The grandmother who does not babysit
By Lorna Beckwith, Editor · · 2 min read
She is sixty-eight, she has a standing tennis game on Tuesday mornings and a reading group on Thursday afternoons, and when her daughter asked, in the careful voice that means the asking has been rehearsed, whether she could take the baby two days a week so that the daughter could go back to work, she said no.
She said it kindly. She offered money toward daycare. She offered Saturdays. The daughter said thank you and did not call for nine days.
I have heard this story, with variations, from four women in the last two years, and in every version the grandmother is described, by someone, as selfish, and in every version the grandmother knows it, and in three of the four she has started to wonder whether the word fits.
The case for her
She raised her children. That is the first thing she says and it is usually said defensively, as though it needed defending, and I would like to say it on her behalf without the defensiveness: she raised her children, for twenty-some years, and the work does not carry a second obligation on the far side of it, however much the culture she grew up in assumed it did. Her mother did Tuesdays and Thursdays. Her mother also did not play tennis, or have a reading group, or, as far as my friend can remember, have an afternoon that belonged to her between 1951 and the day she died.
There is also the plain matter of capacity. A baby two days a week at sixty-eight is not the same proposition it was at forty-four. She knows what her back does now. The daughter does not, yet, and will.
The case against her, which she makes herself
The reservations are hers, not mine. She says that the baby will be two before she knows it, and that Tuesdays and Thursdays are where a grandmother becomes somebody to a child rather than somebody who arrives at Christmas. She says her daughter did not ask for money. She says, and this is the one that keeps her up, that she is not sure the tennis is worth what it is costing her, and that she is not sure she could give it up now without the giving-up being the whole relationship from here on.
I do not have a ruling. I notice that the women who said yes to the two days are, two years on, tired and necessary and, most of them, glad; and that the one who said no has kept her Tuesdays and keeps explaining them, to people who did not ask, which is not the behavior of someone at peace. I notice also that the daughter went back to work, with daycare, and that the baby is fine, and that the nine days ended, and that nobody has mentioned them since, which in that family means they will be mentioned at a funeral.