Grandmothers

Naturally, the details of personal experience vary enormously, but there’s a charming ideal of what a grandmother is that we can imagine or piece together from fragments of benign memories. Perhaps when you were a child, when your parents and siblings were away for some reason, you spent a couple of days on your own just with her at her house. You were six, you helped in the kitchen, there was a special smell in the cupboard where she kept the plates and a strange set of dark green glasses; she had a funny toaster with a large red lever; and a special little fat knife only for butter. She took you to a farm in her little car and you fed a carrot to a goat and she told you about a pet pig she had when she lived in the country as a child. She cut up an apple in a special way, removing the whole peel in one wonderful long spiral. And she gave you a thin mint chocolate and she laughed when you didn’t really like it. But she didn’t mind. She gave you supper on a tray and let you watch television, sitting on her big sofa.There was a wooden chest with her special things: some old coins, a fan made of ivory, a tiny pencil made of gold, a photo of her at a beach and a slightly sinister one in which she’s standing next to a man in soldier’s uniform which she says was taken ‘during the war’. You were being introduced to an outside world bigger than your parents. It was alien but because of her involvement, it is still one you are connected to. A grandmother can function as what the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a transitional object. A transitional object (like a favourite blanket or an increasingly grubby knitted rabbit) stands for home, but it can also accompany the child in its early forays into the wider world. It provides an extended psychological life-line back to maternal love and security. In its presence the child feels emotionally safe and can therefore risk experimenting with things that are at first a little frightening or alien. The grandmother is kind and gentle and in her reassuring presence the child can start to encounter ideas that are potentially distressing: the fact that the world is very big, with a huge, complex past and filled with strangers.There is a sweet alliance of the elderly grandmother (who is gradually becoming weaker) and the young grandchild (who is slowly becoming stronger). But at the moment, from opposite ends of the spectrum, they both understand frailty quite well. There’s an open-ended tenderness in the Grandmother’s attitude. Her awareness of her own short tenure on life makes her feel the preciousness of mere existence. She’ll probably die before the course of your adult life is established. She might not be able to talk about Minecraft or know how to make a spaceship out of Lego, she can’t make an obstacle course round the sitting room out of cushions and upturned chairs. But she’s very interested in whether you still like Toblerone and if you might be feeling a little bit cold. She may be the only person who simply wants you to happy. She’s good at being cosy. It’s nice to snuggle up to her while she reads to you. She embodies a species of wisdom: the knowledge that achievement is in the long-run over-rated, that simply being comfortable sitting next to another person watching a gardening program on television, or carefully watering a potted geranium in the company of a small person can be deeply important.