A Nagging Family Question that Won't Stop Being Asked

Do you ever get a question in your head that keeps asking itself, like an endless loop revolving and repeating over and over. For a long time I've had this question sneaking up on me at odd times. I hear the question and I really haven't attempted to answer it. Why now? Because I was reading several substacks from women who've attended conferences on relationships. They didn't bring up my question, but it hovered around what they discussed.

Here's the question:

Are grandparents important in the lives of their children and grandchildren?

That question leads to several others:

What is the impact of growing up with no relationship with grandparents? 

What is the impact on the grandparents with no or little relationship with extended family? 

The questions touch me personally, because I had almost no experience of grandparenting except a yearly birthday gift in the mail until I was eighteen. That was the cutoff point. 

My mother's parents died when I was an infant so I had only one set of grandparents, my dad's folks. I knew them briefly when Daddy, a naval officer, was stationed as a plant rep at Thompson Products in Cleveland, OH. They lived in Lakewood about half an hour away. We went for Sunday dinners for awhile until my grandmother got tired of cooking for our family of eight: six children which later grew to ten. 

I remember a few unpleasant episodes when something got broken or the dog, I think his name was Terry, nipped one of us. We were probably harassing the poor thing. So those Sunday dinners ended. I also remember happier things: the platform swing in the back yard, the tomato basket filled with fancy empty perfume bottles which still had a little scent inside, the scary basement, the kitchen breakfast nook, the little latched cupboard where the milkman used to leave the bottles of milk and cream. My grandfather who was a church organist sometimes played the piano. He taught all five of his children to play and my dad was organist at the Naval Academy for Mass during his years there. So few memories of my grandparents.

We moved from Cleveland to Falls Church, VA the summer after I finished kindergarten. From that time on, visits from my grandparents were infrequent and we never went back to Cleveland as a family until my aunt Estelle, who lived with my grandparents, died. All I remember about her was that she was powdered and pink and had white hair treated with the bluish rinse so popular in the 1950s to wash away the yellowish tinge. The perfume bottles were probably all hers. It was 1968 when she died and I was a senior in college. My sisters and I spent the weekend of the funeral coloring our hair in the hotel bathroom. 

The number of face-to-face contacts with my grandparents over the years probably amounts to a dozen before my grandmother died and Grandpa was alone in Cleveland. Every adult child had moved away: New York, California, Milwaukee, only my Aunt Rita and her husband were there locally and she died young. After Grandma died Grandpa came to Virginia and lived with us for a short time before going into a nursing home near my parents.

I wonder what those years were like for them when they were alone in Cleveland. They played bridge and Grandma had all kinds of hobbies. She painted, made ceramics, took photographs and developed her own film. She was German to the core, a real Prussian. I was afraid of her so the low contact suited me. On the few occasions they came to visit, I made myself scarce around Grandma. Grandpa, on the other hand, was a storyteller who liked to take us to the candy store and buy those disgusting marshmallow circus peanuts which I loved as a kid. 

But now I go back to my question. Are grandparents important to include in the lives of children? I grew up without them. I wonder what it would have been like had they lived nearby and I had seen them often. Would I have taken piano lessons from my grandfather and perhaps learned to make some German dishes from my grandmother? Who knows.

My husband's family almost all stayed in Wheeling, WV and Larry had a relationship with both sets of grandparents. He used to go over and work in one grandmother's garden every summer. Two completely different childhoods: the military brat who moved every three or four years versus the kid with the large extended family all living within a few miles of each other. 

Does it matter? The only answer I can come up with is the expression to bloom where you're planted. Larry was planted in a stable garden like a perennial that sprouted in the same spot every Spring. I was like an annual planted somewhere different every few years, wherever the seeds were scattered. It is all in God's providence. But my own desire after growing up the way I did, was to desire stability. I didn't want to raise my children like nomads. And so we embraced Virginia where we spent over thirty years in one parish and our children could make lifelong friends. 

I don't regret my upbringing. Everything is according to God's will. But it's interesting to reflect on how our parents' decisions impact us and form us to become the people we are whether we are perennials or annuals or hot house plants. God's garden is filled with different varieties that make the world beautiful and colorful.

Did you know your grandparents? What kind of relationship did you have with them? Did you see them often? Did they help to form your character? I look forward to meeting my grandparents again, especially my mom's whom I never knew at all except through her sharing her own memories. I beg for both sets of grandparents to pray for me and am confident they will. Just as I'm sure St. Joachim and St. Anne prayed for Mary and for all their relatives. That is a joyful duty for all of us.