Grandads' Conversation

This has been a week of looking ahead and staying in the moment. Anticipating the future of fun with a new grandson, and praying with all my might for his safety and recovery. A week of appreciating the skills of the surgeons and fretting about the lack of schedule and lack of communication from same.

After a couple of days of this, the other grandad and I found ourselves in the car picking up dinner and having a few minutes to visit. This is their first grandchild and, to some extent, the first time with a hospital emergency. It is hard to describe to someone who hasn't been there what this is all like.

So we talked about how proud we were of our kids, their resilience, their determination, their ability to handle the ups and downs, with good humor and unashamed tears. But we also talked about managing our emotions has been harder than we anticipated. I had been down that path several times, so when he said that he felt like bursting into tears at any given moment, I had to tell him it goes with the job. You see, you expend tremendous emotional energy into willing your child and grandchild to get better. You pray more deeply than you thought possible, and your love and care for your family comes boiling to the surface. On top of that, you don't sleep well, or at all. You eat infrequently, and all is tasteless and bland and feels like so much mud in your stomach that you decide it is better to not eat, than to undergo that unpleasantness. And your primary focus to try to be someone of stability in a world where stability and surety are non-existent.

But after thinking about this for 20+ years I think the hardest part for daddies and grandads is the helplessness. We are chartered with the job of caring and providing, of giving safe harbor in the storm of life, to be the positive answer man for the clan. But we are thrust into the position of not knowing, and worse, not having the ability to "fix" anything. We can't protect as we always have, we can't control the outcome, and to add insult to injury, we can't even control our emotions. This is the last straw. It is embarrassing and it publicly displays our pain, frustration, and our fear.

I hope when I get to whatever Heaven is, there is a Q and A for those of us who spent our time on earth asking questions. I anticipate that there will be at least a couple of big groups already assembled. One will be a group of guys around Adam reminding him what poor "scene control" he exhibited in the early chapters of Genesis. Really, the best you could come up with was, "The woman you gave me..."
Of course the other large group will be women with the Apostle Paul cornered somewhere and demanding an explanation about their "voice" in the church. I can hear him now, "THAT is NOT what I meant!!" Good luck with that Paul, it has never worked for me.
But here is my question: Lord, why did you charter me with the task, the responsibility to raise my children, to care for them and protect them from what the world will try to do to them, to make sure they are balanced, mature, caring people..then strip me of the power to accomplish the task? If I can't keep disease and violence, emotional trauma, and can't remove fear from them, how can I do my job? Why give me a tender heart, crying eyes, and threadbare faith as weapons against evil and pain and death? This does not seem like a fair fight.

So I told my grandad partner that the best we can do is be strong in our faith, both in God and our kids. That we need to be honest about our feelings, but remember that the primary concern is the little grandson, taped and tubed and struggling like a little warrior to get better. To not spend our time analyzing ourselves, but to analyze how we can help, how we can lend a hand (as pitiful as it seems at times) to those around us. That while we would like to run and hide, we never have before and we won't start now. He is a good man, probably better at this than I was the first time around. He knew all this and listened and put up with my pontificating with patience. The worst of the storm is over, relief is beginning to stick its head out. We will see what happens.

Questions and answers. I've got more of the former than the latter.

Godspeed out there.
Don