Usually when I go to my swim class at the YMCA a half hour early, I fall into easy conversation with other women who are early. We float around chatting about life waiting for the instructor to bellow out our first exercise. Usually those chats are light, surfacy kind of conversations with little emotion and less depth.
Not so today.
I found myself caught in a trio, me being the third, of grandmothers, two of whom were having mild to severe grand kid issues with grand daughters.The grands are in their early twenties.
The first has a grand daughter getting married next week. What a coincidence. So do I! We had that in common but there the similarity stopped. In asking about the venue, rehearsal dinner, etc. she told me she had no idea what the plans were. She had not been invited to a rehearsal dinner and thought perhaps there wasn't one, but in thinking that through, felt that there might be and she and her husband had not been invited. She is clueless about the big event and was both hurt and upset that no one had at least given her some basics about the day. She went on to say how she had spent a lot of time with this grand daughter throughout her life and felt shut out now. She felt it had something, like a lot, to do with her daughter keeping plans and events to herself.
When the first grand mother paused for breath the second began and wasted no time in telling us what an ungrateful little snob (my words) she had for a grand daughter. There was, what we call in the church world, a "come to Jesus" meeting at Christmas where the grand daughter accused her of liking her grandson better than she liked her and doing more for him than for her. Instead of denying it, like I would have, she proceeded to tell her grand daughter why that might be so: the grand son calls when he doesn't need anything, visits when he doesn't need anything, hugs her when he doesn't need anything, and on and on.
I felt a little sorry for the first grand mother. I felt a little scared of the second for the more she talked the more agitated she became and the more awful the grand daughter became. And the swim class would not start for ten more minutes.
Yikes! I looked around for the swim instructor to begin the class and save me.
When the rants had subsided, grand mother one looked at me and said, "You do not have these issues with your grand daughters." She said it as a fact, not a question. I guess I've been talking about them now and then.
As I sit here typing, my husband has come in with the mail. Included is a thank you note from our soon to be grand-son-in-law thanking us for "being so generous and taking such good care of us. You two are truly appreciated and loved."
How blessed I am. I almost always recognize blessings but realize the magnitude of them when I listen to others' experiences and then hold in my hand a hand-written expression of thanks.
But then I had a brilliant idea...one of these lightning bolts that one wonders 'where did that come from?' Why not offer a seminar for grand daughters on how to treat grand parents? Girls of 12 and older could be enrolled to help stave off some of this animus of the later teen/early twenty years. The YMCA, the Girl Scouts, and churches, could offer this training. Who would teach it? Why, these four grand daughters of mine of course.
And that's what I think about it.
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