I am a full-service grandad. Where are the others?

The grandmother hypothesis is well known. Grandmothers are said to improve evolutionary fitness, helping children survive and families endure across generations. I know a grandma who carries a spare diaper in her handbag. Then there’s the grandfather effect. According to some anthropologists, grandads reduce the survivorship of offspring. When a grandad mooches around, his sons have fewer kids. We snooze, we’re odiferous, we eat too much – right out of the mouths of babes! But if science has been slow to celebrate us, life has recently handed me a counterargument. Three years ago, when my granddaughter came home from the hospital, I committed myself to becoming what I now call a ‘full-service grandad’.

I too had grandfathers. One, called Danda, daily consumed fried bread and loved his rashers of bacon. He would run with me up and down the length of Xavier Avenue in Dublin’s North Strand, and when the trains pulled out of the station, we paused to wave, up, up, up so high on the bridge at the end of that short street. The other grandfather, Grandy, smoked his pipe, or rather he prepared his pipe, shaving the plug of tobacco, stuffing the bowl, striking the match, and raising it aloft as he talked till it burned down to his fingers. His background was revolutionary, storyful, pious; the memories linger a half-century after he is gone.

Even before I became a grandfather, I looked the part. My hair greyed in my 30s and then whitened; my beard is billowy and snowy. My complexion, though not quite rosy, is a little pinkish. December is a cruel month for men embodied in this way. This year, a young man crossed over from his line to mine in Trader Joe’s to announce that I look like Santa. It was the 7th of January. ‘Christmas is over, friend,’ I said. ‘I’ve reverted to being Karl Marx.’ He shrugged, unrepentant, as they always are. But in the main, I look like a generic grandad. Even before my granddaughter was born, children glanced up at me with timid recognition. My granddaughter is now three, and I have grown into the role. Despite ongoing requests from her grandmother – Yiayia – I won’t cut my hair or shave: ‘Why upset the child?’ By genetics, by age and by a natural joviality, I am a fully gestated grandfather.

When my granddaughter was bundled up and readied for her homecoming from the hospital to her first apartment in Lincoln Square in Chicago, I travelled behind the main party by train and walked the chilly street from Ravenswood to join the family. It is a route I’ve walked hundreds of times since. I had committed to being a full-service grandad. The offer had been made and accepted: I was to be a caretaker for two full days a week for as long as her parents needed me. I had, I think, been a very present dad to our two boys. And yet, years before my granddaughter was born, I expressed to the family – everyone was home for the holidays – ‘Wasn’t it great that, because I’m a professor, I could be home so much when you were small?’ How everyone laughed that day. When the chortling subsided, a son had mopped his eyes, he said: ‘You were never around.’ Had I missed out, I wondered? Maybe. One thing I do know about family life now: despite how arduous and all-consuming it is, no matter how tired you feel, that phase is over too quickly. I am a full-service grandad, and yet I realise there is a clock ticking on that service.

Does a full-service grandad change diapers? Yes, he does. This is perhaps the first question a prospective full-service grandad might ask. I recall that this delicate question was on my mind when, just a few weeks after she was born and my ‘training day’ was complete, it was just her, me, and a really quite unpleasant deposit. Was I really up for this, I wondered. But yes, it’s part of the deal. I have since changed – by my back-of-the-envelope calculation – 686 diapers and then pull-ups over the past three years. The child is now potty trained, but I sometimes glance at the last of the pull-ups on her bedside table and wonder when a diaper might have my name on it – a geriatric question for another essay. So much for diapers. But just as importantly, I have overseen feedings, nap times, tummy time, library visits, stroller jaunts and, above all, park visits, playground romps, river walks, bird-watching, squirrel-noticing, beach days, and a full immersion in nature. This is what I am here to say: the full-service grandad does all the routine labours of care, but must also ask what distinctive contributions he brings.

There is something incomparable about offering what you have while they are still so young

I had promised myself that I would not turn my granddaughter into a project. It is tempting, as an ecologist, to observe her too closely. But what interests me most is not what she reveals as a subject, but what she helps me see again. Yes, yes – that is a sparrow, a doggie, a worm, a hawk in a tree, a puddle worth splashing in. The success of my method lies in the fact that young children and elderly gentlemen alike take everything slowly. I will not make a study of her, and yet by catering to her attention I’ve learned how to see the world with fresh wonder.

Each full-service grandad must discover his own talent. Mine is to immerse my granddaughter in the green and leafy world – an intense exposure she might not otherwise have had, at least not so early. Who knows what the future holds for this tiny child who has braced herself against Chicago’s bitter winter days, leapt wellington-booted into spring-swollen puddles, and ambled along sunbaked sidewalks with a floppy hat pulled low? She knows the moored boats along her stretch of river and pauses to remark on the geese drifting across North Pond. She knows her goldenrods, her butterflies, her asters. She never fails to notice the sky. The urban outdoors will have left its mark. And each grandad brings his own gifts: familiarity with the beasts of the countryside, an eye for the stars, a mechanical mind, a musician’s ear, or a facility with art. Imparting these gifts is not the work of an idle afternoon; they require time, patience, and presence. Grandads in the traditional mode may well shine later in a child’s life, but there is something incomparable about offering what you have while they are still so young. Committing to being a full-service grandad begins with a simple act of self-interrogation: what part of the world can I open for this child?

I am a full-service grandad, but it’s a lonely task. I am often the solo grandad in the library, the park, and at the beach. There is, of course, a well-documented crisis in childcare: it is expensive for a parent to stay at home, expensive to send children to daycare, and expensive to hire a carer. And though grandparents often step up – my granddaughter is in the exceptional care of my daughter-in-law’s mother two days a week, and Yiayia, more often than not, shares the responsibility with me now that she is retired – even those contributions come at a cost. We are all finite beings, of course, but finitude feels more urgent in one’s 60s than when one is 20: time engaged in one pursuit means less time for others. I still work full-time, so time not spent with her is fully consumed by paid work. I have written less, applied for fewer grants, and postponed conference-going. My years with my granddaughter have cost the world at least one book and two or three essays. That’s at least a few hundred people deprived of desultorily glancing over my prose. It is both a cost and a very great privilege to do the work of a full-service grandad but, gendered norms being what they are, very few of us are availing ourselves of this opportunity. I want to see more grandads in the fray. Let us nod to one another as the kids throw a hundred pebbles into Lake Michigan – a slight salute in the Nature Museum’s butterfly haven. We have been an evolutionary mixed bag for far too long; it’s time to redress the historical imbalance.

On creaky legs, hoist yourself from your easy chair, Grandad. Apply a final touch of pomade to thinning hair and place that hat firmly upon your head. We shall skip stones on the lakefront; place block upon block in the children’s corner of the library; push strollers through the streets and encourage toddling steps upon the grassy hills of our parks. We shall never surrender that little hand when crossing a busy street. There is no crisis of loneliness in the Brotherhood of Full-Service Grandads, only a surging confidence in our mission. Grandads of the world, we have done well – but now we must do better. We have nothing but our naps to lose, and a world to set right: a little child to care for.