Of grandparents and grandchildren

When I took Clinical Pastoral Education, we did an exercise in mapping our family diagram. Each participant told their family story using game pieces to illustrate. There were special pieces to designate parents, brothers, and sisters. There were ways to illustrate death and divorce if those events had been a part of your family story. Interestingly, the planners of the exercise had made no distinction between children who were born to a family and those who were adopted. That part of the exercise didn’t matter to me. In my family the distinction between entering as adopted or born was not drawn. We were seven. The first two were adopted when they were two and nine years old. Three years later a third sister was born to our family. I was born another two years later, followed by another brother two and a half years after me. The last two boys were 2 and 4 when they were adopted, fitting right into the pattern of the younger children being 2 years apart.

My family is even more complex than that. The youngest two were born to my oldest sister, so they were my nephews who became my brothers. At no time were there more than six children living in our house at the same time and that was just a brief period. Most of the time we were five living at home. The time allotted for each participant in the class expired before I had finished telling my family story and the story was left hanging for the purposes of the class. I had shared enough to illustrate that I, like the others in the class, had come from a unique set of circumstances. There was probably some other point to the exercise, but there was a lot in Clinical Pastoral Education that escaped me.

I grew up with a strong conviction that what families do is to care for children whenever there is a need. When nieces and nephews came to our house they were treated as extensions of our family. The wide spread in ages between my oldest sister and my youngest brother was simply accepted by me. It was just the way our family was.

When we had children of our own, I was much more aware of families where children were being raised by their grandparents. In some of these cases, the parents raised two sets of children, first raising their children and after a break raising grandchildren.

Now that I am a grandfather, I have even deeper appreciation for my parents and for others who have raised or who are raising grandchildren. I was 58 when our first grandchild was born, I have peers who had their first grandchild in their forties, so I know we are older than some grandparents. Still, we are healthy and active. But I can’t imagine having full-time responsibility for young children. We love to have our grandchildren in our home for visits, but usually we have the additional assistance of their parents. Being solely responsible for our grandchildren would be a major shift in our lives.

Of course adopting my two youngest brothers was a major shift in my parents’ lives. They did a wonderful job of helping us older children adjust to the change, but looking back, I understand that they took on a lot of hard work with those adoptions. I am grateful that they were willing to invest in family without limits. They taught me a great deal about family life through the choices they made.

Our house seems pretty quiet today after a visit from our daughter and our grandson. I miss the two year old running into the kitchen yelling “Papa!” with a big hug for me when he got up in the morning. I miss his invitation to “say thanks” before each meal and the way he closed his eyes as we held hands and said our prayer. I miss the deep joy of watching our daughter be such an excellent mother. But I also enjoy the quiet a little bit. I enjoy having the books I put on the table beside my chair being in the same place with the bookmarks in the same pages as I left them. I like being able to leave a project on my desk knowing it will be waiting when I return. I’m not unhappy that our children are raising our grandchildren in their own homes.

Not every set of grandparents have the luxury we enjoy. There are plenty of grandparents raising grandchildren in all kinds of different homes and settings all around the world. They do so because circumstances demand it. They do so because they love their grandchildren. They sacrifice for the sake of the children and they invest in the future understanding that the human story is always the story of many generations. It isn’t just about us and our time on this earth. We belong to a story that is much bigger and much longer than the span of our own lives.

Although my father raised a couple of his grandchildren, he never met our children. Our son was born six months after he died. He knew that we were expecting, but our son never met his paternal grandfather. He was, however, raised with lots of stories about his grandpa. Both of our children heard many stories over and over again. They have a pretty good sense of who he was and how I was raised. I can recognize bits of his personality in them.

In our lives as pastors we have met families of all different sizes, shapes and configurations. We have witnessed families being reconfigured by divorce, addiction, and tragedy. We have witnessed the resilience of children and their capacity to thrive even when faced with incredible changes. And we have witnessed the love of parents and grandparents as they selflessly give their energy and lives to raise children with love.

Today I salute all who care for children regardless of their ages or life circumstances. Thank you for loving and caring for these precious little ones.

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