The Safety Net

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Yesterday I was helping hand out awards for Outstanding Educators in the Jordan School District. Often school administrators will invite extended family members—without the winners’ knowledge–to join the presentation of these awards. In two of the schools, the winners we honored were long-time elementary teachers. The school admin folks had planned surprise assemblies in the schools’ multipurpose rooms to celebrate these teachers’ successes —which meant reasonably controlled noisy crowds of excited students, their voices buzzing and their bodies wiggling at the unexpected change in their daily school schedules.

Proud adult sons and daughters had shown up to honor these two teachers, several of these family members with very young children who were obviously overwhelmed by both the size of the crowd and the unfamiliarity of surroundings. How did these little people cope? In both assemblies these pre-school children spotted familiar faces and ran straight for their grandmothers–the award-winning teachers. The children buried their heads into their grandmothers’ arms and didn’t budge during the whole assembly. They knew where safety was.

Though my own grandparents lived thousands of miles away during most of my life, I always knew that I had a place where I would be welcomed no matter the time or day. Once when I was in college, after a formal dance, a couple of friends and I decided we needed to get out of town, so we called my dad’s mom in Las Vegas to see if we could spend the weekend at her house. (My now-husband-then boyfriend had never seen the Strip and was dying to try a slot machine! Turns out it wasn’t nearly as entertaining as he thought it might be, and it swallowed all his pocket money. Apparently, karma is real!) My grandma had never met my friends, and she was visiting out of town, but she didn’t even take time to blink. “Of course, you all can stay.” Without a second thought, she told me how to find the extra key, what was available in the fridge for meals, and where the clean bedding was stored.

One of my favorite extended family members was the daughter of a father in a second marriage. The first marriage had produced two sons, whom she had never met. The first wife had been so angry at the divorce that she had filled her young boys’ heads with all kinds of tales about their father including constantly lamenting his never having paid a penny of child support. Once they were adults, the two sons sought out their father with the intention of confronting him about his failure to be involved in their lives. During this very uneasy meeting, the second wife (my family member’s mom) pulled out her budget book and showed them copies of more than 15 years of child-support payments. Not only had their own mother never mentioned those checks for her sons, but she had also burned the letters their dad had sent them regularly for years. I still don’t know if those two men ever forgave their mother. It was one thing to deny their father access to their own lives. They were even angrier that their children had lost all those years without a grandfather.

They were right to be upset. When Son #2 began his deep spiral into drugs, he was still in middle school. I would drop him at the front door of the building. He’d wait till I drove out of sight, then take a bus downtown to hang out in front of the old ZCMI Mall and accost strangers with a tale about being homeless—could they spare him some change? He once told me that he averaged $200 dollars a day—more than I was making as a high school teacher. All of it went into a needle in his arm.

By the time he was a junior in high school, he knew he was in desperate need of help, so he called the safest place he knew—his grandparents. They weren’t in the best of health, and they were in their sixties, but they opened their door and welcomed him in—that despite the fact that they were well aware of how difficult the road ahead might be. There was no happy ending to this story, but their willingness to step in gave my husband and I time to breathe and to remember what life was like before the midnights calls from police or emergency rooms—time to recognize how fortunate we were to have seven other children who were making admirable choices in their lives.

Every family has stuff—conflict that can boil over into disappointment or mistrust or pain. Adults who choose to walk away from a relationship with their parents—more and more common in this generation–are not the only ones who pay a price. Perhaps unaware, they are building a pattern that someday may lock themselves out of their own children’s lives. No parent starts out perfect—even if we think we are. Most of us work very hard to get better—sometimes too dang late for our own children. But for the grandchildren? Oh my! They often are the lights of our lives, and all three generations are more than blessed if we can be the safety net in theirs.