Grandparenting

Let me say at once that Elliott has an impeccable sense of timing.

He managed to delay his emergence into the world perfectly to share a birthday with his grandmother. That’s my wife, Danielle. He was born on the same day as she was. Just a few years apart. 

He only just pulled it off. It was twelve minutes past midnight. Thirteen minutes earlier and he’d have missed giving her that special birthday present.

You’ve got to admit that’s smart work by someone who at that stage wasn’t even a minute old.

Impeccable timing

His arrival meant that his parents would welcome some help from the grandparents.

Well, I say grandparents. I really mean grandmother. She left the very evening when he announced his arrival, the eve of her birthday, turning up at what was soon to be his home in the hills north of Madrid (after a mad drive through the night and through Covid travel restrictions from our home in Valencia), in the early hours of the birthday itself.

She has skill and experience. She had a real contribution to make. This is less true of me. My ignorance may not be total, but it’s close to it. I know which end of a baby is up. Why, I can walk up and down a room making rocking motions with the best of them. But dealing with any kind of crisis? I wouldn’t know how to start. I’d freeze.

That’s a bit like the plant I drowned. Because Danielle left me with clear and simple instructions on how to deal with various plants in and around the house. I think when it came to the large thing in the living room, once impressive enough to command even my admiration – and I don’t usually notice plants – I must have misunderstood the quantities and watered it at twice the level needed. 

The poor thing’s struggling now. I think Danielle gives it about the best chance of survival of any plant so badly mistreated, but it’s touch and go all the same. I’m torn between hope and anxiety.

When it comes to Elliott, I feel that if I were called on to provide any actual help things would be scarcely better. I’d end up doing far too much or far too little, even if I got the thing to do right in the first place. I’m happy to be the affectionate granddad, but it’s probably wiser not to ask for anything too concrete from me in the way of actual practical help.

I showed up at Elliott’s ten or twelve days after Danielle. Let me say, as an aside, that one of the reasons for the delay was that I was waiting for my first Covid vaccine shot. Which raises the question of whether my decision to travel to the Madrid hills was my own, or  the result of sinister manipulation to suit the wicked ends of Bill Gates. I have my own answer to that question, but I leave you to come up with your own.

It was with a profound and humbling sense of my own inadequacy that I joined the Elliott grandparenting team. All the more humbling given the superb quality of the parenting team itself. I wish I’d shown the same nurturing spirit towards my kids as these parents show to theirs. Since the father in this young family is one of the kids I subjected to my parenting skills, I imagine he too might feel that way.

Like I said. Humbling.

Still, however little I usefully contributed to the Elliott effort, it was by no means beyond my capacity to walk my granddaughter Matilda, Elliott’s big sister (now nearly two) to school and back. Or, more accurately, push her there and walk her back. With a stop on the way home to eat bread and marmite. She and I are on opposite sides of the great marmite divide, between those who are wildly enthusiastic about the stuff and those who can’t stand it. Matilda seems to like it. 

She got blueberries or bananas too, and on those at least we see eye to eye.

A little quality time for Granddad with Matilda in the park

We’d either stop in the park, where she could scramble over rocks or run down paths, leaving me behind on one occasion as she made a determined dash for freedom, or in a playground where she could slide or swing (the latter under granddad power) or, just as in the park, make a determined dash for freedom.

Self-assured young lady, she is, with a clear focus on liberty.

The school, incidentally, is an extraordinary place. It takes kids from the age of six months, though Matilda joined at one. Her class may not yet have made a great deal of progress on higher mathematics, or tackled the great classics of either Spanish or English literature, or grappled with the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht that left Britain holding the Spanish territory of Gibraltar to this day. But the kids do seem to have a wonderful time there. That became particularly clear when, during my visit, Matilda had a memorable moment at school, when the teacher and class covered each other with flour in the garden, to everyone’s joy.

Great for socialisation, great for language-learning and, if the video clips shared with us are to be believed, great fun too.

Matilda started off wildly enthusiastic at the arrival of a granddad she hadn’t seen since late last summer (well, you know how it is, Covid and all that). That was gratifying. However, I quickly faded into a routine presence, of course, just someone who was there each day and pushed the buggy to school and picked her up later. Safe and familiar but a little dull.

She, at any rate, was anything but dull. That will. That sense of adventure. That clear drive to achieve firm purposes. She’s impressive. And the smile, when it bursts out, is entirely seductive.

It was a joy to get to know Matilda better. And to meet Elliott too. But I think it may be a little while before I get to know him as well as his sister – Matilda’s age is one I find it easier to relate to.

But thanks to my experience with Matilda, I know that means I have another pleasure to look forward to.

Matilda getting to know Elliott