Gratitude for being a grandparent

This is from an article in Medium by an author I read:

• What’s amazing to me is how consistent this struggle is among every parent I talk to. The texts and social media posts bouncing around my circle all echo each other. We feel like we’re failing at both. Our kids don’t just need us — they need more of us. Our kids are acting out, abandoning the routines they already had, dropping naps, sleeping less, doing less — except for jumping on top of their parents, which is happening much more. We’re letting them watch far greater amounts of screen time than we ever thought we’d tolerate. Forget homeschooling success — most of us are struggling to get our kids to do the basics that would have accounted for a Saturday-morning routine before this pandemic.

What amazes me about this is the consistency the author conveys and what I see in my own, much smaller circle made up of people I either knew in high school or Bahá'ís I have known since the 1970s.

Namely, they are older and without at-home children. Often, as in my case, there is no spouse, no other human in the house.

We do not have to worry about homeschooling, keeping pre-teens from going crazy or damaging things (dogs, furniture, walls...themselves), and balancing whatever paid work there is with the necessity to give "enough" time to those children and perhaps a spouse.

A person I know is the parent of three children, all under the teenage years. There is a spouse and both parents have stay-at-home jobs now. The challenges my friend deals with are unlike anything in one's life experience. There are the stresses created by keeping children contained within a relatively small space (house and backyard), of keeping a large breed dog de-stressed by walking as often as possible, and dealing with a spouse's stressful new job, started just about the time the novel coronavirus began to make its presence felt.

There is very little 'downtime' for this new breed of parents. Considering this pandemic involves a novel coronavirus against which not one human on Earth has any immunity, there is no historical basis on which to rely; the decisions are far more frequent than day-to-day. They come minute-to-minute. There is no consistency; what worked an hour ago might fail now. There is no manual, no helpful book by an experienced pediatrician.

There is just the Now.

As I sit here in my own small cave, alone, writing these words, I am reminded that there was a time when I was one of those parents with a houseful of children, all needing attention, direction, guidance, and discipline. The difference, of course, is there was no novel coronavirus waiting to inflict incredible sickness on a body just around the corner.

My heart goes out to all parents with children, the children themselves, and the teachers who will have to deal with a wide variety of homeschooling results when they finally go back to school. The time between now and then will be stressful and chaotic for them.

I am glad I am a grandparent.