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Grandparents
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“If becoming a grandmother was only a matter of choice, I should advise every one of you straightway to become one. There is no fun for old people like it.”
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“Grandma ... had a great deal to do with the education of her granddaughters. In general she not so much trained as just shed herself upon us.”
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“A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn't charge more after midnight — or anything before midnight.”
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“Eating cookies that you bake with your grandmother is one of the greatest social steps one must experience in order to grow up into a decent world citizen, in my opinion.”
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“A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt ... ”
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“On the way to the delivery room, I almost changed my mind about having a baby. I wouldn't have found it so hard to go ahead with it if I had realized that having a baby was the only way I could ever become a grandmother.”
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“Over the river, and through the wood, / To grandfather's house we go; / The horse knows the way, / To carry the sleigh, / Through the white and drifted snow.”
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“Over the river, and through the wood, / Now Grandmother's cap I spy! / Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done? / Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!”
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“A mother becomes a true grandmother the day she stops noticing the terrible things her children do because she is so enchanted with the wonderful things her grandchildren do.”
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“A child who has a grandparent has a softened view of life, the feeling that there is more to life than what we see, more than getting and gaining, winning and losing.”
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“Grandchildren are the dots that connect the lines from generation to generation.”
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“Grandpa ... was ever ready to cheer and help me, ever sure that I was a remarkable specimen. He was a dear old man who asked little from life and got less.”
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“My grandmother was unsurpassable at sitting. She would sit on tombstones, glaciers, small hard benches with ants crawling over them, fragments of public monuments, other people's wheelbarrows, and when one returned one could be sure of finding her there, conversing affably with the owner of the wheelbarrow.”
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“I wish I could be a grandmother. It is wanton extravagance to have had a youth with no one to tell of it to when one grows old.”
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“... in my grandparents' house it was a distinction and a mournful pleasure to be ill. This was partly because my grandfather was always ill, and his children adored him and were inclined to imitate him; and partly because it was so delightful to be pitied and nursed by my grandmother.”
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“... to know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.”
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“Grandmother was rather severe with us ... Inappropriate conduct was bad manners, bad manners were bad morals, and bad morals led to bad manners, and there you were, ringed with fire, and no way out.”
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“You will e'er long know that a Grandchild is almost as near to your Heart as your own children; my little Boys delight me and I should feel quite melancholy without them.”
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“Whenever you come to have Grandchildren, you will scarcly know any difference between them & your own children, particularly if you should be under the same roof with them.”
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“There is nothing that enlivens us so much as having these little creatures round us --”
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“I begin to think Grandparents not so well qualified to Educate Grandchildren as Parents. They are apt to relax in their Spirit of Government, and to be too indulgent.”
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“Uncles, and aunts, and cousins, are all very well, and fathers and mothers are not to be despised; but a grandmother, at holiday time, is worth them all.”
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“All children are my children. I teach them songs and whatever else I can. That's what Grandmothers are for — to teach songs and tell stories and show them the right berries to pick and roots to dig. And also to give them all the love they can stand. No better job in the world than being a Grandmother!”
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“Oh, I never meant, in my old age, to become subject to the thrall of a love like this; it is almost dreadful, so absorbing, so stirring down to the deeps. For the tiny creature is so old and wise and sweet, and so fascinating in his sturdy common sense and clear intelligence; and his affection for me is a wonderful, exquisite thing, the sweetest flower that has bloomed for me in all my life through.”
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“Helped grandma with the weekend shopping. She was dead fierce in the grocer's; she watched the scales like a hawk watching a fieldmouse. Then she pounced and accused the shop assistant of giving her underweight bacon. The shop assistant was dead scared of her and put another slice on.”
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“Passover, I think, will always be my happiest holiday, because no matter how old I'll be, at Passover time I'm always the little girl at my grandma's house.”
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“A house needs a grandma in it.”
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“There were, in the beginning, seven children, each rising out of my great-grandmother's darkness every twelve or thirteen months like little full moons, following, even in birth, the quirky Jewish calendar. ... My great-grandmother conceived and bore them, I am told, with bemused passivity, as tolerant as the moon must be of her own swellings and thinnings and equally unconscious.”
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“Grandparents are given a second chance to enjoy parenthood with fewer of its tribulations and anxieties.”
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“Through a grandmother's voice and hands the end of life is known at the beginning.”
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“... I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.”
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“... I wish to ask you how you find yourself, on being a grandfather. ... the prospect is worse than the reality ...”
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“... grandparenting is the ultimate second chance ...”
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“When a child is born, so are grandmothers.”
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“I loved grandfather for his silence; / words / He used as sparing as his Sunday hat.”
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“My grandmothers are full of memories / Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay / With veins rolling roughly over quick hands / They have many clean words to say. / My grandmothers were strong. / Why am I not as they?”
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“No one ... who has not known the inestimable privilege can possibly realize what good fortune it is to grow up in a home where there are grandparents.”
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“Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.”
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“Grandma was a kind of first-aid station, or a Red Cross nurse, who took up where the battle ended, accepting us and our little sobbing sins, gathering the whole of us into her lap, restoring us to health and confidence by her amazing faith in life and in a mortal's strength to meet it ...”
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“I didn't anticipate the primal quality of my pleasure, the raw physicality of it, the way my whole body leaps forward when I see my grandsons after a few days' absence.”
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“... it seems to me that grandmothers have a very special place in the affections of young children. Not obliged, as parents are, to provide food, shelter, protection, advice and discipline, day in and day out, they can afford to be much more easy-going. The unexpected present, the extra outing, the little treat of a favourite meal prepared especially to delight the child and, above all, the time to listen to youthful outpourings, all make a grandmother a loved ally. It is hardly surprising that the bond between grandmother and grandchild is often stronger than that between parent and child.”
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“I loved their home. Everything smelled older, worn but safe; the food aroma had baked itself into the furniture, and the lace curtains, which had seen sunlight in Galicia, smelled like chicken soup.”
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“It had not occurred to me that she would sleep in my room: I am eight and she is nearly eighty. ... I've acquired not the doting Nana of my dreams, but an aged kid sister. Within hours, the theft and rivalry begin.”
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“If your baby is 'beautiful and perfect, never cries or fusses, sleeps on schedule and burps on demand, an angel all the time' ... you're the grandma.”
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“Grandmother, that wonderful name, has always meant teacher in all of our [Ojibwa] society. That's a good distinction and I'm proud of it.”
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“Grandpa did everything at his own pace, a speed that my sister and I referred to as 'when snails attack.' ... My grandparents' house was only about ten miles from ours, but the ride there would necessitate sandwiches packed for the trip, and several books to keep us occupied.”
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“There are two types of grandmothers — the ones who feel relieved when they hear the first 'Let's go home' and the ones who feel hurt. The latter are definitely in the minority.”
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“As a grandmother, I've learned that you can't buy love. But your grandchildren are disappointed when you don't try.”
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“There is no time so short as the time between when your kids stop wrecking your furniture and your grandchildren start.”
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“The Baby Boom has spawned an even bigger Grandma Boom. For every baby born, two women turn into grandmas.”
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“Grandmother. Few words are as evocative. It could be argued that its meaning lies as much in the name giver as in the name. Grandmothers, like beauty, lie as much in the eyes and souls of the beholder as in the women themselves. It is the gratitude, love, strength, and dreams that they inspire in their grandchildren that make them grandmothers.”
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“... we'd been calling him Faux Pas, as he is the stepgranddad.”
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“... everybody started calling me Nana. It felt to me like the verbal equivalent of being sent out on the ice floe when my teeth were too worn down to chew animal hides anymore.”
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“I'm a flower, poa, a flower opening and reaching for the sun. You are the sun, grandma, you are the sun in my life.”
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“Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? They have the same enemy — the mother.”
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“Women without children are also the best of mothers, often, with the patience, interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parents, by another adult.”
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“If she and Job had had children they too, by this time, would be all scattered and anyhow. Grown up. Married. And of course making a grandmother of her. Incredible, the things one could be made by other people. Fancy being forced to be a grandmother, whether you liked it or not!”
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“I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them.”
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“Grandmothers are dangerous vehicles of propaganda because they appear harmless. They are the first living antiquities in one's life. ... Beware of grandmothers who teach what cannot be untaught: You'll know them by the dullness of their ways.”
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“If God had intended us to follow recipes, He wouldn't have given us grandmothers.”
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“One could not live without delicacy, but when / I think of love I think of the big, clumsy-looking / hands of my grandmother, each knuckle a knob ...”
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“If it hadn't been for Grandma, we'd have had no ethnic tone at all.”
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“If Grandma Goldman ever smiled, she must have done it in the bathroom with the door locked. She had been the undisputed head of her own family, ruling with an iron hand and a mouth full of rocks.”
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“My grandmother, when she served dinner, was a virtuoso hanging on the edge of her own ecstatic performance. ... She was a little power crazed: she had us and, by God, we were going to eat. ... The futility of saying no was supreme, and no one ever tried it. How could a son-in-law, already weakened near the point of imbecility by the once, twice, thrice charge to the barricades of pork and mashed potato, be expected to gather his feeble wit long enough to ignore the final call of his old commander when she sounded the alarm: 'Pie, Fred?'”
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“I love myself because my grandmother loved me.”
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“A clever, strong-minded grandmother is a power in her family and immediate circle.”
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“Grandmother always made you feel she had been waiting to see just you all day and now the day was complete.”
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“A grandmother is someone who lets you win at cards.”
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“A grandmother is someone who never thinks you've had enough to eat.”
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“A grandmother is someone who is always willing to listen, although she can't always hear.”
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“A grandmother is someone who has hair of silver and a heart of gold.”
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“My mother wants grandchildren, so I said, 'Mom, go for it!'”
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“Grandparents are the great equalizer in a child's life; they are the strong safety in the 'them versus us' game, which pairs grandparent and grandchild against the parent. Mindful of their own child-rearing errors (and acutely aware of those being made daily by their adult child), grandparents become a safe harbor when the sailing gets rough. It offer one that rarity in life — a second chance.”