by Ian Haysom
Grandparenting, apparently, has a time limit. Usually about six hours.
Your grandchild is a massive ball of energy and enthusiasm, crashing into walls and other people, and you’re essentially knackered after about four minutes. I have a lot of energy. I play sports. I ski. I bike. I play tennis. But this wasn’t the same. There was no downtime.
I’d look after Mayana every day for about ten hours. I resorted to some TV babysitting after breakfast, and we both had an afternoon nap—or quiet time—sometime after lunch. In between she moved at ninety kilometres an hour while I tried to keep up, huffing and puffing.
I know some grandmas who look after a grandchild while the parents are at work, family-based childcare so to speak, and the grandmas hand over the kids at 6:00 p.m. and then they go home to sleep, drained.
The second-most-popular sentence uttered by grandparents is, “If I’d known being a grandparent was going to be this much fun, I’d have had them before I had my kids.”
Not at this age you wouldn’t.
TV Time
Television is a superb babysitter. Particularly when you’re exhausted. You think you’re not going to need TV—you’d probably harrumph and get haughty if your own kids use TV to babysit your grandchild—but after reading three books to your granddaughter and making her breakfast and getting her to brush her teeth and then finding clothes she’s willing to wear and socks that match, you’re already exhausted beyond belief and need any relief you can get.
Oh, don’t get too hoity-toity with me. I know using TV as a babysitter is a cop-out, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
I was happy to give Mayana a glass of orange juice, sit her on the sofa, and turn on morning television before we took on the day, while I did the breakfast dishes. But not morning cartoons. One thing I discovered is that TV for kids is a whole lot better than when we grandparents were children. Back then it was all black and white grainy images and awkward puppets with visible strings and adults being incredibly childish or patronizing.
Today, and I’m not exaggerating here, much of TV made for kids is better than much of the TV they’re making for adults. There’s Sesame Street, of course, the good old standby that still helps children spell and sing and learn stuff when they don’t realize they’re learning.
But there’s plenty of other educational stuff masquerading as children’s programming. There are science shows, detective shows, animal shows, shows with kids as the heroes and heroines, shows with giants and monsters and aliens, shows with lovable bears—and all of them have people, mostly, being nice to one another. Positive messages and smiling faces light up the screen. This is the exact opposite of prime-time TV, where people are cruel, conniving jerks who will shoot, maim, undermine, or destroy at the drop of a stereotype. And that’s just the news. We haven’t started with CSI yet.
We should all watch more kids’ TV. We might learn something.
Mayana loved the Berenstain Bears, the animated cartoon based on the picture books created back in 1962 by Stan and Jan Berenstain and, later, their son Mike. An astonishing 250 Berenstain Bears books have been published and more than 260 million copies sold.
Mayana also loved the Berenstain Bears books, about a family of bears—Mama, Papa, Brother, Sister, and baby Honey—and their many adventures. Grizzly Gran and Gramps show up now and then too, as do their friends and occasional bullies, such as Too Tall. Too Tall can be menacing and scary, but when he’s brought down to size he’s actually a good kid.
The TV version is true to the books. And there’s usually a moral in every story: don’t be too greedy; don’t envy people their bigger toys; help other people at all times; think of other’s feelings; keep a smile on your face. I was hooked on the show.
My favourite story, somewhat ironically for someone who worked in television, is Too Much TV, where Mama Bear decides the family has been watching way too much TV. Particularly on sunny days.
The Bear family had once had conversations at the dinner table, but now sat around silently. The young bears didn’t go outdoors anymore. So Mama orders the TV to be turned off. For an entire week. It’s tough at first, but slowly and surely the Bears start reading and drawing and looking at the stars. Papa is the main problem, however. He tries to sneak downstairs for a peek at the late-night movie. But Mama and the cubs stop him just in time.
The book should be required reading for every parent—and grandparent. And kid.
Some TV is okay. But not too much.
When I wanted us to leave, I’d simply say, “Too Much TV, Mayana.”
She’d look up, shrug, and say, “Okay.”
And we’d put on our shoes and go outside.
If she wanted to do something, go out and play, and I was hooked on PGA golf or a supper-hour newscast, she’d give it right back to me.
“Too Much TV, Grandad.”
“Just one more minute . . . I want to see if he makes this putt.”
“Grandad.”
“Oh, okay.”
Click.
Cabbage Patch Fantasyland
Mayana and I were rooting around in an old trunk when she uncovered them.
“Wow, these are soooo cool, Grandad.”
She brandished two floppy dolls with ratty hair . . . both with wide, staring eyes. One blonde, the other a redhead.
“What are they?”
“They,” I said grandly, “are Cabbage Patch dolls. They belonged to your mum and auntie. We went through hell to get those for them. They all sold out in a minute.”
“Whose was whose?”
“Well, Auntie Jani had the blonde one, because she’s blonde, and your mum had the dark-haired one, because she has dark hair.”
“Do they have names?”
I wracked my brain. I couldn’t remember. After checking with my daughters, we ascertained they were called Sybil Sadie and Rachel Marie.
Mayana loved playing with them. She kept their original names and was thrilled her own mother had also played with them. A friend had some Cabbage Patch doll clothes, so Mayana dressed them up, and enjoyed making up imaginative games. She talked with them a lot.
Mayana also played with an old Barbie doll someone found. I sniffed a little at this, tried to interest her in more gender-neutral games and more upscale, acceptable activities, but she loved the dolls.
She’d also get out stuffed animals and, with the Cabbage Patch dolls and Barbie playing key roles, would put on elaborate shows for me.
I found a book called 365 TV-free Activities, and we’d do some of them: painting and doing easy quizzes, making bubbles, creating dogs with playdough, and cutting pictures out of magazines.
But the Cabbage Patch dolls, staring and ratty-haired and worse for wear, and Barbie, who was mostly nude, were the summer favourites.
As a grandfather, it mystified me for a while, this compunction to play with dolls, until I realized it had nothing to do with playing mommy or having a pre-school maternal instinct and everything to do with having a vivid imagination.
The dolls were given voices, given little scenarios to act out—mostly pretty minimalist, like going to the park or running away from robbers with accompanying squeals—and they were a means to an end. A means by which to live in a fantasy world. She loved going there. Don’t we all.
Monsters in My Room
There are monsters upstairs.
I figured this out when I asked Mayana to get a sweater from her bedroom. She didn’t want to go upstairs on her own—even though the lights were on.
I was fixing supper, a kind of homemade macaroni and cheese with tuna and—for green stuff—frozen peas. It was coagulating in the saucepan. I was thinking I should have bought Kraft Dinner, though I didn’t want to serve Mayana cheese the colour of dog barf. Though she’d probably prefer it.
“No, you come with me, Grandad.”
/> “It’s okay, Mayana. Your bedroom’s just at the top of the stairs. Just run up and get the sweater. It’s getting chilly.”
And grandad’s too cheap to put on the heating. I didn’t say this.
“No-o-o.” A drawn-out no.
“Why not?”
“There are monsters up there.”
Now, none of this made sense. But, as many of you know, not a lot of things make sense when you’re dealing with a three-year-old. She had happily slept in this room, and in the dark, for weeks.
“There aren’t any monsters up there, sweetie.” I said this in a reassuring voice. Okay, with maybe a hint of frustration. My macaroni and cheese had turned into a single blob, and I was feverishly drowning it in milk, which wasn’t doing any good at all.
“I don’t want to go up there. Go with me.”
So I took the saucepan off the burner and went to the foot of the stairs. I held her hand and we walked up. Well, she skipped up, retrieved a sweater, and skipped down.
“There weren’t any monsters, were there? There was nothing to worry about.”
“No, they’re not there when you’re with me.”
We left it there. I never did see them. And, later, she seemed to forget all about them too.
The Dress
Like many men, I’m a sucker for a girl in a dress. That sounds kinda creepy, I know, but when my wife puts on a dress, I’m putty in her hands. A dress is feminine, bright, and beautiful. It’s spring and summer. It separates men perfectly from women. We’d look terrible in dresses. That’s why we have our short, fat hairy legs, and women have long, smooth, shapely legs. Only a mad, myopic Scotsman would show off his legs under a tartan skirt.
As I write this, I realize how sexist and sad and old-fashioned this all sounds, but I can’t help it. A stylish, colourful dress or skirt or posh frock makes me weak in the knees.
I bought my daughters plenty of dresses over the years, though they always preferred jeans and shorts. But every now and then they’d wear them—at Easter or heading off to a summer party—and I’d feel like a million dollars.
They were cute beyond belief. They’d spin and twirl like princesses and seemed to glow. Well, I glowed. I once bought them a couple of dresses when we were in Australia, when they were eight and nine, and they wore them to meet their grandparents for the first time in two years.
“Oh, my, don’t you look bonny,” said my mum.
“You look like fairy queens,” said my dad, and they did. They’d made two old people very happy. Sure, my folks would have been happy if they’d turned up in T-shirts and cut-off jeans, but the dresses were special. They’d put on a show.
Which brings us to the dress in the shop window. Mayana and I saw it while walking along Beacon Avenue in Sidney on Vancouver Island.
Well, I saw it first. It was the most magical dress I’d ever seen. Not too girly or silly, but different. Special.
“Wow, take a look at that dress, Mayana,” I said. “What do you think?”
She studied it for a moment.
“Well, it’s okay.” There was a distinct lack of enthusiasm in her voice. She hadn’t learned yet that Grandad was a sucker for dresses.
“Shall we go in?”
“Fine.”
Inside, we asked the sales assistant to get it out of the window display for us.
“You have a good eye,” she told me.
“What does that mean, Grandad?” said Mayana, squinting at me. “Don’t you have two good eyes?”
Once I’d sorted that out, we started examining the dress.
It was called a seaside dress. Handmade. It had straps made of rope, was white on top and blue below. Upon the dress were seaside scenes: an umbrella and beach ball; a palm tree; a sandcastle; a bucket and spade; a sailboat. It was perfect.
Mayana warmed to it too. “I like all the pretty pictures,” she said.
She tried on the dress over her shorts and T-shirt. It was a tad big, but we didn’t care. “It’ll last you next summer too,” I said.
She kept it on, and I paid for it—it was pricey but worth every penny—and we went out into the sunshine and she twirled and danced along the street and held her arms out wide.
“I love it,” I said.
“I think I love it too,” said Mayana. We drew admiring glances as she skipped along the street and I beamed.
She’ll wear plenty of dresses in her lifetime. Dresses for parties, dresses for dress-up, dresses for Halloween, dresses for graduation, but that dress will always be burned into my memory. Better than any fancy-schmancy dress on any red carpet anywhere.
A million-dollar dress? That dress was worth a billion.
The Ring
“Look at what I got for Mommy, Grandad.”
Mayana had something clutched in her hand. We had just been to see an IMAX movie on space exploration that she had pronounced “awesome,” and now we were getting into the car.
“What is it, Mayana?”
“It’s a present. Mommy said she was going to get me a gift this weekend, so I got her one too.”
“That’s nice,” I said as I drove the car through heavy traffic. I glanced in the rear-view mirror. “What is it?”
“A ring,” she said, and held it up for me to see. I couldn’t see it clearly, but it looked like a cheap ring that she must have found in her pocket or in the back of the car, where, frankly, there’s enough random detritus to fill a junk shop.
When we got home, she showed me the ring again.
It was the ugliest ring I had ever seen. It had three skulls, one larger, two smaller, on either side. It was ghoulish, terrifying, and dark.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Grandad?”
“It’s, er, very nice. Where on earth did you get it?”
“At the IMAX. After the show. I found it.”
“On the floor?”
“No, I found it . . . it was in a box. On a shelf. In that gift shop.”
Oh! My sweet little granddaughter was a shoplifter.
The gift shop and the IMAX is actually part of the Royal BC Museum, and I was mystified why they’d be selling rings that would have been more suited to trinkets at a Hell’s Angels convention.
“How do you mean it was on a box on a shelf? Like, for sale?”
“No, it was just in a box in the corner.”
I’m not sure how I missed her taking the ring. We had walked hand-in-hand back to the car, and I had buckled her into her seat. Maybe she was wearing it. I’m a trained observer. A journalist. But I miss things.
Let’s go back sixty years or so, to a small arcade in the seaside town of Southend-on-Sea in England. The arcade had a bazaar-like atmosphere, full of market stalls, with goods on display. My mother and I were walking around aimlessly. I loved the happy chaos of the place. Mum briefly let go of my hand to pore over some bargain shoes at one stall.
The adjoining stall was full of toys. To a toddler it was an absolute inviting array of brightly coloured toys and games. Yo-yos and toy soldiers and kites and dolls and cars and ribbons and balloons.
And rubber tomahawks.
There, in a box at the front of the stall, were at least twenty of them. All tacky and, nowadays, as inappropriate as the toy guns next to them—and more politically incorrect. But I couldn’t resist touching one. I picked it up. It had a red handle and a silver, realistic-looking blade. I tried a few random practice whacks and loved it. I immediately put it in my raincoat pocket.
I had to have it. I’m not sure if my mother had already turned me down when I’d pleaded for some other toy or treat—meaning there was no chance she’d buy me a rubber tomahawk—but the act was intentional and full of subterfuge. I knew it was wrong to take it. But I couldn’t help myself.
Later, as we took the bus home, I kept patting it in my pocket. Ready to sc
alp at an instant.
When we got home, I took it out of my pocket and started waving it about at my sister. My dad asked what I was doing.
“Playing with my tomahawk.”
“Where’d you get that, then?”
“At the arcade in Southend.”
My mother turned towards me. “Did you take it from that toy stall? I thought you looked guilty.”
I didn’t even try and lie.
“All right,” said my mum. “You know it’s wrong to take things without paying, don’t you?”
“Er, um, well . . .”
My mother told me to put my raincoat back on, and we went outside into a gloomy afternoon, waited for the bus, then took a twenty-minute ride back to the arcade. I was made to go up to the stall, tell the owner what I’d done, apologize, and give the tomahawk back.
The owner had a wry smile on his face, but my mother painstakingly explained why it was wrong—that I was taking something that didn’t belong to me, which meant that the stall owner would lose money. The way my mother told the story the poor man wouldn’t be able to eat again and would have to live in a tent because I’d damaged his livelihood. She may have also mentioned the police and jail and throwing away the key.
Here’s the thing: I never shoplifted again in my life—not even when school friends were pocketing chocolate bars or licorice chews when the shop owner’s back was turned. It never felt right.
So Mayana and I got back in the car, drove the thirty minutes south to Victoria, parked in the same parking lot and went back to the gift shop and told the clerk that we’d—we’d!—taken the ring by mistake. And apologized.
“I’m not sure we sell that ring,” said the clerk, sniffily. He began hunting around, and then found a small box of cheap knickknacks. “Oh, I guess it came from there. They’re awful, aren’t they? I’m not sure why we sell them.”
We put the ring in the box, and I grandly told Mayana why it was wrong to take something without paying.
“Oh, I already know that,” said Mayana. “I just forgot I had the ring until I realized I had it in the car.”