You reap what you sow grandma.

I think this is a sad article by Adair Lara:

One recent Saturday morning my daughter, Morgan, and her husband, Trevor, were feverishly trying to pull their new apartment together with Ryan underfoot and the baby wailing. “Can you watch the babies while we work?” Morgan called to ask, as Trevor hammered in the background. She lives three blocks away from me in San Francisco.

Look, I’d love to nip over and whisper secrets into 1-month-old Maggie’s ears, or to dress 2-year-old Ryan in the black leather jacket I bought her recently and take her to look for late blackberries in Golden Gate Park on my bike (with its deluxe new kid seat). But I have a job. I’m a reporter, I have two books to write, a husband who wants to go to France, and I just bought an investment property in Portland, Oregon. I love my grandchildren, but being a grandmother got added to my to-do list.

The truth is, I can’t be the kind of grandmother my own grandmother was — available and self-sacrificing, always arriving in her red VW with her overnight bag to help Mom. I wasn’t a stay-at-home mom, and I can’t be a stay-at-home-grandma either.

Well a word of caution Ms. Lara. You reap what you sow. You can’t be available and self-sacrificing now? Then don’t expect your children and your grandchilren to be available and self-sacrificing later. The truth is that in 20 years when perhaps you need help dressing yourself, or feeding yourself, or wiping yourself after going to the bathroom, or even when you are just feeling lonely, your offspring and their prodigy will do just exactly as you have taught them. They will make time for themselves and if they can fit you in, (and that’s a big if because it’s not exactly like you will have earned a spot of honor in their hearts and minds with all of the memory making you’re not doing)it will be, as you say, on their own terms. Which means you’ll probably spend plenty of time alone, lonely, hungry and sitting in your own waste, unless you pay a stranger to do be your family for hire. When the inevitable happens, yours will be the neglected grave site that no one visits.

Sir Walter Scott

HT Feminine Genius Blog

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