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Granny rage could seriously damage your summer
Now that August is here, how tempting it feels to plan a romantic escape to somewhere exotic, first dumping the children on granny. Unfortunately it is a temptation that will be hotly resisted - by granny. More and more grandmothers are recognising that they don't want to be used as unpaid help and are beginning to say so loudly. This isn't only my impression: a survey was published last week saying much the same thing.
So much for all our assumptions about dear old grey-haired granny, basking in the presence of her children's babies in the twilight of her days. Another conventional piety hits the dust: granny is far more likely these days to be expensively tinted, toned and busy and suffering from a new social disorder - acute grannyrage.
Older women seem increasingly angry that their daughters and daughters-in-law feel they have an unquestioned claim on their time as childminders. It infuriates them still more to be made to feel that grannies who challenge that assumption are unnatural and unloving or, worse still, selfish. This rage is even more bitter when the daughter or daughter-in-law has a career of her own and leaves granny holding the babies while she continues her unmaternal, child-light life, skipping from the boardroom to Mauritius or Tenerife.
I have a surprising number of acquaintances in their sixties who are consumed with granny rage. Several say they wouldn't dream of having the grandbabies to stay without the nanny or au pair coming as well. One of the wheezes of daughters and daughters-in-law, apparently, is to give the help time off when the children are dispatched to granny - which, of course, means that the young mother never has to face a moment without nanny herself.
This cunning plan seems to arouse particular resentment and one can see why. It is an obvious form of exploitation, made all the worse for being taken for granted. One woman even says she has recently moved into a smaller house in the country precisely so that there won't be enough room for the grandchildren to stay.
Grown-up children in their turn are aghast at granny rage. They are amazed and furious that their mothers and mothers-in-law can think of something better to do than looking after their grandchildren. The young (or youngish) parents watch proudly while their offspring tread soggy crumbs into granny's carpet, smear the furniture with yogurt and stagger about sucking obsessively at a bottle of fruit juice, like a vagrant wino, stopping only to wail or shriek. Meanwhile, the grandparents long to soothe their shredded nerves with nicotine or alcohol but know that both are absolutely forbidden on childcare duty by the young parents who, though lax with their own children, are extremely strict with their ageing parents. Then they wonder why their little darlings aren't always entirely welcome.
Curiously enough, my own mother was immensely tolerant of all that and let her many grandchildren create havoc in her house. The more mess and the more activity, the happier she and they seemed.
But she did secretly disapprove of the slummy, disruptive way in which contemporary children are allowed to behave and the chaos and clutter which they and their disorganised mothers bring with them. And she did tell me that some of her friends were exploited quite shamelessly by their adult children.
Looking after children is very tiring. Contemporary children are particularly tiring, since most of their parents have little concept of routine or regular meals. Broken nights are bad enough the first time round, even with the joy that one's own babies bring; sleep deprivation is much harder to endure in late middle age, as older mothers find as well.
So, too, is the physical disruption: after a certain age one feels one is through with kiddie-proofing the electric sockets and being constantly on anxious alert for damage and injury. Patience fades with time. Then there's the boredom of children, not often mentioned. The most beloved children can be very tedious in more than small doses and somehow when one has moved beyond the frustrations of a child-centred life to the wider interest and freedom of an adult-centred life, it is hard to bear them again.
Tangled up in all this are several important and recent social changes. One is the stress caused by contemporary liberalism in child-rearing. Another has to do with age. Grannies and grandpas today may look younger and be fitter, but they are actually older than they used to be. Now that women have babies in their thirties and forties, new grandparents are likely to be in their sixties, even in their early seventies. I know several mothers and fathers in their early fifties with very young children, so the grandparents could easily be in their eighties. However fighting fit, as so many older people now are, they are not likely to have much excess physical energy. When did you last climb a tree? And although not so strong as the young, many of the grannies are still pursuing their brilliant careers or new interests and are extremely busy.
Then there is the problem of childcare in its new form. Until quite recently there was not much competition for nannies, minders, nursery places and au pairs. Working-class women made do, somehow, often with help from family and granny. Better-off women either didn't work or could afford nannies or both. Now that most middle-class women work and all women have better prospects of well paid work, there is immense competition for childcare.
It has become very scarce and extremely expensive. Working-class nan has always been volunteered for this job; recognising this, the government is actually proposing to pay her. Now it is the turn of middle-class and upper-middle class granny to be volunteered in a way that is quite new and she has very mixed feelings, to put it mildly.
If she never had the chance to work or if she stayed home to look after her own children, putting her career on the back burner meanwhile, she might not feel like helping a younger woman who refuses to make the sacrifices she had made; that would be losing out twice.
She might feel actively jealous or she might simply feel she had done her bit.
Alternatively, if her opportunity has at last come to go back to her abandoned career, or to travel to all those places like Mauritius that she couldn't get to as an encumbered mother, or to take up clock golf, she will not want anybody else's babies to stop her. Not even her own grandchildren. The last thing a stay-at-home mummy wants is to turn into a stay-at-home granny. Besides, the pensions crisis means that many grannies won't be enjoying a comfortable retirement but will be working until they drop.
It is very odd that the post-feminist new mothers of today do not apply feminist standards to their own mothers' lives. I am a career woman, they seem to think, but you are merely a granny. This must be the first generation in this country in which this has happened. Previous feminists were more considerate of women who went before. And that is why we have the first response to this new development: granny rage.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, August 04, 2002 | Comments (0)
