TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the responsibility of grandparents. Although I’m not a parent, I’ve often pictured what my life would be like if I were a parent. How would I behave as a parent? And sometimes I take it to the next level and think, how would I be if I were a grandparent? If I had had children and my children had children, what I would like to think is that I would see the children of my children as my own children. I would like to think that I would love my grandchildren in the exact same way I loved my own children. I would care about their needs as much as I cared about the needs of my own children. If I saw them coming to pain, I saw them being neglected, I saw them hurt, confused in their lives, I would want to be there for them to help them grow, to help, well, to help them have extra parents in their life, really, to be grand. Grand being big, good, great. I would want to be that extra special parent for them.
And then I think about what I observe in grandparents so often in our modern world. I think about the four grandparents that I had. All four are dead now. Well, what I felt is that one of my four grandparents actually kind of loved me. That was my favorite grandmother, my mother’s mom. Many times she was kind to me. Many times she showed love to me. She held me, she played with me, she sought me out, she was nice to me. Many times she wasn’t. Certainly, as I became more of an adult, as I started having more of my own independent ideas, especially as I started to critique my parents, especially critiquing my mother for her very sick and disturbed behavior, I noticed that my grandmother didn’t like me so much anymore. Even hated me, criticized me, rejected me. But when I was younger, this one grandmother of mine, she did love me in certain ways, and I thought she was a positive force in my life overall.
But what I realize is when I think back about it, she was a positive force in my life overall not so much inherently because I would say out of, well, if I give the ideal of what a healthy grandparent could and should be for their grandchildren, really loving them deeply as one’s own child, being a really healthy human being, healthy super adult as a grandparent, if that’s a 10 out of 10, my grandmother was about a two, maybe a three out of ten. But my grandmother who loved me, who was a two or three out of ten, she was a 10 out of 10 compared to my other three grandparents. Her husband, he didn’t care about me at all. He barely knew who I was. He wasn’t interested in me. Sometimes he was vaguely nice to me, but he didn’t know my birthday, he didn’t know any of my friends, he wasn’t interested in me. He never sought me out for conversation at all. I think for my childhood, he was actually kind of a scary person who a lot of times I avoided because he acted weird and strange and intrusive and even dangerous, raging things like that. And yet the funny thing was, in terms of my grandparents, he was definitely the second best grandparent.
And then there were my father’s parents. The irony about them is I didn’t even know them. I think I met them, what, in my whole childhood, three or four times? They never, either of them, had a conversation with me alone, ever. I mean, not even talked to me ever. I don’t remember them. I remember I have a photograph of me playing piano with my dad’s mother one time, and I remember thinking, “Oh my God, I have such a great relationship with her. Wow, we really bonded so well.” We played, she taught me how to play on the piano. And that goes to show me when I thought that we really bonded over that, that actually I had incredibly low standards for what a grandparent should be. This woman didn’t know me at all. I mean, I have had friends or people I barely know. I’ve gone over to their house and I’ve played guitar with their child for longer than my grandmother actually interacted with me in my entire childhood. This woman didn’t care about me, and she didn’t care much about my father, but she cared about me even less. And my grandfather, her husband, I didn’t know him. I had even less interaction with him. And then he started getting dementia when I was a teenager, and he was just like something was really off about this guy. And it was like he did not contribute to my childhood at all. Complete and absolute neglect. And yet people don’t really accuse grandparents of doing neglect, of practicing neglect, because basically in our society, in many places in the world, there is no expectation on grandparents.
So even if grandparents do a little bit of a good job, and sometimes, by the way, I do admit I know people who say, “My grandparents saved my life. They loved me more than my parents did.” And bless those grandparents, but that was not my grandparents. And so often I think it’s the case that many grandparents are, well, they’re either a negative force or they’re just sort of like both of my dad’s parents. They’re just nothing. They’re non-existent people, complete failures in terms of being grandparents. They, on an emotional level, on pretty much every level, gave me nothing. And what’s up with that?
Now, I’d like to philosophize a little bit. Something that I was thinking about before I made this video, that we live in a society that radically lets parents off the hook in terms of meeting the emotional needs of their children. We have this concept of the good enough mother, that, you know, parents are good enough as long as they do a sort of marginally good job. They’re actually even expected at some level to fail their children. Oh, if they fail their children, then their children have to learn how to become independent and how to adapt to failure. And children are resilient, and they’ll figure out how to make it on their own. Don’t be too good of a parent or your child will be spoiled. Untrue. It’s backward. But basically, we live in a world, and I’m talking world, every culture, every culture that I’ve seen, and I’ve been to a lot of them, where there are very, very low expectations for what it means to be a good parent. And when it comes to grandparents, it’s even less so.
I think what it means, actually, what I’m really getting at is that if an average parent can, let’s say, do a 30% good job and still be considered a great parent, a great loving parent who is really there for their child, if they can do 30% and it’s considered good enough, I think with grandparents it’s multiplied out even more. Meaning like if they can do like a 5% good enough job, meet the expectations of inherently what a grandparent should meet, if there is such a thing, if I can say there’s such a thing as what a grandparent should do, if they can do five percent of a good enough job, they’re considered a great grandparent.
And I think about the world that I was raised in. I was raised in a very conventional mindset, very conventionally low expectations for what my parents should be. I thought my mother was the greatest person in the world for most of my childhood. I thought she was a fantastic mother. I thought my father was a fantastic father because this is what they trained me to believe. This is what their denial and their rationalization would have had them believe about themselves, and they inculcated that in me psychologically. So I said, “Oh my God, my parents are great. I love them because they’re so awesome.” And it actually profoundly wasn’t true. And yet what I believed as a child was that all four of my grandparents were great. If anyone had asked me how are your grandparents, I’d say, “Oh, they’re great grandparents. You know, yeah, it’s really, really nice, good people. They care about me.” But they didn’t. So I think this goes to show that as much as our society, our families, our culture, our world lets parents off the hook, they let grandparents off the hook even more. And great grandparents, I think there is not even any concept whatsoever that they are supposed to in any way do anything, have any responsibility for.
Their great grandchildren. In fact, I knew almost nothing about my great grandparents, and they set up zero legacy for me. Zero offerings for me on any level. Zero writings. Zero caring about me. One great grandfather gave me an inscribed cup with my name on it. That was the sum total, emotionally, physically, or anything that he actually passed on to me.
And I think, is that what I would want if I had a great grandchild? I mean, it’s like you think that this grand word, “great,” great and grand, these words, “great grandparent,” would have some obligation to be great and grand. And yet, there’s nothing.
And to conclude this video, what I’d like to say, the irony for me is that as I’ve become more emotionally healthy, as I figured out how to meet more of my ancient historical unresolved childhood needs, all the ways in which my parents and grandparents, great grandparents failed me, the more that I’ve become whole on the inside, healed, self-loving, the more that I want to give to everyone, everyone in the world. The more that I’ve become altruistic toward humanity, especially toward younger people.
And that’s part of why I make these videos and share my ideas at a certain self-sacrifice. It’s stressful to share about my life. It’s stressful to talk about this. It’s stressful to open myself up to family and societal critique, criticism, hatred even. And yet, I do it anyway because the more I’ve learned to love myself, the more I want to love others.