Wendy Reid Crisp is the editor-in-chief of GRAND magazine, the magazine for grandparents. She has published three books including her most recent When I Grow Up I Want To Be 60.
Tomorrow morning, I’m flying across the country, to New York, to spend a week with my grandsons. (And, not incidentally, their parents, of whom I am also most fond.) The boys are almost-five and almost-three – ages that transform in days, let alone the months that separate each of our visits.
My husband has the same dilemma: his five grandchildren live in New Jersey.
“You could move back here,” says my daughter-in-law, not meaning to her exact house, but somewhere in the region that would make it possible for me to see Cooper as Haman in the Purim pageant and my husband to attend his grandsons’ concerts at Faith Baptist.
We could – let’s suspend the emotional tug for a moment – if, in our mid-60s, we could find employment that would sustain us as easily as we are sustained on the family farm we inherited in far northern California. The farm, while a monument to deferred maintenance, has no associated costs (like renting a parking space), and the village it adjoins has enough potlucks to feed the multitudes. Our water is free; we raise our own sheep; we have chickens. Where in the economic map of greater New York-New Jersey metropolitan region would we find jobs that would provide for us? While we both love – and need – the work we have, we have the luxury of being able to devote our full energies to that work, and not to the competitive political struggles we would confront if we were competing with two younger generations.
We both know well that struggle: I was a magazine editor in New York and my husband was a communications software design for a telephone company. (Are they still called that?) We both thrived on the highly-charged environments of careers.
Today, however, we thrive in an environment of creativity and imagination, unencumbered by a need to move up ladders and mastheads; instead, we are motivated by a desire – an urgency -- to create work of integrity, spirit, and compassion.
To achieve this, we must stay “in culture” – we cannot earn a living while undertaking the stress of re-learning mundane practical details (“Excuse me, where is the produce department?”).
And this reality means separation from our children and our grandchildren. Every day, we re-evaluate and re-consider. The photographs reveal what we are missing: rapidly changing young lives that do not include us. The telephone calls, especially from three-year-olds, bring physical pain to my upper arms – so longing am I to hold them. (“Happy birthday, Nana. Poopyhead.” Raucous giggling. His mother’s voice, “Don’t talk to Nana like that or I won’t let you call her again.” Oh, no, please: he can call me whatever he likes – Poopyhead, hey, I’ve been called worse by people I didn’t even love.)
The grandparents of our neighbors’ children have never seen their grandchildren except on the videos we’ve burned to DVDs and mailed south of the border.
“My mother cries every week on the phone,” my neighbor says. “You can’t believe how sad it is.”
Mmmmm. I think I can.