As a mother of three, all over 21, with a toddler grandchild, I see there are all sorts of issues: what’s the right amount of contact with your kids? At what point is helping seen as interference? How do you avoid hurt feelings? All this while creating your new life, after the upbringing.
While there are shelves of baby and toddler books, and a growing number of teens, late-stage motherhood is a wasteland. However, that doesn’t mean women aren’t interested in it. Byford found more than 30 women to interview, and many felt a huge relief when they were able to voice their opinion.
As Byford reminds me, female friendships are generally very much based on announcing things to each other. “But there seems to be a taboo on talking about things that are difficult at this stage, as if it were your fault. You prefer to give a positive version of your family life. It took a while for these women to say, ‘You know what? This is really hard.’ And that is difficult for all of us.
“With this book I wanted to say to women: you are not alone.”
The struggle with maintaining relationships with your adult children
Where can it go wrong? Probably the most common conflict is whether your kids even want to know what you’re thinking. Where once you were free to direct their lives, when they are adults they make their own decisions. It can be really hard to hold back when you think you might know better, but almost all the moms Byford spoke to recommend that you do.
“Moms told me they are constantly trying to balance what is and isn’t for them to say. To a certain extent, they live in fear of doing it wrong and that the relationship will break down because of something small that they did wrong. .” It could be an opinion, a critique, or a random comment seen as aggressive.
To complicate matters, independence isn’t always what grown kids crave. Sometimes they really want the opposite: hugs, condolences, tissues and homemade brownies when they crawl back under your wing because of heartbreak, domestic chaos or work worries.
The majority of mothers told Bayford how much they enjoyed spending time with their grandchildren, and many had part-time childcare roles in their children’s lives. Byford takes care of her daughter’s child one day every two weeks. Yet very often there are tensions about how grandmothers do it: what they make happen; what food is prepared; what activities are offered. As one interviewee, Paula, told Byford: “My daughter doesn’t like me being close to the grandkids. She does not share: one wrong move and sanctions follow.”
There is also the potential of jealous rivalry between the different sets of grandparents. Often the mothers of sons feel that they have been sidelined by the family of a dominant daughter-in-law. For example, Debora told Byford: “She [the other grandmother] picks them up from school most days; we only visit a few times a year. We are the occasional visitors; we don’t really stand a chance.”