Miriam Weinstein, author

Author Archives: Miriam Weinstein

Grandma on Campus

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Take a bunch of teenagers with no families, and a bunch of grandparent-age people with extra energy and love. Add sunshine and a lovely campus. Blend.

That is the successful recipe of San Pasqual Academy in southern California. A public-private partnership in operation since 2001, which bills itself as “the first residential foster campus for foster youth in the nation,” it has served more than 700 young people from ages 12-18.

The youngsters live in home-like settings with house parents. And senior citizens also live in their own homes on the campus. In exchange for paying a reduced rent, they act as mentors. The kids go to school at the facility, and
come home for vacations when they are in college. The seniors act as surrogate grandparents. They tutor, hang out, garden, cook with the kids; whatever grandparents normally do.

When a massive wildfire destroyed 17 buildings in 2007, they were all rebuilt. When you have something good, you want to keep it going.

Grandkids help keep Alzheimers at bay. Or not.

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This just in from an Australian study reported in the journal Menopause: Since everyone knows that keeping mentally alert and socially engaged are plus factors in staving off dementia, a team of scientists decided to look at whether or not caring for grandchildren made a difference in the health of post-menopausal women. After all, they reasoned, that caretaking was something that lots of p.m. women do. Why not factor it in?

The good news is that women who care for their grandchildren one day a week had better cognition and less dementia. The bad news is that women who care for their grandchildren five days or more a week did significantly worse on the test that measures working memory and mental processing speed.

The researchers thought that this might be linked to the fact that the women who were clocking the heavy caretaking hours felt that their children were more demanding of them. (No kidding!) Maybe the family tension contributed to the negative part of the equation.

Is this like the finding that drinking a glass of red wine is good for your health? More study needed, obviously.

Elephant Grandmothers, Giant Concern

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You have probably heard about the threat to African elephants: 17,000 slaughtered in 2011. And grandmothers are at the center of this crisis.

Elephants live in matriarchal tribes, headed by mature females. They are an extremely social species. The matriarchs know where the closest watering hole can be found, as well as who, or what, is the most potent enemy. Researchers have found that the older the matriarch, the more babies who survive.

Sadly, also, the older the matriarch, the longer the tusk: those pieces of ivory prized by poachers. So elephant grandmothers are valuable both to their own species, and to the humans who prey on them. And they seem to be aware of the genocide in progress. Scientists report that they are suffering from a form of ptsd, except that the danger is ongoing.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if human grandmother could help?

https://www.elephanttrust.org

Grandma Buddies

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One thing I hadn’t anticipated about grandmotherhood was the continuation of the girl buddy system. We lend and borrow porta cribs when the kids come to visit. We commiserate about distance and closeness. We marvel at the mix of personalities, and track them through time. We trade tips about playgrounds, parks; easy ways to kill time in the house with little kids; how to stay close as the little ones grow big.

Some of these things we know from our motherhood days. Lots of them reside in our bones. Others, like cellphone videos, we could never have imagined; likewise having to defer to your children, who somehow have become the ones who must be obeyed, except when they are not looking.

What has remained constant is the easy friendship we share. Some of the actual people are the same ones I knew when my own kids were little. Others are newer friends. A couple are not even grandmothers. But if they are my age, and if they were mothers, they  have the instincts at the ready.

The “What’s good to do?”; the “How can I ever….” the “Can you believe?” feel the same as when we were kids planning our own adventures for the afternoon.

This is bonus time, big time.

 

Barefoot Grandmothers Light Their World

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Bunker Roy, the Indian social activist, has a well-deserved reputation for turning assumptions on their heads.

One of his goals has been to introduce solar electricity to poor and rural villages. But when he brought village men to his Barefoot Colleges to learn solar engineering, he called the men untrainable. He said they were “…restless, compulsively mobile, and they all want a certificate and the moment you give them a certificate they leave the village and go to the cities looking for jobs”  So, he thought,  “…why not invest in women, older women, mature women, gutsy women who have roots in the village and train them.”

He brings grandmothers from many different countries to spend six months together learning to install and maintain solar lighting and power. Many of these women have never left home before. Oh, and did we mention that many are illiterate? The training is done primarily with sign language and color-coded circuits.

“We have shown that solar-electrified villages can be technically and financially self-sufficient,” says Roy. He also says, “Every grandmother is a walking, talking Barefoot College.”

 

Grandmothers Saving Mother Earth

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In 2004, 13 indigenous grandmothers heard the cry of Mother

Earth. She was in agony, they said. She needed them “to help to heal her and all her inhabitants.”

Since then the women, who call themselves The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers,  come together from their homes in North and South America, Africa and Asia. They meet at regular intervals to pray for Mother Earth and to bring attention to what can be done for her.

They have repeatedly petitioned the Pope. They have met with the Dali Lama. They have held a salmon ceremony in Alaska welcoming the return of the native fish. They have organized a seed temple in Mexico, linking the safeguarding of seeds with the birth of children.

“Ours is an alliance of prayer and healing for our Mother Earth, all Her inhabitants, all the children, and for the next seven generations to come.”

Their names are Aama Bombo, Agnes Baker Pilgrim, Beatrice Long Visitor, Bernadette Rebienot, Clara Shinobu Iura, Julieta Casimiro, Margaret Behan, Flordemayo, Maria Alice Campos Freire, Mona Polacca, Rita Long Visitor Holy Dance, Rita Pitka Blumenstein, and Tsering Dolma Gyaltong.

Impressively Bad Grandma Poetry

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I would not be so naïve as to say that grandmothers are the only subjects of bad poetry. I would only point out some of the narrowness and shallowness of the genre. How about this classic opener:
Everything my grandma does
Is something special, made with love.
There is even a subset of poems on the subject of grandmothers’ aprons. Full disclosure here: I had an adored grandmother who actually sewed aprons both plain and fancy, that constituted an important part of her meager retirement income. Decades later, we found that several of the fancier examples had been carefully preserved.
But you don’t see me writing a poem about it, do you?
The poems you do see are breathtaking in their singsong blandness. This one was found (where else) in an online grandma apron poetry section:
When I would visit Grandma, I was always very blessed
By the apron that she wore, and the love that she expressed.
And on for several stanzas.
Clearly, for this genre, grandma equals love and giving and sweets and an old timey sensibility. What could ever be that good again? When are we ever, in real adult life, the recipients of food, devotion, and the warmth coming from the old wood stove? The answer, my friends, is never.
So here is my contribution to the grandma poetry canon:
Now that I am Grandma, I
Set the kids on stools so high.
They mix their snack, I mix my drink,
We dump the dishes in the kitchen sink.

Grandma the Geek

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Don’t you just hate that phrase: it’s so simple, even my grandmother can understand it?

Rachel Levy hated it too; so she started a blog called Grandma Got STEM (which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, for you liberal arts majors.)

She called for people to write in about important scientists who just happened to be grandmothers, or vice versa.

You would not believe the response! And the photos! And the history! Women wrote in about themselves, their grandmothers, and famous female scientists. Such as:

Maria Goeppert-Mayer, the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics, generated a newspaper headline that read, “S.D. Mother Wins Nobel Prize.” She worked as a volunteer because, since her husband was a university professor, she could not get a university job.

Eve Sprunt, a geophysicist, showed up for a job interview wearing her infant son in a front baby pack and announced, “This is the question you are not supposed to ask.” The interviewer invited her whole family for an on-site interview, babysitting provided.

Neuroscientist Marian Diamond studied Einstein’s brain. But when she had arrived as the first female student in the anatomy department at UC Berkeley, years earlier, the first thing she was asked to do was to sew a cover for a large magnifying machine.

Ursula Franklin was a metallurgist who pioneered the field of archeometry, the science of dating archeologically discovered metals and ceramics. Her research about levels of radioactive strontium in baby teeth factored heavily into the U.S decision to ban nuclear tests.

When Franklin had a baby, in 1955, the committee at the research institution where she worked never managed to make a decision about what she could, or could not do. “The unpreparedness, administratively and legally, to recognize that women, when you employ them, have needs, and require an administrative framework that takes that into account was totally absent. So that the task, then, for women like myself who were feminists, was to know that you had to have laws that gave maternity leave; you had to have provisions for flexible work; and the struggle from there on was not for us, but was struggled for all women to have decent working conditions and safe wages.

“And that’s how it starts.”

The Grandmother Food Challenge

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A 20-something Australian journalist decided to spend a week eating the way her grandmother did in 1964: eggs and bacon for breakfast, white bread and baked beans for lunch; and, for dinner, meat, three veg (one always potato) and dessert.

At the end of the week, she was glad it was over. She was also down a kilo (2.2 pounds.)

What she learned: Her grandmother never snacked. She cooked and baked all her own food, ate smaller portions, and smoked.

And what did Grandma find when she spent a week trying sushi, red velvet cake, constant snacking, and mega-portions? “By the end of the week, I’m relieved to have finished,” she reported.
But she did enjoy the red velvet cake, which she added to her baking repertoire.

There really was a Granny Smith

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In case you were worrying that this most popular of apple varieties was named as a marketing stunt, you can relax now. Granny Smith was real. And she was really cool.

Maria Ann (Windsor) Smith, who was born in England in 1799, emigrated to Australia with her husband, Thomas, a farm laborer, and their five children, in 1838. They built a successful farm and orchard, and had another child. They may have been illiterate.

There are several colorful stories about Maria’s discovery of a new apple, a mutation that occurred in a cross between a crab apple and a domestic apple. What is not in dispute is that she was 68 at the time, her husband was an invalid, and she did the work to both cultivate and claim the new variety.

Smith died two years later; so did not get to see the success of her apple. Because it kept well, was slower to turn brown, and was excellent for cooking, it quickly gained international popularity. By 1975, 40 percent of Australia’s apple crop was Granny Smiths.

Because the Granny Smith was a mutation, the seeds grow into a more tart apple with less appeal. So most apples are direct descendants of the original Smith tree. Australia celebrates with an annual Granny Smith festival, complete with Festival Queen and fireworks.