Minding wise and wild granddaughter a chance to learn

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This article was published 09/09/2022 (1456 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘I need a better adult.” That’s what my granddaughter said to me when she was no bigger than three.

She had asked me to go into the basement of her house to play. I was minding her. I had been minding her throughout the year, a couple of days each week. I say minding because her presence, her emerging self, changed the character and quality of my own mind in relation to hers. Let me explain.

On the day of her request, I told her that I could not go down into the basement, for I am allergic to cats, and my son and daughter-in-law have three cats who characteristically lounged there and make it difficult for me to breathe and see. I tried to explain. My granddaughter crossed her still-baby arms, looked me up and down (I felt keenly the assessment), then proclaimed, “I need a better adult.”

I was struck by the implications within her pronouncement, even as I recall that in the moment she first made it, I wondered if it best she go outside and hail another caregiver with less limited capabilities. Within this blend of admiration and critique, I stored her observation as an invitation to reflect. I reference it often, appreciating the way it opens my mind to an ongoing assessment of my own evolving identity as her Baba.

My granddaughter is lively, dramatic, creative and expressive. She is like so many other little children and yet, as my granddaughter, she is also a one of a kind. And I am also a one of a kind to her. Though she has two Babas, I am unique in what I bring as one of them. I think about the idiosyncratic features of our relationship. When I read about grandmothering to deepen my understanding, I am struck by commentary that underlines a grandmother role as one that supports the wise and wild in the little ones we share our lives with.

Wise and wild. I think about wise wild woman in culture, an ancient and ongoing presence teaching about knowledge-keeping and caregiving. Her principles, though often ignored and undermined in mainstream culture, nonetheless provide profound earth-centred and peacemaking practices that sustain life in all its forms of expression. Wise Wild Woman lives in each of us, connects us to the rotation of the seasons, the possibilities of decline and repair and the necessity for understandings of enoughness, creativity and balance.

When I recall the wise and wild in my granddaughter at three, I think of her beginning self, somewhat uninflected by society’s systems and regulations. At seven, she is more schooled by and within systems, learning about the compromises that take place as one’s personal freedom yields to the common good. But she is also thoroughly a force in her own right, an explorer when it comes to boundary and accommodation, an insider alive with her ideas and feelings, curious about how she acts, reacts and comprehends the forces around her. In this way, she is always wondering — taking stock, as it were, discerning how things “work,” what is possible, what she might desire and dream of.

When her wondering is thwarted by the rule, by circumstance and/or by the realities of shared space, she is often a fury to be reckoned. I think of the phrase “temper tantrum” so often used to characterize how a child might challenge authorities that thwart, albeit often for sane and sound reasons.

But I don’t want those words very much anymore because I also understand how I “misbehave” when thwarted at 72, even when the thwarting takes place within the reasonable confines of reasonable external forces. I feel sharply what drives my desire to transcend those confines.

Thus, I place my elderly self in relation to my granddaughter’s burgeoning one.

I track how the training I received in my childhood might surface and dictate that I should refuse my granddaughter opportunities for self-expression. Like many, I was a raised in a culture that believed in shutting a child down in the midst of their experience, punishing misdemeanors, mistakes, unbridled enthusiasms. This punishing, often called childrearing, did not take the time to comprehend confusion, uncertainty, fear and longing — the reality of feeling and understanding a child is entitled to bring to a world where bigger humans most often call the shots.

If my granddaughter questions regulations or realities unaligned with her vision and desire, I teach myself to be taught by her and by her parents, my son and his wife. Rather than scolding or silencing their daughter’s reactions, they give her room, wait with her, consider what words they might use to affirm her frustration and anger and at what point those words could be useful.

I learned some of this with my own children; I re-learn and expand now guided by my emerging grandmotherly identity. I wait with love, swallow words that might diminish my granddaughter’s right to react; reconsider counter-actions I might take that would “remove” or “control” the feelings that are real to her. In these ways, I am extending my grandmotherly presence as one who respects her responsiveness to circumstances that curtail or prohibit. I wait as she gives vent; I inhabit the role of the better adult who can see with her heart and mind the impact No and Yes might have in her world. I don’t try to smooth things over; I don’t submit entirely to the adult mind that comprehends why No and Yes are given as determined by forces beyond her.

And I don’t fold my arms across my chest and wish for a “better” granddaughter, one who might possess an equanimity rendering her more immediately compliant. I take in her will, her passion, as crucial to her development, and my own, and hope she can trust the better grandmother growing in understanding and compassion. We consider the better in one another.

debbieschnitzer@mts.net