“About a week after my daughter moved near her in-laws, the other grandma sent me a video of my grandson playing in her flat,” says Donna. “I thought my heart would break; I wished that was me.”
Donna’s only daughter moved nearer to her mother-in-law in Glasgow when her baby was 18 months old. Donna, who lives in south London, had looked after her grandson two or three days a week for over a year, and although she had known for months that the move might be on the cards, it was still a bitter blow.
“I was absolutely dreading them going. I’ve always hated the idea that my daughter might live away from me. When she had the baby, we become much closer, and spending so much time looking after my grandson made saying goodbye incredibly difficult. I was absolutely devastated. I feel much more alone.”
When a son or daughter moves near their in-laws, it can trigger sadness and jealousy amongst grandparents: fears of missing key milestones like first words and first steps, and the pervading sense that you will no longer be part of the fabric of their daily lives.
Donna’s daughter now lives a 15-minute walk from her mother-in-law, who picks her grandson up from nursery, has him to stay one night a week and is always there to help – all the things that Donna used to love doing. “When my daughter had her baby, she needed me in a way she hasn’t needed me for a very long time,” she remembers, “and there is nothing like being needed by someone you love, especially when you can fulfil their need. I knew when they moved it would change my life. The other granny is just starting to take my grandson away for weekends, and I would love to do that.”
Pippa, 66, had driven to London from her home in South Wales to look after her granddaughter two days every fortnight for about a year, before her son moved to Belfast. “It was so lovely looking after her, and being wanted and needed and valued,” she says. “Those things are so important, and I really appreciated that my son and his partner trusted me to look after her.”
There is usually a whole mix of reasons why an adult child chooses to move closer to the other grandparents: it’s could be about house prices, or because the other grandparents can offer free childcare or simply because their partner is close to their parents. Pippa’s son and his partner couldn’t afford a house in London. They had originally planned to move to Wales to be near Pippa, but then the idea of living near her parents in Northern Ireland was suggested.
‘‘My strongest response has been to do with my son rather than my granddaughters. My son has always been close to his mother-in-law, and the whole family, so I had come to terms with that before they moved. Even so, my initial, automatic response was a little bit jealous, a little bit possessive,” she says. “On my last visit, his mother-in-law said, ‘I think of him as my own son.’ I’d bought a bag of cherries and she said something about them being good for his knee. I had no idea there was anything wrong with his knee, and it made me feel a bit detached. If there’s proximity between people you get that kind of daily information – it’s almost like the fabric of those relationships.”
As a psychological counsellor, Pippa is well aware of the dangers of knee-jerk emotional reactions, although she admits that for her, they still surface from time to time. “It would be so easy to think something like, ‘He’s not your son, he’s mine,’ but I know that’s where you see awful family fall-outs and dramas, when people can’t cope with those natural, automatic responses,” she says. “When attachment is threatened in some way those immediate reactions are natural. We just have to give ourselves time to think empathically, although it’s not always easy. I really don’t want to engage in anything competitive, so I quickly flipped my initial reaction into thinking that if there are lots of people in my son’s life, and my grandchildren’s lives, who love them and protect them, that’s of huge value to them.”
If an adult child lives much closer to one set of grandparents, it heightens the inequality that invariably exists. The left-behind grandparents have to plan visits in advance, and make an effort to keep up with their grandchildren’s constantly changing lives. For their part, adult children can help to keep the grandparents alive for their children, just by talking about them and sharing photos.
Donna now sees her grandson every two months or so, and she’s relieved that their bond remains just as strong. Two weeks after her daughter and her partner moved, she went to look after her grandson while they went away for four days. “By doing that, I felt I established myself, and that was fantastically important for me. But I realise it was tough for the other granny, because she was just beginning to really bond with our grandson when I stormed in. To be honest, I think she’s more competitive than I am. She used to tell me I was doing things wrong and kind of elbow me out of the way. But she did it in the nicest possible way – she’s on it as a grandparent in a way that I’m not. I don’t see her as a competitor at all because she’s so different from me.”
Pippa’s visits have to be scheduled around her work. She tries to go every three months and stays for a couple of days. There are inevitably times when the other grandparents’ closeness to the family hits home, like at Christmas, and when the new baby was born. Her son originally asked her to come when the baby was due, “but five days before I was due to leave I got a message asking me not to be there when the baby was born, partly because the other grandparents were going to be looking after our granddaughter. I remember having an initial flare-up of feeling upset and hurt. It took me a few minutes to think, ‘Come on, she’s having a baby at home, she doesn’t want all these people around’. It helps that I like the other grandparents a lot, and I really appreciate everything they do for the family. Once you get into that mindset, feelings of jealousy just evaporate.”
It’s been a year since Donna’s daughter moved but she is determined to look on the bright side. “I know my daughter doesn’t love her mother-in-law like she loves me, and I know she wishes her son could be with me more,” she says. “He certainly hasn’t forgotten me – we always have a wild time together.”
Celia Dodd’s new book, ‘Grand Expectations: The Joys and Dilemmas of Being a Grandparent’, is out now
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