Grandchildren
Wednesday December 28, 2005
Passing the baton
When we sent out our annual Christmas letter this year, most of it was about our granddaughter.
Grandparents can be crashing bores. I know that, having been on the receiving end for about 20 years. Now I catch myself making the same assumption—that everyone else must be fascinated by every detail about our wonderful, brilliant, beautiful – well, you get the picture…
It’s as if something essential had been missing from our lives.
I’ve been trying to figure out where that feeling comes from.
I think perhaps it is the sense of handing on the torch, if you like the imagery of the Olympic games. Or the baton, if you’re a relay runner.
The high school I attended was small enough that at the annual sports day, everyone had to take part. We didn’t have enough people in each “house” to allow members to specialize – this person for high jump, that one for pole vault; this one for sprints, that one for distance…
As a consequence, I usually got pressed into service to run a leg in the senior boys’ relay.
I can still remember my sense of anxiety as I started running and waited for the baton to slap into my palm – to say nothing of my fear of dropping it and disgracing the team.
And then, further down the track, came the sheer relief of slapping that baton into an outreached hand and letting someone else assume responsibility.
That, strangely enough, is the feeling I have as a grandparent.
We’ve passed the baton.
The urge to perpetuate
Biologist Richard Dawkins argues that we humans are little more than a means for our DNA to replicate itself. Dawkins invented the somewhat confusing term, the “selfish gene,” – another way of suggesting that a hen is simply an egg’s means of producing more eggs.
By his theory, our genes are satisfied only when they have passed their content on to succeeding generations.
But genetics doesn’t apply to me. Because our granddaughter is adopted. She doesn’t even look like us. She’s black. She comes from Ethiopia. From an unknown mother, who abandoned her at the entrance to a mission-funded school.
Dawkins also writes about “memes,” something like cultural genes – social patterns, understandings of life, passed from generation to generation, often without our knowing it.
Racial prejudice would be a “meme.” So would religion. Table manners. Ethics. Morals. Values.
That fits better with my sense of relief.
Once a parent, always a parent. Even though our daughter is an adult, Joan and I still felt a sense of responsibility. We wanted to ensure that our values carried on.
But grandchildren are a further stage removed. There’s nothing more that we can do to obey the dictates of our DNA. The baton is already well down the track.
Even if the grandchild is adopted, somehow her very existence satisfies some kind of deep longing that goes beyond anything merely rational.
And so we can just relax and enjoy our grandchild.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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PROMOTION PLUGS
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