XI. The Enduring Role of Generativity One as Leader and Grandparent

Our second center stage actor, Dale, speaks about this Generativity One absence in his role as a grandfather replicating, unfortunately, the earlier absence of Generativity One parenting after his divorce. However, in Dale’s case, and in the case of many other absentee grandparents, there have been a few moments when he and his current wife of 25 years have been able to play an important and generative grand parenting role:

Because my son’s family lives in North Carolina and my daughter’s family lives in Illinois, I have not had a regular or particularly intimate parenting role with my grandchildren. An important exception was the three weeks that my wife and I stayed with our nine year old grandson in Philadelphia while my son and daughter-in-law began new jobs in North Carolina. That three weeks really enabled us to bond with him, and this continues. (We are planning to have him join us for a summer vacation this year.) I must confess, however, that I am disappointed that my repeated requests to have a Skype hook-up so I can regularly talk with my grandson have been ignored.

My wife and I have also played a parenting role in supporting our St. Louis granddaughter during a difficult three-year period after her high school boy friend committed suicide. She went off to college last fall, and I am pleased that I was able to help her weigh her college choice.

Because he is now in a second marriage, Dale has had the opportunity to be a grandparent to his second wife’s grandchildren who live close by. While second marriages come with many challenges, they often open the door to what we might call step-generativity –  as we see in Dale’s following narrative:

I am very close with my granddaughter and grandson on my wife’s side and saw them often because they lived in the SF Bay Area. I taught my grandson how to fly fish, and  we continue to talk about that bond to this day. My granddaughter is now a college sophomore, and we regularly correspond through e-mail. I continue to be close to my grandson, who is in a very selective and expensive master’s degree program in theatre at Columbia University. We e-mail on occasion, talk on the phone, and visit with him and his sister when they are home on vacation.