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Grief Is Love With Nowhere To Go
Let’s start with some boring stats: in families where grandmothers are involved in child rearing and generally the household, there’s more longevity and better outcomes for the little ones.
Like many kids of my generation (the 90s kids), raised after the fall of the USSR in Eastern Europe, I was raised by my grandparents.
(The main heroes of my childhood ^^)
Some kids had it worse, their parents worked abroad and sent money home. Mine worked at home, but they were never present. One worked 16-hour days and the other barely moved his ass out of the sofa to do anything for the kids or the household.
We'd spend the summers, the weekends, and often evenings during the week with my grandparents. It was from them that I learned everything good in life — work ethics, work-life balance, and how to be of service to others and the community. I learned the tough love lesson that sometimes family is complicated, we don’t get to choose who they are, and we also don’t get to choose to love them, especially as kids — we simply do, even when they are not perfect, and when their inactions mostly hurt is. So grandparents stepped up to create good humans. They did a great job!
