COGWA Members App
Feast App
ROKU AppAppreciation for Grandparents!
Written by Nancy Diraison
Families are often spread out today, but grandparents are still very important.
Lately I have felt a special joy hearing about and watching grandparents who are able to share in the arrival of precious, newborn grandchildren. It impacts me deeply because I seldom saw my grandparents when I was growing up. I was born in New York, but my grandparents lived in Europe, and I only got to see them every other summer.
I believe I was most attached to my maternal grandmother, with whom I shared a special bond. She awed me with her warm hugs, her hearty laugh, her great cooking and the art she put into singing along with 1950s opera stars on her crackly old radio. She was the life of the family, and her dining room was the gathering place for some wonderfully warm reunions.
It was also a somber time, as we watched the ancestral town slowly recover from the ruins of World War II. There were a lot of stories about the Nazi occupation, and history came alive in my grandmother’s kitchen.
Back home in America, we had Thanksgiving with only ourselves—my parents and us three children. There was no one to invite, no relatives to share these events with. No extended family. No grandmotherʼs house to go to. There was a void.
Bonding with Grandma
When my two children were born, late in my life, I had predetermined to involve my mother as much as possible so my children would have that extra bond early in their lives. Ironically, by the time these happy events came to be, my mother had returned to Brittany for her retirement, and I saw the lonely cycle repeating itself. Nevertheless she came, both times, to share the first five or six months of their lives with me, and her help was invaluable.
I might have doubted the importance of that early bonding, except for one unusual event. By the time my mother came the second time for the birth of our son, our daughter was almost 2 years old. However, in the house we had moved to, this little girl had a dread fear of the hallway that led to the guest bedroom. The source of her fear—judging from the direction of her eyes just before sheʼd bolt in the opposite direction—was a cowboy hat hanging on the antique hall tree near the bedroom.
The day my mother arrived, though, everything changed. When the luggage went into that bedroom, our daughter forgot all about the hat, the hall tree and her phobia. She was in and out of there running and smiling and settled herself right away on the bed, which was the same one my mother had slept in and entertained her on when she was just an infant.
In time, I came to see that my daughter also carried many of my mother’s traits, which had skipped me and my siblings, just as I shared some of my grandmother’s traits.
Even after my mother left, the fear of the hallway never returned.
Embracing family
We live in a society of fragmented and scattered families. Hearts, I believe, are broken very early. Infants are not fooled by the care of a stranger in place of their mothers, fathers, grandparents and siblings. What God intended for families, for the nurturing of His future spiritual children, has been greatly upset. God Himself does not turn our hearts to substitutes for Himself or His love; He is jealous for us! He wants to be the One to bless us!
So, I get excited when I know grandmothers and grandfathers are able to show their own zealous love by running across the country to embrace their newborn grandchildren. They are making deep and lasting impressions, planting great blessings in tiny souls!
Nancy Diraison is a long-time Church of God member who lives in East Texas and has two teenagers in college. She very much looks forward to seeing her own family expand with grandchildren someday!
For more about family and grandparenting, see:
