I posed this conundrum in my last post:

Aside from a few obvious similarities ... both being about baths, and neither written for children ... what is the connection between the songs "Splish, Splash" and "Mother's Lament"? And to stretch the point just a bit more, what the heck do they have to do with older parent adoption?

The answer is, according to Wikipedia they were both recorded by men who found out as adults that their parents were in fact their grandparents, their sisters were actually their mothers, and neither ever knew their birthfathers.

Bobby Darin and Eric Clapton, both giants in modern music, share beginnings of teen mothers in the era of secrets

Bobby Darin was born in America in 1936. Eric Clapton in England in 1945. Neither decade in either country gave a girl a chance, and when "mistakes" were made, parenting was not often presented as an option. Grandparents frequently stepped in to raise the children of their children, but given the stigma attached to at least two of the three parties involved ... the world "bastard" carried a lifetime supply of grief ... birthmother and child, the quieter the transfer could be the better. (Fathers, by the way, very often were allowed or encouraged to drift out of the picture, as was apparently the case with these two mega-stars' birth dads.)

According to reports, both Darin and Clapton had issues to deal with when they learned of the true relationships and circumstances ...but of course! Lies like that are bound to come around and bite ... but those couldn't restrain their talent, dampen their enthusiasm or hold them down, and perhaps some of that was thanks to the job their grandparents did in raising them.

Thankfully, the time for secrets has passed, and most children being cared for nowadays by their grandparents know the details of their birth and their life.

In the 1990s, the number families in the US where kids were being raised by grandparents grew by 53%, and by 2000 there were 6 million households headed by a grandparent or other non-parent relative.

There are as many reasons for this as there are kids living with grandparents. In the developing world, AIDS has turned grandmothers into primary carers for millions of grandchildren ... often ALL of their grandchildren at the same time ... and throughout human history it has often been the grandparents stepping up when the children's children have no one else to rear them.

Since my little ones are younger than my granddaughter, the thought of raising a grandchild presents no fear, other than worry about what might have happened to my child to bring make the situation necessary, and it seems a fluid move to me.

That could certainly not be the case for others, and I would be very interested to hear perspectives, ideas and tips from adopting grandparents.

In the meantime, I'll keep singing to my kids as I scrub ...

Anyone finding themselves in the position of adopting their grandchildren may want to take a look at some of the older parent resources on Adoption.com

And for a look at my take on Ann Fessler's great book about the closed era of adoption, the time of secrets, "The Girls Who Went Away" ... read the series here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.