Excerpts

(unedited excerpt - please check with publisher before reproducing in any form) Introduction "We are involved in creating the future for humankind." Dr. Bruce Perry A slim, fair-haired girl in a pink sundress asks 7-year-old Jeff, "Where do you go to school?" Jeff and I are waiting in the checkout line at the Italian Centre Shop in central Edmonton; the girl and a woman about my age--in her 60s I'd say--are behind us. Jeff blushes through his olive-brown cheeks and turns toward the display of bacio chocolates and Tic Tac mints. He's naturally shy, even more so around girls his age. I turn to the woman, who's leaning on the handle of a grocery cart full of produce and pasta. "Do you live around here?" I ask. She glances at my bald crown, the curly gray hair jutting out around the temples of my wire-framed glasses, my faded purple Edmonton Folk Fest T-shirt from five years ago. She gives me a blank look. Maybe she wonders how to demonstrate to the girl that she should not talk to strange men. And I admit that I do look a little strange to some people, sometimes even to myself when I look in the bathroom mirror in the morning. "I'm Gary," I say. "This is my grandson, Jeff. He's going into grade 2 at Norwood School in August." I nod toward the girl. "What school does she go to?" When I say "grandson," the woman's eyes glisten. Maybe she thinks I'm not so strange after all. Or she realizes we're both the same kind of strange. She tells me they don't live in the neighbourhood, but not far away. She says she and her 8-year-old granddaughter live together. She tells me the name of her child's school. When the checkout clerk takes my $20 bill and gives me a few coins back, I say goodbye to her and the girl. They smile. It's been 25 years since my own kids were cute enough to break the ice with strangers when I took them into grocery stores, parks, and shopping centres. Now that I'm grandfathering two small children, it happens every day, everywhere I go. I've met grandparents with grandchildren in parks and on sidewalks. I've read my poems about grandparenting in public. I've had grandparents come up to me afterwards and say, "Me too!" Friends have told me about grandparents they know in situations like mine and offer to introduce me to them. Grandparents are everywhere. That's where we belong. But the grandparenting some of us do is the other side of the moon compared to the grandparenting we got when we were kids during the 1950s and 60s. For us, a visit to grandma and grandpa was a treat if they lived nearby and a vacation trip to paradise if they didn't. Grandma and Grandpa didn't make us do stuff we didn't want to, like eat broccoli or wash dishes. They didn't discipline us or threaten to spank us when we did something bad. They played with us in the park. They bought us candy. They gave us toys and money, even when it wasn't Christmas or a birthday. Many grandparents our age do this kind of grandparenting now. But the grandparenting I'm talking about is mothering and fathering young children who would've ended up in foster care if we didn't take them in. We raise the children as our own, but we raise them with 25 years more life experience than when we raised children the first time. We raise them because somebody saw these kids being neglected or abused and phoned child welfare. We raise them because we saw parenting that had gone horribly wrong and we wanted to keep child welfare out of it. We raise them because their biological parents--our children--can't or won't, because of addiction, mental or physical illness, death, prison, poverty, et cetera. We raise them as we nurse a wound deep in our hearts, because our child is out of the picture, because we fear for our child's safety, and when the telephone rings we shudder because maybe this time it's the police and they've they found our son or daughter dead from a self-inflicted wound or drug overdose. We raise these grandchildren even though we're chronically sleep deprived. We wrestle every night with the voice inside our head that says, "Mike could be out in the snowstorm tonight, freezing to death." We imagine Amanda prostituting herself for crystal meth or Mitchell burglarizing a pharmacy. We walk these grandkids to school every day. We take them to soccer, hockey, music, dance, tae kwon do. We have more in common with the grandparents we sit next to at these events than with the parents, but we don't belong to either group. We can't socialize with retired friends because we have kids to look after every school day at 3 p.m., all day on weekends, on teacher PD days, school holidays, and all summer. We get emergency calls from the school office, as parents do, and have to interrupt our days for kids' dental and medical appointments. But we're 30 years older than the other parents. We grew up on the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who; not Pearl Jam, the Stone Temple Pilots, and Brittney Spears. We learned to read in phonics class, watched snowy black-and-white television images via rooftop antennae, and dialed clunky black telephones to talk to friends on party lines. These cultural influences shaped our brains a long time ago, and those brains don't work as fast as when we were parents the first time. We raise these grandkids because they're ours. They're members of our family, and we love them. Despite the anxiety, fear, shame, guilt, expense, loss of freedom and our frustrated dreams of retirement, we still love them. The manager of kinship care in Alberta told me at a workshop that 1400 kinship families in Alberta get government support of some kind. About 90 percent of these kinship caregivers are grandparents. Betty Cornelius, president and founder of CanGrands, a national grandparent support network, told me Ontario officially has 22,000 kincare families. But nobody knows how many grandparents are raising grandchildren without government involvement, informally. At the first kincare Christmas party I went to in Edmonton, I met a grandfather who claimed a million Canadian grandparents were raising grandchildren. The real story, though, isn't statistics. It's the individual grandparents and grandchildren who live together as a family unit, with all the struggle and delight that involves. Extended family members have been caring for children for millennia. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors who lived in caves stuck together in extended family and tribal groups against the threat of wolves, bears, and saber-toothed tigers. Sharing responsibility for the tribe's children was as natural as sharing food and fire. Today, it's normal for grandparents to raise children in places like China, where the mother and father both have to work. The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa has challenged grandmothers more than ever to step up and raise untold millions of orphans. Kinship caregiving is common cultural practice in Aboriginal communities throughout the world, and it's an honourable thing to do. But mainstream Western culture has affixed a stigma to it: if a grandmother is raising a grandchild, she must have failed as a parent, and here she is, doing it again! To complement the stigma, we have a tradition of devaluing our women and our elders. John Bowlby, author of a seminal book on broken childhood, says the practice of parents in Western industrialized nations of migrating for employment places severe pressure on those parents to go it alone, without a village of relatives. He says, "In any analysis of the causes of children becoming deprived, therefore, it has to be considered not only why the natural home group has failed, but also why relatives have failed to act as substitutes." In the last 20 years, Western governments have offered varying degrees of financial support, encouragement, and training to extended family caregivers and even to teachers, coaches, and neighbours the child had a previous relationship with. Grandparents are by far the largest single kinship group. Many grandparents keep secret the fact that they are raising grandchildren. Some realize they need to be with others like themselves in order to feel normal again, to share experiences, and to cope with an ever-shifting torrent of difficulties. In the summer of 2012, I met 30 grandparents and 70 grandchildren at Camp Ignite in southern Ontario near the shore of Roblin Lake and next to historic Ameliasburgh. These grandparents gathered for the CanGrands summer camp to support each other, shed tears together, and celebrate together. While children splashed in the pool, played volleyball, shot baskets, and dug in sandboxes, I interviewed 10 grandparents in the camp's open areas, under the shade of hundred-year-old ash trees. Occasionally the children interrupted to ask grandma or grandpa a question or to get a kiss for an ow-ie. Sometimes grandma or grandpa yelled across the field for a child to behave. Even in this idyllic setting during summer vacation, none of us had the luxury of peace, quiet, and solitude. This was not a Caribbean resort or a retirement centre. I'll introduce you to some of the people I met there. Victoria is 74 years old and lives in St. Catharines, Ontario. She's raised her great-granddaughter for 10 years and now she also cares for her recently retired husband, who has Alzheimer's. On October 8, 2002, she took in her granddaughter's 5-day-old baby, who was born an alcoholic. The girl has serious FASD. (See chapter 3 for Victoria's whole story.) Lucy lives in Montreal with two granddaughters, 12 and 14. She's had them since birth, when she was 50 years old. Her son, her only child, is their father. He's addicted to drugs and alcohol. He drops by to visit once a year and promptly disappears again. The mother has been a heroin addict since she was 17, and Lucy is surprised whenever she hears the mother is still alive. Every year when the parents' birthdays come around, Lucy and the girls sing happy birthday to the pictures of them that hang on the wall. The girls ask her, "Do you think we'll ever see mom before she dies?" Don jokes about his ongoing battle with pancreatitis. "I should've died 30 years ago!" he says. When he has the energy, his inner schoolteacher surfaces. He commands the attention of over a hundred people in Camp Ignite's large cafeteria, his booming voice loud enough to drown out clinking cutlery and giggling children. But he has to take naps and medication every day to keep going. He and his wife, Cassie, care for an 8-year-old granddaughter full time. The girl's mother is bipolar and used to be heavily into ecstasy. Cassie and Don are retired teachers who spent $20,000 in a custody battle with the mother; they doubt that Caribbean cruises will be in their future, but they seem so happy living with their grandchild that a mere cruise would probably be a step down for them. Julie's stepdaughter was 27 when she got pregnant. For the first year of her life, the baby was back and forth between her parents' home and Julie's. Julie said the parents were drug and alcohol addicts who frequently would beat each other up and trash their home in the process. Julie and her husband spent a fortune battling the birth parents' legal aid lawyers to get custody. The stepdaughter brags about her daughter on her Facebook page and likes to be called Mommy. When the stepdaughter comes for a rare visit, she gives her child a doll. Julie says that's the extent of her interest in mothering. Chris lives in London, Ontario, with his extended aboriginal family. He jokes that he and his wife have taken in more than a hundred kids over the years. He says they have 14 or more people sleeping over at their house some nights, so many that he sometimes has to sleep on the floor. He and his wife recently adopted 7-year-old twins who were daughters of his wife's cousin. "Now they're my daughters," he laughs, "but realistically, I think we count them as third cousins." He was in his early 50s when Children's Services told him he was too old to take the girls in; he and his wife convinced them to change their minds. Now Chris and his wife are educating themselves about FASD. They got the twins diagnosed, but now he needs to develop strategies to work with them. He's determined to educate his community about the long-term effects of drinking during pregnancy. Betty Cornelius, the president and founder of CanGrands tells me that 95 percent of the kids associated with CanGrands have FASD, ADHD, ODD, or some other disability. She laughs, "And the other 5 percent of the grandparents are delusional and think their kids don't have any of these things." Once they have a diagnosis, grandparents can get financial help and other support. Getting that diagnosis, though, can be as tough as climbing a cliff with a child on your back and can cost thousands of dollars. But governments are tight-fisted and often withhold information about programs grandchildren might be eligible for. At the CanGrands camp, a normal family group is one grandmother and up to five grandkids. Four grandfathers are there with partners, and one or two more drop in and out during the five-day event. At the end of the week, Betty Cornelius asks each of the grandparents to express a wish for the group. My wish is that more grandfathers get involved in the children's lives. My other wish is that grandparents in hiding will set their shame aside and be proud of all the love they give their grandchildren every day. I have a confession to make. At the outset, I said Jeff is my grandson, but he's technically a step-grandson. He and his sister are my partner's grandchildren. I've had a relationship with them both for nearly as long as I've had a relationship with their grandmother. But the more I get into the culture of kincare, foster care, adoption, traumatic attachment groups, etc., the more I realize the labels we use to identify our roles are inadequate, at best. I have, at last count, three grandchildren via my own three biological children. I am functionally the father of the two I'm raising, but they have a hard time calling me dad. If I were their dad, would that mean they are brother and sister to my own three children? If so, that would make them the aunt and uncle to my biological grandchildren. If we adopted them, which Children's Services has pushed us to do, would that make them brother and sister to their own biological father? We tell the kids they have two sets of parents: the ones they were born to and us. For us, it's more important what our relationship is now, not who conceived them. Last year, a friend I went to high school with 45 years ago and hadn't talked to much for 30 years asked me why I decided to help raise two grandkids that weren't mine. I said, "I've got nothing better to do." I said, what could be better than living with the woman I love and helping her raise two children? If I'd found a woman to love who had no grandchildren in the house, of course, that would have been good, too. But I didn't. In fact, the woman I found to love didn't have any grandchildren when our relationship started; she acquired them a little later. When I saw how much she loved them and what she was giving up to take them in, I loved her even more. If I'd had the chance to be 35 years old again with her instead of 65, I might have taken it. That wasn't one of the options. But being around a 6-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy is a good way to get back some youthful exuberance that my body had forgotten. Being in love helps me feel young again too. That it involves loving two kids and coaching them as they learn to read, write, skate, play soccer and hockey, ride bicycles, play violin, and dance is a bonus, even better than getting something at a three-for-one sale. In the 1950s, when I was their age, I saw television ads that plugged Geritol, an iron supplement for older people. They claimed older people had low energy because of "tired blood," and Geritol would fix it. I'm in my middle 60s, and my blood often feels tired. So do my brain, my muscles, my eyes and ears. That all changes when I engage with a child 50 or 60 years younger than me. Since I'm raising two of them, I get regular doses of something more effective than Geritol several times a day. Of course, my blood does get tired every evening when the kids are in bed and I finally have some free time. Statistics Canada calls grandparent-headed households with grandchildren present and the middle generation missing "skipped generation families." The numbers of these households is growing. People may think I'm a little strange because I write quirky poetry or my curly white hair turns into a ratty Afro donut after I've had a tuque on. But when I'm out with my partner and our two grandkids, we are part of the new normal in parenting. We are a living reminder of extended family units that have been around since our ancestors started walking upright and developed opposable thumbs. We are "creating the future for humankind," and we're the future our ancestors created hundreds of thousands of years ago, back when the survival of our species was in doubt. Excerpted from Raising Grandkids: Rescuing the Next Generation by Gary Garrison All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.