What it means to be a grandma

Being a grandma means delighting in the fruition of your work without interfering or controlling.

My first granddaughter will soon be one year old. She’s an adorable spitfire, and I can’t wait to hear what she has to say when she’s two. I’m not worried about her already stubborn opinions because I know her parents are up to the challenge. They can handle it, so I can enjoy it.

There are two things about becoming a grandma that I was not expecting before it happened.

First, I was not expecting to be asked by everyone immediately upon mentioning my upcoming promotion - including strangers in person and online - what my grandma name would be. Now, I did my best to quickly figure this out so I’d have an answer. I felt like I was being asked almost every day for a time; now it’s more like once a week.

All my children and my husband agreed that the only option was grandma. So here we are: Grandma is my grandma name. Now you know.

The second thing I was not expecting was the constant question: “How do you like being a grandma?!” The convenient thing about such an obvious question is the simple answer: “It’s the best!”

But since, apparently, everyone wants to know how it is to be a grandma, I thought I’d write a longer form answer.

Being a grandma is the best, and it’s not only because you can have baby time without changing diapers or waking up in the middle of the night.

A grandma’s responsibility

The lovely thing about being a grandma is not that you have no responsibility, as the answer about diapers and sleep generally implies. Rather, the responsibility is different, It is less immediate and physically demanding.

The first primary responsibility is to support rather than direct and control. Today, many parents move to the support role too soon, afraid to direct and control their small children lest they breed resentment and trauma. Small children merely supported in their foolishness, however, will not yield adults who are courageous and productive.

Then, when those uncontrolled toddlers become teens, it is too late to direct and control them. Even controlled toddlers, however, must be gently loosed from firm parental direction. Teens resist control, but it’s also not fully the time to move into a support role. It is difficult for parents to find the middle ground, but doing so is key to moving into this new phase and developing a healthy almost peer like relationship with them. Teens need us to be their coaches: Let them make their plays, then review the game film and make plans with them for the next plays.

I moved out of coach and into support position when my son put a ring on his wife’s finger. If you were expecting it all along, it can be delightful. If it sneaks up on you, it can feel like getting kicked out and replaced. In fact, you have been replaced. Or, at best, down-shifted.

The less authority you try to invoke at this stage, the more influence you can graciously wield later. Let your son leave and cleave, let yourself be replaced and down-graded, and you open yourself to new horizons that are so much better. It is a death-to-life time for mothers — when you know that’s what’s happening, you can receive it with joy rather than fight it and grieve over it.

Don’t grieve over the way God made the world. That’s silly sentimentalism masking itself as care and love.

After all, the non-interfering support role is a delightful place to hold as a grandma. It’s a front-row seat to see the abundant blessing of God poured on your meager, inadequate offerings of the last twenty-some years.

The cute toddler became the bright little boy, who became the argumentative twelve-year-old, who became the bold teen, who became a young man who won the affections of a good woman, put a ring on it, and started the cycle over again, taking a new mantle of authority and dignity.

It is jaw-droopingly awesome and incredible when you see it from this perspective.

Your children’s children

While visiting at my parents with my siblings and their kids at Easter this year, my dad was struck with God's grace: “My baby has a baby who had a baby.” Yes, I was a young grandma at 42. My dad is in his early sixties, so he is a young great-grandpa who also had two new grandkids the same year as his first great.

Our kids aren’t as numerous or spread out as my parent's, so we might not have that same situation, but still both my parents and my husband and I could feasibly see our great-great grandchildren. In fact, on my husband’s side, our grandchild still has two living great-great grandparents — 4 living generations.

One recurring blessing pronounced in the Psalms is that of seeing your children’s children. When my children were born, I sang those hymns and recognized my own children as my parents’ blessing. They were not simply mine, but just as much theirs.

When I first held my granddaughter in my arms, the marvel that nearly overwhelmed me was that I had a baby without going through labor. My labors were all long and difficult; my daughter-in-law’s was long and difficult. She had done the work for me. Yes, it was her work and her child, but also mine. It is a gut-wrenching picture of grace: a newborn that looked like my newborns was placed in my arms, yet I had not done anything to bring it into the world. My stomach turned that first time I held her in awe and wonder.

My children are not in themselves my own full blessing and reward, but rather to be the future source of blessing, bringing children of their own so that I, too, may see my children’s children.

Over the decades I’ve been a mother, I’ve heard many older women comment in one way or another, “Oh, kids are great and all, but *grandchildren* — that’s where it’s at.” This is no shirking of responsibility but a sheer delight. It strikes me as utterly biblical.

Such a long-view perspective changes your parenting. Your children are not your own. They belong to God. Also, your children are your reward in that they are the ones who will give you grandchildren. When Psalm 127 says the fruit of the womb is a reward, it adds the context of them standing with you at the gate, standing with you in conflict. Blessing is not in the pitter-patter of their feet in your home, delightful as that is, but in their feet being solidly planted alongside you in your God-given mission.

Natural son, but spiritual brother

Part of the baptism vow parents make at our church upon the covenant baptism of their children is “do you promise to raise this child not only as your natural son, but also as your spiritual brother?” As children of God, we are all siblings, peers, co-laborers. To see your son become a father is to see that spiritual reality embodied in front of you and even to hold it in your arms as you embrace not him, but his child.

As parents, we are raising people to become our peers, parents and kingdom-builders alongside us. Seeing our grandchildren is seeing that reality taking place. The work isn’t done. Having grandchildren doesn’t mean retirement from the mission. Instead, reinforcements have arrived — our children have become our reinforcements.

When they become older teens, our children separate from us and sometimes that can be painful. For some, it is a shock.

Remember that we’re working for our grandchildren and not ourselves, not to keep our children safe as our personal pets. Just as caterpillars have to take a time out in a cocoon before emerging as beautiful butterflies, so our children need time out from under our care and personal attention. They will emerge as adults — adults who can give us grandchildren we can be proud of.

As you educate, discipline, and nurture your children, you are shaping the kind of parents they will become. Don’t worry if they aren’t loving every minute of your parenting when they are 12, 15, or 17. You’re not working for immediate feedback. You’re shaping the parents of your grandchildren. What kind of parents will your grandchildren need? Help your children grow into that.

My husband and I consciously raised our children to be adults. Each one growing up and launching was always our aim and purpose. And, lo! Here we are! It’s not by our efforts, but rather by faith in receiving what God has given, each stage along the way, taking it with joy.

Let it be marvelous in your eyes

I was having coffee with my 17-year-old daughter a few weeks ago when from the coffeeshop window we spotted my oldest son, now father of two (the second still in utero), leaping out of his truck toward his office.

He is not exactly like his father, nor exactly like me, but some of the best of both of us, mixed with some of our same struggles, as well as a dose of his own person, shaped by the Lord. It is delightful to happen upon a man at church or on the street and realize it’s your son, your boy, and an admirable man.

Who knew this really would happen? Here we are! Every time I see my adult children in the wild, I am bowled over by God’s goodness. Psalm 118:23 pops into my head: “This is the LORD’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.”

Over coffee, I had smiled reflexively upon realizing that the man leaping from the truck was my son. I turned my smile to my practically adult daughter as said, “You know, I love having grown ups even more than having little kids.”

What a shift to the mother-child relationship! It is necessary, why not relish it? Why attempt to hold on to a past or mourn a past whose whole purpose was to bring you to this moment? Our purpose as a mother isn’t over after our children become adults. We get to onboard them as fellow mothers and fathers and enjoy the resulting grandchildren, the blessing of seeing generational, covenantal faithfulness.

Why not let our children see that being a grown up makes us happy, rather than makes us sad? Which response will make them more confident and resilient? Which will help them become better parents themselves? It is not the response of trying to keep them under our roof, under our provision.

Sentimentalism is selfish

Mommy sentimentalism is not love, even if that’s what we think it feels like. In reality, it is indulgent self-love, a desire to be the self we think we still are: young and fertile. We aren’t ready to take on the grandma-mantle, so we yearn for our children to stay children.

The role of mother is familiar and has become comfortable. Indeed, I admit that part of my desire to have a different name than “grandma” is to hold tighter to my youth than to my promotion. Promotions require shifts, new duties, and change.

I can still look back at photos of my oldest as a cute and precocious elementary student and smile, remembering more of the good than the hard of those days. That memory-filtering is a blessing of grandmahood. Such delight in memories is not incompatible with delight in knowing that cute little boy is now a man taller than me, whom I ask questions and into whose opinion and experience I inquire.

I have several friends who are living out both positions at once: nurturing mother of a newborn and gloating grandma. What a superfluity of blessing — and all blessings come with challenges, stretching us to expand our capacity, our love, our faithfulness and worship.

Love wants the best for the loved one. It is not good for teens to be treated like children. It is not good for young adults to be hemmed in. Letting go in love brings, years later, the fertility of our fertility, the children of our children, the fruit of our fruit - and it’s incredibly delightful. Love and worship of God delights in His daily provision, not trying to keep back today’s because we prefer our memories of yesterday’s blessings.

It is only by letting our young adults go free and enjoying them in their new state that we get the biblical blessing of seeing our children’s children — and that’s the blessing God tells us to look for.

Being a grandma is a blessing to receive. It is an achievement level to rejoice in. Parent toward reaching that achievement - keep it on your radar. Your children growing up is a prerequisite to receiving the blessing, so don’t mourn and grieve when it happens, but wait patiently, knowing the reward is having them stand next to you, taller than you, stronger than you, better than you.