Helen Elliott - Grandmothers: Essays by 21st-century Grandmothers

An anthology of essays by twenty-four Australian women, edited by Helen Elliott, about the many aspects of being a grandmother in the 21st century. It seems so different from the experience we had of our grandmothers. Although perhaps the human essential, love, hasnt shifted much? In thoughtful, provoking, uncompromising writing, a broad range of women reflect on vastly diverse experiences. This period of a womans life, a continuation and culmination, is as defining as any other and the words grand and mother rearrange and realign themselves into bright focus.

The contributors: Stephanie Alexander, Maggie Beer, Judith Brett, Jane Caro, Elizabeth Chong, Cresside Collette, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Helen Garner, Anastasia Gonis, Glenda Guest, Katherine Hattam, Celestine Hitiura Vaite, Yvette Holt, Cheryl Kernot, Ramona Koval, Alison Lester, Joan London, Jenny Macklin, Auntie Daphne Milward, Mona Mobarek, Carol Raye and Gillian Triggs.

The dearest child is the child of your child.

EGYPTIAN PROVERB

Contents

If nothing is going well, call your grandmother.

ITALIAN PROVERB

There are four of them. Olivia, Madeleine, Eloise and Isobel-Daisy. Sometimes I think they all belong to me. I sign my texts to the children and grandchildren The Doter.

Doting. Me, a woman who found the harnessing realities of early motherhood so crippling I couldnt wait for it to be over so I could get on with my own life. Now, this time of life, the final and perhaps loveliest part since my childhood, might be The Days of Doting.

Not all the women, the grandmothers, in the following pages, however, would be pleased to be called doters. Not at all! There is stringency in their words, as well as tenderness. Our commonality is in being a grandmother, and some of us here are more intentional grandmothers than others. Individuality flows through in grandmothering as much as it does through mothering. And in doting now there is, perhaps, an element of reparation for then.

When I was thirty, with a hard-won education behind me, my son was born. He was the first baby I had ever held. I had never understood what it was with women and babies. In fact, my mother came to stay for a while because she was worried about the baby. And me. But for me it was love, love, love. And a terrifying responsibility. My mother went home and told everyone she was amazed. Two years later I had my daughter.

Grandmothering has always been a grand subject, but it has never been outed as such. There has been no strong narrative about grandmothering; it is still closeted. Too general to have interesting meaning, too often spoken about in a thoughtless, patronising tone. In a world where currency is all, like a granny describes someone who is not current. Nanna nap is insulting, as you will see in these essays. The grandmother narrative is circumscribed, lazily connected to scented soap, lace, lavender, babysitting, caregivinga latter-day invisibility. Grandmother still suggests a woman whose days of significance in the actual, rushing world are past.

Yet. Yet. French president Emmanuel Macron says that his grandmother, whom he called Manette, was the most important adult in his life. Margaret Atwood is winning prizes, Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren are not off-stage. In fiction, Lady Olenna, played by the obviously immortal Diana Rigg in Game of Thrones, is an archetype with nuancea grandmother with knowledge of poison equal to her knowledge of power. And there is always Nancy Pelosi. Is it possible that she, too, might be immortal? I dare hope. Grandmothers can be the thing that surveys show is what a high number of young people aim to be, Influencers.

The essays in this book arrive from a reconfigured world. Grandmothers used to be the aged mother a loving child looked after. Now things have reversed, and more often than not the grandmother is essential to the smooth working of a busy family. The women here see themselves as current. Some are central in a family in an emotional sense and often in a financial sense. If the grandmother could not care for grandchildren, the parent might not be able to work.

Women of my generationI am speaking narrowly, specifically of certain strata of white women herecan be grateful to the feminist revolution of the sixties and seventies. Many more of us can also be grateful to the continuing technological revolution, where speed and connection have physical meaning in our daily lives. Connectivity is eloquent and satisfying and these essays are a testament to that. In the last thirty years, the world sped up more than it did in the previous three hundred. And the tech-savvy tell us that this is just the beginning of the change. Will we live long enough to see our grandchildren with phones implanted in their hands? Or chips in their temples for instant access to the internet? Some of us will.

We, too, are transforming, but in different ways. We are, perhaps, responding to the world, rather than creating it. A grandmother has transformed into something else, a grand mother. A great mother. We cant all be adept at practical poison, like Lady Olenna, but we have knowledge, experience, and, thanks to high tech, the world is paying attention in a new way. Grandmothers have a fresh visibility and are prepared to use it. There is grandmother Fonda, Jane, being arrested in New York as she draws attention to climate change. Climate change, unsurprisingly, is the urgent issue for most of the writers in this anthology.

Being a mother took some figuring out and so does being a grandmother. The grandmothers in the following pages often speak about the significance of their own grandmothers. We might not have paid attention back then. Children dont. Grandma was just grandma, by whatever name. Now our often surprising and surprised landing at this point in our lives allows the long view and we see that our grandmothers were, like us, more than just old womensome, astonishingly, were younger than we are nowfrom whom we might have inherited manners, hair, cancer, kindness, attention, generosity, impatience, vanity. That list is endless, intriguing and expands daily. The inheritance from a grandmother is worth an entire essay itself.

Women, constrained by culture and society, will turn to two things. Walking and gardening. All that walking in Jane Austen and the Bronts was not accidental. My love of gardening and of flowers came from my only grandmother, my mothers mother. She came to live with us when I was ten and died when I was fifteen. She was sick, she trembled, she was slow and I was a snippy girl, impatient as the wind. We didnt get on. Perhaps we loved one another? There is always something about blood connection. She knew about hard work and she knew about flowers.

In my thirties, I discovered why gardening is so attractive to women. Not just the women I knew from books but women I was meeting. Gardening is about cherishing and, critically for me, gardening meant I didnt have to play endless boring games with (cherished) toddlers. Instead we could garden together. My resentment at finding myself a mother was dug into the garden, buried as we watered and tended beautiful things that would flourish in the sunshine. It still astonishes me how simple it is to make children happy.

But the world has moved on and, close to the city where my children and their families live, gardens are seen as luxury. There are great public gardens that are still valued in Australia, but as much as I love these gifts from public planners of the past with a vision of a future, as much as I enjoy being in them, they dont offer the intimate pleasure of a private garden. A private garden can be a work of art and, like all good art, requires labour and concentration.