This is a risky post. Risky because I’m going to violate one of my own rules of blogging. Don’t write about something you haven’t experienced because if you haven’t lived it, you probably don’t understand it. Grandkids fit into that category for me. While my wife and I have three great grown kids, two married and one in a long term relationship, we are bereft of grandchildren.
The thing is, I like it like that, at least for now. My incredibly fit and tough wife loves the outdoors. We share all kinds of outdoor hobbies and live in a state that has few people but lots of public wilderness to explore. We hike marked trails, there are hundreds of those. We bushwhack where no trails exist to find waterfalls and canyons and rock formations that have been tagged with GPS coordinates. We also explore the lazy way on our Polaris RZR off road all terrain vehicle. Arkansas has some amazing trail systems for ATV’s as well as thousands of miles of forest service roads that are approved for off road vehicle use. We love to fish and generally do pretty well at keeping our freezer stocked with tasty filets. Sometimes we even head out West to ski. We have been visiting national parks during their shoulder (less busy) months, including Big Bend and New River Gorge so far this year. And because we can, we rarely plan any of these things more than a week out. We’ll just be sitting at the breakfast table and one of us will suggest heading out on a several thousand mile road trip designed to either see one or more of our kids or a destination like a national park or both. We will head out with no reservations and no idea really of how long we will be gone or what we will add to our travel agenda along the way. All of that is to say we like the time flexibility that being financially independent and no longer tied to an employer provides us.
And what does that have to do with grandkids? I can explain it this way, I think. Forty-three years ago when my wife and I married we did not feel the need to have children. We enjoyed being able to do things with our childless couple friends. We could go skiing or travel spontaneously as long as we could manage the time off of work. Because, other than our jobs, nothing constrained our choices about how and where we spent our time. It was a glorious time of freedom and helped build our relationship and friendship into something that would last the rest of our lives. We had a great seven year period before we decided that we did indeed want to have children. We knew that it would constrain our future choices but when we weighed the costs against the joy we felt little ones would bring it wasn’t even close, we chose children.
We never regretted the choice, in fact we made it three times. Maybe a time or two in the teen years I wondered….but no, it was one of our best decisions. Like history, life repeats itself. And now in our early retired years we enjoy the same freedom as our early married years before kids. In fact we enjoy that in a 10X way because we not only have all our time free but we’ve got enough money to do almost anything we can imagine. And its wonderful. I kind of dreaded my sixties for most of my life because I’d be so old. But so far they have been the best years of my life. We are still fit enough to do whatever we want and smart enough to make wise choices. It reminds me so much of how we felt in our early married, childless, years. And like then, before we were ready to have kids, we didn’t want them. And then we did. I think right now that’s where we are, we don’t want grandkids just yet. But when and if they come I think it will be like when we had kids. We looked back and wondered how we got by without them to love on.
What little I know about grandkids comes from what I remember as having been one, and what I’ve seen in my senior adult friends who have them. And it is a lot like what I know about children. I have friends who have happy, successful children and I have friends who lost their children to drugs or crime or bad personal choices. Parents who rejoice in their children’s lives and those who are haunted by what could have been. I think there is a range of outcomes for grandparents too. I see two main camps of grandparent behavior. One is what I consider grandparent overload. I could name a few of our friends who fall into this camp. It might be voluntary or it might be guilt fueled but some grandparents I know have ceased to have a life outside of their grandchildren. These are grandparents who become de facto day care workers for their children’s children. Unpaid at that. In fact not only unpaid but expected to foot the bill for feeding and transporting their grandkids all week. And on weekends they often become babysitters so their kids can enjoy their days off of work. Some of these are people who we befriended before they retired and before grandkids. Even though they had demanding jobs they still found time to enjoy hobbies they loved. But something happened when grandkids came along, they stopped doing most of that because they found themselves with a new job, being parents to their grandkids. In extreme examples they actually took their own grown children back into their home and helped raise the grandkids because the grown child isn’t capable of adulting enough to do it.
Just last night on the pickleball courts two little grandkids of a couple we are friends with were running around on the courts unsupervised. They and their unmarried and pregnant mother are living with our friends across the street from the courts because our friends can’t stand to see the grandkids impoverished. I have another retired friend who legally adopted his granddaughter because his daughter was not a functioning parent. While he should be in decent financial shape he is putting a kid through college in his seventies. I do not blame the victims here, they really have no choice when their kids will not or can not adequately care for the grandkids. In fact they probably deserve medals for being selfless.
There is another way of grandparenting that appeals to me much more. And that’s what I observe our most successful grandparent friends do. In most cases these friends do not have local grandkids because our rural area doesn’t produce enough quality jobs to make it easy for kids to stay here after college. However, they go to great lengths to stay involved in their grandchildren’s lives. Two of my friends for instance bought condos in the same city as their grandkids. Their kids live hours away from here so they get to choose when they are local grandparents and when they are distant ones, I think that’s a pretty wise way to go. A third bought an RV and they go to a park close to their grandkids pretty often, that’s a less expensive way to accomplish the same thing. If and when we are grandparents, assuming none of our progeny return to our area, we’ll most likely do something like these friends have done. Probably more along the lines of VRBO stays. We are already building a cabin in the middle of nowhere and I don’t think we want three residences.
So if you are old enough to conceive of the idea of having grandkids or if you already have them what’s your take on how they fit into your life?
Is life after grandkids way different than your life before?
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