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Eager saints and sweet-toothed sinners
The blessed Halloween of my youth
By Kate Convissor
[10/29/99]

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Please, God, don't let him be a penis grabber
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Wild Thing
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[10/27/99]

High noon for nurturers
Penelope Leach faces off with the Ezzos in a nasty turf war. Someone needs a spanking.
By Shelley Emling
[10/26/99]

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Their consistent presence was exactly what I needed. Combined with the domestic routine my stepmother brought to Dad and me, those visits made me feel like I belonged to a normal family, one that wouldn't disappear or drastically change without warning. Slowly, I outgrew my fears and shame. My emotional muscles relaxed, and I simply grew up. A family, I began to see, was a patchwork of support systems, not a couples-based, genetic flowchart.

My father and stepmother largely encouraged that feeling, and the visits. But tensions often arose over gifts. We lived a frugal, blue-collar life, so whenever I returned to our rundown apartment with the latest Atari game, or the hippest Nikes, they worried. "They're trying to buy your love," Dad would say.

Truth is, my grandparents -- both entrepreneurs who pulled themselves through the Depression -- didn't know any better. The gifts weren't as much about gaining my love as showing their own. Still, I was a brat who was poor but manipulative enough to know how cool those games or sneakers would make me. My dad and stepmother's fears that I would become a stinking materialist were not totally unwarranted.

Sadly though, those fears grew to epic proportions. The result was the cold-war battle I mentioned earlier. To this day, my father and stepmother are convinced that I've gone over to the dark side, fallen in love with a rich, Jewish, sophisticated snobbery, thus snubbing the Christian hard work that they've come to revere. When I asked my dad if he ever felt jealous of my relationship with my grandparents, he said, "No," but admitted that "money is control." The wealth I saw when visiting my grandparents influenced me more than it should have, he said.

By the same token, my grandfather has a hard time believing that my father has taught me anything worthwhile. Like "The Swede" of Philip Roth's "American Pastoral," he is cut from the cloth of a post-World War II era. He didn't understand why my parents got married in the first place, can't fathom the simple, religious life my father now lives and -- above all else -- finds it appalling that my father did not take on debt to help me pay for college.

Ultimately, these issues of class are not relevant to every story of grandparents' rights. But underlying them are several simple truths. First, and this should come as no surprise, grandparents' values often don't coincide with parents'. Second, because of such disparities, fights are inevitable, particularly when grandparents are given a legal foot in the door. And third, a parent-grandparent mix of influence creates a parent-grandparent child. This is not necessarily a boon to a child's development, but judges should have the freedom to decide the issue. Tying their hands, limiting their vision to parents alone, will only hurt the thousands of children who, like myself, need the stability that an older generation offers.

In the long run, that stability is what will last. Without my grandfather, I would never have learned the joy of classical music or the taste of a Brooklyn Danish. Without Grandma, I might never have come to appreciate modern art, nor have been told about the importance of birth control. Together they pushed me to study at Oxford, and trusted my decision to forego law school to become a writer.

But ultimately, their love and consistency have been their greatest gifts. Neither would have been possible without the habit of visits mandated by the courts. There have been problems, but also great moments of strength. In the words of my grandmother: "We're dysfunctional, but so is everyone else. What counts is that we're there for each other."
salon.com | Nov. 1, 1999

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