STI: Grandparents are a treasure

Nov 20, 2004
Grandparents are a treasure
by Sharon Loh

WE HAVE just ended a very welcome but all-too-brief visit from the grandparents who live in America.

Though in their 70s, they got on a plane some weeks ago and travelled halfway around the world from their home in North Carolina to Singapore.

Because of the vast physical distance between us, the children have spent far less than a year of actual face time with Grannypam and Jan Jan since they were born.

Despite this, they adore their paternal grandparents and are as comfortable in their presence as they are with their beloved Mama and Gong Gong in Singapore.

What can one say about grandparents? In our experience, they have been a treasure, indispensable in the raising of our children, adding untold layers of love, care and security around them.

It's not the same for everyone, though.

Tell us about your Gong Gong and Mama, the girls clamoured recently, as we were talking for the umpteenth time about the anticipated visit from Pam and Jan.

Well, I said, my grandparents weren't quite like yours.

Why not, they wanted to know.

Somehow, my grandparents seemed older, more constrained in what they could do with us.

We saw our maternal grandmother a lot but she was something of an invalid. I remember her as a frail but somewhat stern woman who was tolerant rather than warm, but she would always indulge us by giving us money for candy or movies.

My paternal grandmother was kindly, as stout as my other grandma was thin. She sometimes came to watch my brother and me at our home in Tanglin Halt but not often, as she had other grandchildren in her care.

Both my grandmothers were 80 when they died within six months of each other. I was 17.

My maternal grandfather had died in my mother's childhood, so I never knew him. He was a prominent educationist in the Teochew community and my mother said she owed a great debt to him.

He exacted a promise before he died that his younger daughter, the fourth of five children, should be sent to school - and educated in English.

I knew my paternal grandfather, a tailor, but he was very much the patriarch who left the care of children to the women. He too died when I was a teenager.

I wasn't close to my grandparents. Language kept us apart. I spoke little Teochew and almost no Hakka, so our communication was functional only.

It is a different story for my girls.

Their grandparents are mobile, active, healthy - and they help with homework, thank God.

Grannypam and Jan Jan are nothing but patient and attentive, open to all sorts of childish requests. I have never heard Pam say no when a child asks for a game or story. Jan will amuse them with funny impersonations and put them to bed.

As for their grandparents here, Mama and Gong Gong might as well be the air that they breathe. There just isn't anybody else they are more at home with.

At least once a week they sleep over at their grandparents' house, all four of them in the same room. I may protest but my mother never says no when the kids ask to stay.

Without my parents I probably would have gone barmy as a new mother.

We decided there was no need to employ a maid since I would be home with the baby. But as anyone with a newborn knows, it's a 24/7 job. And when we had two within 13 1/2 months of each other, the workload simply multiplied.

My parents have always been willing to share the burden of child care. Even today they help pick up the kids from school, take them to activities, give them meals and have them for the weekend if we want the time off.

In America, my in-laws do the same whenever they can for their daughter, who lives with her family in another state, a four-hour drive away.

Where the dotage of a grandparent, any grandparent, can become a double-edged sword is when they try to intervene by coming between parent and child.

A friend who was thrashing her young son complained of how the grandfather threw himself between them to shield the child. 'I ended up caning my father-in-law,' she said, exasperated.

Kids soon learn who the good cops are.

Still, it's a small price to pay for the wealth that granddads and grandmums add to their lives.

We keep in touch with the folks on the other side of the world through that most enabling of technologies, the Internet. Once or twice a week, Alexis and Isabel talk to their grandparents on video through iChat.

It was their father who got everyone wired up, first at our house, then, through a constant stream of persuasion and instruction, at his parents' house too.

Finally when the two households were connected, they roped in his sister, who then set up a system in her house which could talk to the other two.

Now the three Drake households, though thousands of kilometres apart, are connected, so we can talk to each other, face to face in real time - when the time difference permits.

That, in a world that's constantly expanding outwards, is as good as it gets.