I haven’t written much about grandparents here yet. This is partly because, the last time I discussed her in print, my mum got so offended that I ended up spending half my fee on flowers. However, this week I’ve decided to bite the bullet and finally talk about my folks, not least because it’s late enough in the year for the next bouquet to count towards her Christmas present.
There’s a huge box of old photos in my mum and dad’s house; photos of old holidays and distant relatives and people and places long since lost to the winds. At my wife’s behest, we found ourselves sifting through them a few weekends ago. The pictures that drew my attention more than anything else weren’t photos of me, though, they were the ones of my parents from before I was born.
Until now, if I’m honest, I’d never really given those photos much thought. Narcissist that I am, I’d always assumed that they were taken in the dark days before I came along to magically grant meaning to their lives. But I’m a parent now and with that I’ve come to realise that I might not necessarily be the centre of the universe. Now I can see these pictures for what they are. They are photos of a couple. A loving couple who met as teenagers and married at 20 and have stuck together ever since. They had an entire life before I intruded on them.
In all the photos, they’re younger than I am now. Despite all the period signifiers – the nylon, the Formica, the succession of genuinely regrettable haircuts that my dad had before male pattern baldness swept in and mercifully limited his options – they’re just timeless pictures of kids. And, in every single one of them, they’re inseparable. It’d be an exaggeration to say that they were carefree, as these were the days when every camera click cost actual money, but the happiness drips from them.
My parents aren’t parents in these photos. They haven’t yet developed into the roles that I’d rigidly come to define them by. They’re just two kids who didn’t really know what they were doing. They were still figuring it out. I could have been looking at me, or my brother, or any of my friends.
It took longer than it should have to understand that my parents are people first and parents second. But having a baby has helped. Since his birth, they have been a little freer to share their experiences and vulnerabilities with me. They have been happier to discuss stuff that had only been hinted at in the past, like the frustration of being unable to conceive for a decade or the pain of losing their first baby to cot death at six weeks.
And they are fabulous grandparents. Watching them dote on my son is one of the greatest joys in my life. There’s a sense that, now the family is three generations strong, the bonds have become tighter. We’ve all got each others’ backs. We’ve closed ranks. Nothing means more than that.
You take your parents for granted as you grow up because their love is all you know. I’m sure that one day my son will take our love for granted, too. But I hope that eventually, once his horizons have widened and his perspective has shifted, he’ll be as proud of his parents as I am of mine.
Like a lot of working-class families, we’ve always been a bit crap at expressing our emotions to each other. I have to confess, then, that this column is really a cheat. It’s a way for me to tell my parents that I love them, without actually having to tell them. I hope they know.
