Tuesday, March 01, 2011

A plot hole in my childhood

A couple of times a year, we'd go up north to visit my great-grandparents. (Three were still alive when I was born, the last passed away when I was about 13.) I found this boring. We had to sit in their house and do nothing while the grownups talked about boring things that I didn't understand, and I always felt awkward and vaguely humiliated because it seemed like they didn't want me there. So one day I asked my father (whose grandparents they were) why I had to go. It really didn't look like they needed me there, I had to just sit there and do nothing. "Because it makes them happy," he replied.

What I took away from this at the time is that it makes old people happy when I'm feeling bored and out of place and awkward and humiliated.

But thinking back on it with an adult perspective, if you're an adult and it does in fact make you happy to see certain children that you're related to, wouldn't you engage with them somehow? Talk to them, ask them about their lives, offer them treats, get them to show you what they can do and praise them for being able to do it well?

At the time, I felt guilty for not knowing what to say or do to engage with them, but looking at it as an adult, they should totally have been the ones to engage with me! They had multiple children and grandchildren (obviously), they'd been children themselves, they'd been alive for 10 times as long as I had (and no, at this point they weren't losing their faculties like the other elders I've been blogging about recently). They were the ones empowered to initiate and facilitate the relationship. But they gave me less than I give my co-workers' stray children when they wander into my office.

So the question is: did it actually make them happy to see me and they had an odd way of expressing it, or was my father lying to me about that? Not that it makes much of a difference to me either way, but it's a mystery.

2 comments:

laura k said...

I had a similar question about my own great-grandparents. My mother has told me that just seeing us in a family-gathering context made them happy, made them feel connected to more generations. Also that they were happy specifically to see their grandchildren's families, implying their happiness.

impudent strumpet said...

Hmmmm...it seems like if that was the case, we'd have been allowed to play or something rather than just sitting there listening to the grownups. But I'll never know.

They always say you should ask elders questions when you're young because they won't be around later, but the questions don't even occur when you're young because you tend to assume by default that the situation is normal!