The Labour MP Angela Rayner has become a grandmother at the age of 37. #Grangela, as she hashtagged herself on Twitter, is lucky to be able to look forward to a long time of it: becoming a grandparent is one of the best things that can happen to you. (I became a grandmother seven weeks ago and was the founding editor of Gransnet, so I know this for a fact.)
Becoming a grandparent is one of the few unequivocally good things about getting older. Forget sudden mysterious bone-aches, the misplaced names of actors, or looking in the mirror and seeing, unaccountably, an old person looking back at you: become a grandparent and these things seem, suddenly, negligible.
There is a theory in evolutionary biology called the grandmother hypothesis, which holds that, basically, all human development is down to grandmothers. It’s only because grannies were around to help out with infants that parents ever had their hands free to invent tools, or the headspace to think up the means of production. But the grandmother hypothesis is not just a relic of the evolutionary past; in fact, grandparents are critical to the smooth running of households right here and now.
When I had children, it was unthinkable that I would ask my parents to be involved; now, there is a near-universal expectation that the older generation will pitch in. I recently gave a talk at an investment bank at which everyone in the room had a more-or-less formal and regular childcare arrangement with parents and in-laws, apart from the one person who was a grandmother, who looked after her grandchildren on her day off. All of my daughters’ friends have help from grandparents, some for the majority of the working week.
The costs of housing and childcare, plus flatlining incomes, mean many parents would have to give up work if it weren’t for free help from grandparents. (Forget all that nonsense about selfish baby boomers – the older generation can’t move out of their big houses because half the time they’re full of other people’s children.)
The BBC Two comedy Motherland has skewered this dependency with a running joke that working mother Julia (playd by Anna Maxwell Martin) is in a permanent state of outrage that her own mother, Marion (Ellie Haddington), doesn’t do more. When Julia splashes across a public swimming pool to berate Marion for claiming she was busy (when she was actually swimming), her mother notes that it’s not her fault that Julia hasn’t sorted out her childcare. Julia yells back: “I’ve been too busy looking after your grandchildren.”
It is not just exercise that keeps grandmothers from what have become their duties. Some of us – I am speaking personally here – may still have children at school and university. They may also (me again) have elderly parents with dementia, needing daily attention.
And then there’s the pressure to go on working. As lifespans increase, the argument is that fit and healthy people should work longer. And so the pension age recedes. All very well, but what are we supposed to live on while we are doing all this childcare and dementia-monitoring?
I have a new grandmother hypothesis: where there is an intractable social problem that no one in government wants to grapple with – unaffordable pensions, an elderly care crisis, or expensive childcare – it should automatically be dumped on grandmothers, because they will do it without complaint.
Well, without a lot of a complaint.
I don’t suppose Rayner will have much time for childcare, what with Westminster and the constituency, although she’s a remarkable woman – a single parent at 16, shadow education secretary at 37 – so who knows? I was adamant that I didn’t want to do childcare before my daughter was pregnant, and now – well, the great thing about becoming a grandparent is that it gives you a different perspective.
As a parent, you’re so busy thinking about whether you can put your baby down long enough to get dressed, about whether you’re feeding properly, about the sheer weight of responsibility of it all, that you don’t have time to think. As a grandparent, you have a longer view. It’s humbling to watch your child turn into that astonishingly competent thing, a mother; you can see the arrival of a new person for the miracle it is. I am astonishingly young myself (don’t ask) but I would have been thrilled to have these insights at 37.
• Geraldine Bedell is a novelist and was the founding editor of Gransnet
