The other night at Artisan, a fancy dinner place in town, I observed a baby-faced blonde woman in a halter top, eensy skirt and white go-go boots weave through the tables to join a bald older man at his table. Let’s call him Old Grodo. I asked my dinner companion, who has better hearing than I, to eavesdrop on their conversation and determine the nature of the relationship. He did and reported that it seemed like a first date between the blonde and Old Grodo.
I shot a death glare over to Old Grodo, but he paid me no mind. And why should he?
“What is wrong with men?” I asked my dinner companion. A rhetorical question, to be sure. He shrugged and speared a bite of steak. “Survival of the species,” he said.
Sigh. We women do outlive our fertility, while men can keep having kids until the day they drop dead. And maybe the men are in it to spread their seed. But from a biological standpoint, what do we older women do with all this life force?
Like me, a middle-aged mother of two, female killer whales also outlive their fertility. They stop having calves in their late 30s or early 40s, but they can live past 100. B According to the grandmother hypothesis, our grannies—even in animal species—can help us survive. Killer whale babies with grandmothers are four and a half times more likely to survive their first two years than those without.
But both older women and killer whales still have a biological purpose according to the “grandmother hypothesis.” Once they’re done raising their own children, they’re useful to help raise their grandchildren, contributing to their survival.
I didn’t know these facts when my grandma came to live with us in 1984, the summer I turned 18. My beloved stepmother Rita had died, and Grandma Hilma came to help out.
No one discussed Grandma coming to stay with us after Rita died. I came home from school, and the air smelled like zucchini souffle just like Rita had made. Grandma was reading Rita’s Ms. magazine, sitting on the sunny yellow couch where Rita had sat. I wasn’t old enough to further the species, just old enough to sit next to her on the yellow couch and eat my souffle.
Since I learned that the grandmother hypothesis worked on land and sea, I began asking my friends about their grandmothers. Had they been killer whales, so to speak? How exactly had their grandmothers nurtured them?
I asked another Idaho woman, my friend Kari whose dad worked at the paper mill same as mine. Almost every weekend Grandma Eula scooped up Kari and her brother in her 1949 Chevy Coupe, and took them to her farm down the Clearwater River in Idaho. Their parents fought all the time, the marriage was disintegrating. At the farm, Kari and her brother ate chocolate pudding, played board games, and watched how a garden grew. Peace, as Kari said, came not from a flag but from the soil.
My testing of the grandmother hypothesis revealed that it wasn’t just Idaho grannies who were killer sharks. The New York City childhood of my friend Andie also benefitted from some extra grandma attention. Andie’s mom traveled extensively for her job so Grandma Bea with her azalea pink lipstick and a laugh like bells, stepped in to fill any gaps. They went to plays and museums together. She wasn’t – rich, but she liked cultural experiences and elegant things, so they’d take the bus and then wait on long lines to see half price plays. Now Andie lives in Grandma Bea’s apartment and often dreams about her still being alive on the 14th floor (their building doesn’t have a 14th floor).
My friend Emiko grew up in the Three Countries House hotel owned by her Grandma Hatsu in Japan. Because Emiko’s parents ran the hotel, her grandmother looked after her. She met Emiko at the door most days after school. Hatsu wasn’t much of a cook, so she asked Emiko to make scrambled eggs and hot chocolate for the two of them. She had been a geisha in her youth, and could only read hiragana, the simplest Japanese alphabet. But she admired those who could read and bought Emiko any book she wanted. One day when Emiko came home after being caught in a blizzard, Grandma Hatsu tucked her frozen hands in her underarms and warmed them. Every bit of Emiko’s body was soaked by her love.
My friend Kathleen didn’t need a grandma to rescue her. Her mother took care of her. But her Granny Nealy was like syrup on waffles—an added layer of sweetness. She remembered her granddaughter’s favorite foods. That Kathleen loved chocolate cream pie, and dark syrup for her pancakes, and corn bread. Grannie Nealy made lemon cream pies for her brother and had light syrup and white bread on hand for him. Everyone ate strawberries, but Grannie Nealy always made Kathleen a special blackberry cobbler. She would send her out with a paper bag to collect berries that grew along the fence.
We would all like to have a Grannie Nealy, but some grandmothers fall short of a storybook ideal, dealing instead in the pragmatic details of a child’s life. My friend Melissa told me that her father’s parents lived in a small house on the same property as theirs. After Melissa’s mom died when Melissa was seven, her grandmother must have noticed that she didn’t have clean clothes. Grandma Ellen gave her a milk crate and told her to put her dirty clothes in there and bring them to her so she could wash them. Melissa would walk over and pick them up. Grandma Ellen’s heart was damaged by rheumatic fever when she was young. She was too frail to do much for the family, but she could manage the clothes of an undersized seven-year-old child who was quiet and never asked for a thing.
My friend Ann’s grandmother spent her summer days drinking scotch by 11am, drowning the tedium of cooking and cleaning in the summer cabin where the family gathered on Lake Superior. And numbing the sense that her husband loved the island more than he loved her. “Ann, get away from the cliffs!” she would call as Ann climbed the steep rocky outcropping on the island. But Ann pretended not to hear, wanting to be a fearless explorer of Captain Kidd Island. For Marjorie, the world seemed like a dangerous place for a girl.
These grannies are not relics of the past either. Nowadays, too many young parents die of drug overdoses, gun violence, cancer. Five years ago, I met just such a grandmother on a freezing day at the beach. She and her husband had brought her young grandsons there to play. While the boys petted my dog Josie, she told me her son and his wife were dead of drug overdoses. She and her husband were raising their children. He stood off to the side, not meeting my eyes.
A few days later I saw them walk by my house, the boys on their way to the elementary school around the corner. For the past five years I’ve watched them walk the boys to school until this year.
This year they walked alone. Because their grandparents had showed them the way.