventures they wanted. I wasn’t always the wise grandmother I wanted to be. The trips changed me for the better. Thanks to my grandmother coach for suggesting meaningful engagement. The help she gave me during our three consultations, helped me spend quality time with my grandchildren while simultaneously running a successful business, traveling to Central America and Europe with Chuck and then friends after his death. I anticipate future travels may be with a grandchild in charge, buying the tickets, renting the car, and making sure I don’t lose my hiking sticks.

I have repairs to make with one grandson and desire closer connections with two others. These relationships in process are evidence that right relations with grandchildren—with anyone—are works in progress. I’ll continue to reach out and to receive through the final days of hospice when the inevitable comes.