Don't mess with my grandkids!
My (edited) interview with Jan Casey, author of The War Artist and five other novels.
During my interview with Jan, a theme emerges. And that is the powerful instinct grandparents seem to develop to protect their grandkids at all costs.
Jan Casey, in addition to writing and working in learning support, is grandmother to nine (!). She is also the author of five novels about the roles women played during the second world war. We originally met on our creative writing MA at Anglia Ruskin University over ten years ago now. I was immediately impressed by (and a little envious of) Jan’s idea to write about the women who built Waterloo Bridge during the war. Five books on, she has proved what a great idea it was! You can find out more about her wonderful books and where to buy them below and read about her inspiration
We meet to talk about grandparenting in the café at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich on a gorgeous autumnal day.
Behind us, in the gallery, amongst other iconic works of art, is one of Henry Moore’s Mother and Child sculptures. It’s a pertinent reminder of the way a mother and child are unified, intertwined, in those early months after birth.
As if to illustrate this, Jan describes the first time she saw her daughter with her new baby.
‘I was worried she wouldn’t know to hold the head up or not to touch the fontanel. It was so hard to believe my child knew what to do with a newborn baby.’
Learning to trust our children with their children is one of the bridges every new grandparent has to cross, and I look at this in more detail below. Jan, however, quickly saw how capable her daughter was, and how it was she who had things to learn.
‘But then of course I realised our children know more than we do. We are the ones who need to be told what to do!’
Grandparenting a grandchild you’ve never met
As Jan and I chat about becoming grandmothers, I pick up a theme I haven’t looked at in very much detail yet. How grandparents are so programmed to care about their grandchildren they may even take on the care of those they’ve never met.
‘When I was a teenager, my family lived in California. My sister disappeared to travel for many years with a cult,’ Jan tells me. ‘The resulting estrangement was a great sadness to all of us, but most of all, to my mother. When we heard, via letters, sometimes months after the event that my sister had given birth to another child, my mother always made sure to send gifts to the grandchild.’
Eventually one of Jan’s sister’s children, aged eighteen, left the community.
Jan’s mother took him in, unquestioningly providing a home for the young adult who she’d never laid eyes upon before.
‘My nephew lived with Mum on and off for about a year. She gave him a home without knowing anything about him other than that he was her grandson – which was enough for her. He was involved in a court case against one of the cult leaders so would go off to give evidence from time to time. He didn’t have any formal qualifications so eventually went to live near his father - who had left the cult a few years previously - in Texas where it was much easier, at that time, to continue education. But my mother didn’t hesitate to provide a home for this stranger, her grandson, until he could make a future for himself.’
Biology or learnt behaviour?
Psychologist Terri Apter suggests in What Do You Want from Me? ( her book on how to get along with in-laws) that we have an instinct to protect those who carry our genes. But having spoken to grandparents who are not biologically related to their grandchildren ( see my post on being a step grandmother here) I’m not sure biology alone explains this fierce protective instinct towards the children of our children.
Trusting our children to parent
Psychologist Rachel Barnes, tells me that in her work with families, she has often seen grandparents taking on the full time care of grandchildren when their own children (due to mental health or other issues) are unable to care for them. When and if the time comes for the grandparents to hand the grandchildren back to the parents, they are often reluctant to do so. Even where the parents are now deemed responsible. And even where the grandparents have enough on their plates or are getting quite elderly.
Is this another case of the phrase ‘more dear than the child is the child’s child.’ ? A quote I discuss in another post here
OR does it suggest that it is hard for grandparents to trust their children know what they’re doing as parents? As Jan’s initial reaction to witnessing her daughter as a mother illustrates?
Whatever the answer is, it is clear the instinct to care for a grandchild ( even where they may not be biologically related) OR where, as in Jan’s mother’s case, the grandchild is in effect a stranger, is incredibly potent.
The ‘Club’ sandwich generation
Now the baton of caring for grandchildren has been handed down to Jan and her husband Don. They have nine grandchildren between them! Jan’s daughter has three children, while her son has two. Don has two sons, one with two children and one with a step-daughter.
‘We don’t differentiate between them,’ Jan emphasises. ‘They’re all our grandchildren as far as we’re concerned.’
They are also involved in looking after Don’s elderly parents, one of whom is very unwell, which means they are members of what is being called the ‘Club Sandwich’ generation, not just caught between looking after kids and elderly parents, (the old sandwich generation) but caught between looking after kids, their kids and elderly parents!
I’m in admiration of Jan’s discipline ( she still produces a book a year) and also a little perplexed because I know she lives close to her daughter’s young family and I know how hard it is to write with any kind of interruption.
How does she fit in the inevitable cries for help?
Does she set firm time boundaries?
‘I don’t have time boundaries, but I do have a word count to aim for. I was planning to write a thousand words every day this week, but Friday is an extra day of half term, so my daughter (who works as a kitchen manager at an events venue) asked if I can have her three children that day. I’ve had to scratch out that day’s word count and it means I’ll have to catch up another day. Then my son asked if I could look after his kids all next week as its half term, so that’s another whole week, or 10,000 words scratched out of the diary.’
Jan doesn’t resent this time she gives to caring for her grandchildren, but she agrees that fulfilling her contract as a writer whilst being there for her daughter’s and her sons’ children, and finding time to visit the other grandchildren ( who are further away) and spending time with her husband’s elderly parents whilst keeping up the writing- is like spinning plates.
But Jan believes it’s this instinctive urge illustrated by her mother’s devotion to the grandchildren she hadn’t met- which makes it virtually impossible to say no to requests for help. Even when it isn’t always that straightforward.
‘If I’m looking after more than one of them, and take them out to the cinema, for example, I have to work out how to take the little one to the loos to change her nappy whilst watching the older child. My daughter says the older one’s old enough to leave, but I’m not happy leaving any of them on their own.’
These juggling acts we perform so naturally as young parents can become more of a conundrum when we’re grandparents- perhaps a little less agile, and certainly more anxious about getting it wrong. An yet something propels most of us to do it, to put other things aside, to provide support for our children, but more tellingly perhaps, to ensure this continuing relationship with our grandchildren.
As we discuss further whether grandparents do have an inbuilt instinct to protect their grandchildren, Jan tells me a story about her father’s grandmother.
Grandmaternal loyalty
‘She moved in with her son-in-law after his wife ( her daughter) died to help him bring up a family of what she describes as five ‘feral’ boys.
‘When she witnessed a neighbourhood boy whacking one of her grandsons with a stick, she told him she wouldn’t let him back in the house until he’d whacked him back!’
Such ‘eye for an eye’ retaliation isn’t encouraged these days of course, but the story illustrates a grandmother’s unswerving loyalty to her grandchildren. And, Jan adds,
‘The story goes that if anyone came to the house and complained about any one of her grandsons for being rowdy or crossing lines, she’d lift her dress, under which she wore nothing, smack her bottom and say ‘kiss that!’
Next week I am going to look at how this almost animal drive to be part of our grandchildren’s lives can cause us untold pain when it isn’t met.
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Thank you so much, have a lovely day and enjoy your grandchildren!
More about Jan’s new book
The War Artist:
London, 1940Following a chance meeting with her former teacher, young painter Sybil Paige wins a coveted assignment from the War Arists' Advisory CommiJee, and so begins her journey across the length and breadth of the country, sketching everything from airfields and assembly lines to farms and factories.Sometimes it’s milkmaids and poultry keepers, brave and hopeful; sometimes it’s the harrowed faces of those digging through the rubble to find their loved ones and livelihoods. But armed with her sketchbook, Sybil captures it all, determined to tell the stories of the thousands of women fighting their own battles on the home front. Above all, she wants the voices of her subjects to shine through.But amidst the scenes of despair and courage, the one picture Sybil cannot paint and yet cannot purge from her brain, no matter how hard she tries, is the image of a woman folded into a chair, the crumpled telegram about her missing husband clasped in her hand. Because a self-portrait, Sybil well knows, requires the artist to find her own voice.With each new commission, Sybil grows in confidence. But, like the many people she meets and sketches, she fears the future: will it bring hope or heartbreak? https://amzn.eu/d/gHAZe2k