Overblow

     I have come to realize that the way you learned how to be a mother was from your children. Some of that learning may also apply to being a grandmother.  What I learned has served me well throughout life.

     When my younger son was about four years old, he told me that the “trouble with you is that you overblow.” I asked him what overblow meant and he explained it meant that you don’t get mad when you are mad and then you get so mad that you overblow. That was a profound insight, especially from a four-year- old.

     Sorry to say, at the time that feedback from my child probably had a greater influence on my dealing with others, especially professionally, then it did with my responses to my children. Mothers tend to “overblow” when a child seems not to be paying attention – or as parents say, “not listening”. Patience tends to run out when you have other chores to attend to.

    Also, as a parent you are particularly vulnerable to feeling that your children’s behavior is. a reflection on you. That feeling is reinforced when others blame parents for a child’s misbehavior.  A pleasure of being a grand parent is that the relationship is most often free of the the need to reprimand or chastise issues of misbehavior.

     My granddaughter as a young child told me to “listen to the children.” At the time she seemed to be telling me to pay attention to the children’s point of view when parents were telling their own story about a child and his or her behavior. What I understood about this was not that children were telling a different version of the same story but instead were expressing different feelings from those I had heard from parents.

     Basically, in any disagreement between people there are different points of view about events, or in this case about behavior.   I think children are asking us to listen to how they think and feel rather than to what parents may be reporting. As grandparents it may be easier to do that, and children may get the sense that we hear them – that we understand them, without regard for the so-called facts of a given situation.

     Most of us would like to feel understood by others. Not always easy to do in daily interactions.  I don’t think our grandchildren are necessarily asking us to take sides in a conflict they may have with their parents. The challenge for us as grandparents may be to provide the understanding and support that our grandchildren seek without that turning into criticism of their parents and thereby creating a generational conflict.

 I continue to learn from my grandchildren as I did from my children.