I had just become a mother when Mom said, “I never had anyone to teach me to be a mother or a grandmother.”
I responded, “You’ve certainly done an excellent job.”
I knew Mom was only seven when her mother had died but I’d never really thought about what her life had been like. Her two much older sisters soon married leaving her father alone to raise Mom and her brother.
I’ve taken for granted the many things I learned from my mother and her oldest sister, Aunt Frannie, who was like a grandmother to me.
I didn’t know much about babies when Linda was born. I soon realized bearing a child didn’t automatically make me a mother. Mom lived close by and came every day to show me how to take care of our newborn. When Lisa came along a year later, I was a seasoned parent. Kurt joined our family two years after that. When I asked Mom to babysit while I went shopping, I said, “Can you handle all three of them? I could take one with me.”
Her response, “If you can, I can.” I hadn’t thought of it that way.
Our offspring spent a lot of time with their grandparents who considered babysitting a privilege instead of a job. Mom was my safety valve when I was out of patience with our little ones as well as giving Ken and me free time to spend as adults together. Our friends looked at my husband and me with envy because our kids usually stayed overnight at their grandparents’ house. Ken and I could sleep late in the morning after a night out.
If you’ve had a loving mother and grandmother, have you ever thought about how your life would have been without them?
This is a hard subject for me to wrap my mind around. My dad came from a nuclear family but he got mad at his dad & so left when he was 13 years old to live & work in Dixon, IL. Mother lost her father when she was about 7 years, and some years later when her mother remarried, she was sent to live (along with two other siblings) to live with her grandparents in Sterling, IL. So neither of my parents had a totally “normal childhood.” Then when they got married, the depression era came so they didn’t have children for 11 years, and then that one was a “oops.” At 5 months old, brother, Carwin John Hasselman died of spinal meningitis, and again they were left childless. Then they WANTED children & planned Janice & me.
So my parents really didn’t have a “normal” early marriage. They didn’t have relatives to guide them for dad’s relatives were down in Dixon, IL; mother’s brother had no children; mother’s sister was not available (only once) for babysitting.
Since brother died, mother & dad were very clutchy parents to Janice & me, & took us everywhere with them.
I, also was in an abnormal situation with my children for their father was an Army officer & this took us all around the US plus Germany so I had very little help from my parents. I had to wing it alone.
So our family is a family that “reinvents the wheel” each generation.