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In Dr. G’s recent posts about a possible downside to older parents adopting she talked about her MIL and how she could have adopted a child of her own at the same age she became a grandmother … fifty-four.
Well … yeah.
I became a grandmother a year and a half before we adopted Sam … my granddaughter is fifteen months older than he is, and more than four and a half years older than Cj … and I have to remind myself that this is not how families are usually constructed, age-wise.
Let’s see … I’m 55. My kids are 37, 35, 3 and 17 months. My granddaughter is 5. Sam and Cj’s paternal grandma is 59.
And it all seems so normal to me. To all of us, I think.
Grandma is very grandma-like; she does grandma stuff and says grandma things and gives grandma food. (Lots of cookies.) Even when what she’s doing looks just like what Mom does, it’s still done with a grandma flair that can’t be missed, and there’s never any confusing what’s to be had or allowed or ignored at grandma’s with what’s certainly not at home.
My husband’s mother may be only 4 years older than I am, but the eyes she sees him through have a totally different view. (Yeah, duh! But you know what I’m getting at.) He’s still her little boy, and because I’m his wife there’s part of her that has me a kid, as well. (I like that.)
I’m not often in the same hemisphere as my granddaughter, but when I am I put on my grammy hat, and there’s no confusion over who’s who there either. I’m Mom to my daughter and my little kids, and Grammy to my granddaughter. My daughter is Mom to her daughter and daughter to me.
So, as far as this ’set in our ways’ business goes, I don’t see it. I can be a mom and a grammy and a wife and a daughter … all at the same time. Maybe it’s just the way I live, but life is always far too much in motion to get stuck anywhere. Flexibility is vital, and fun, and keeps everyone in shape.
I’m not going to go so far as to insist that Sam and Cj won’t someday wish they had a younger mom. (My bio kids sure spent a lot of time wishing they had an older mom, and I heard about that a lot, too.) I wouldn’t be at all surprised if at some point both my adopted kids let their fantasies run wild with imaginings that it was the young, rich and beautiful Angelina Jolie who’d adopted them instead of boring old mom.
But real life is real life, and I am their mother, and if I ever wonder if being an older mom is a good thing or not a good thing (and I don’t actually recall ever having this conversation with myself) I’ll remind myself that the real life alternative for Sam and Cj would have been no mom at all.
Perhaps there are some who parent for selfish reasons, but I don’t know these people. Maybe there are folks who are so entrenched in being old that they don’t keep up with the world, but I don’t know them either.
The photo is my MIL doing the Grandma Thing with Sam and Cj on the beach. It looks very much like when I walk with them, but is somehow different because it’s Grandma, not Mom. Could be just that I’m the one always taking the photos!
“I’ll remind myself that the real life alternative for Sam and Cj would have been no mom at all.”
I was thinking about that issue yesterday reading about the older mom issue. Hard to imagine if given a choice between staying in foster care or an orphanage, a child would be too concerned about how old parents who might adopt them were.