Month: August 2024

When I was growing up with my four older brothers, all of them very large like me, my mother became masterful at making meals that could feed our small army.

She didn’t just make one big pot of baked ziti, she’d make two. Loaves of her delicious homemade bread would cover the kitchen counters. Our giant salad bowl could hold a whole garden. When dinner started, it was like a pack of wolves had been released, and soon what at first looked like a lot of food was no longer there. My mom, five foot ten inches tall, would remain standing, busy shoveling more food onto the table. If there was a smidgen of ziti or whatever remaining in the pot, she’d hold it in front of us and command, “Eat this up!”

I recall one night where mom had made meatloaf. We ate almost the entire pan. About an hour after dinner, my brother John said to our mom, “I’m still hungry.” She replied, “Finish up the meatloaf.” He sure did. What we didn’t know until later that night was that mom had made two pans of meatloaf. My brother had polished off the sliver left in the first pan, along with the entire second pan. Impressive even by Page standards.

These big family meals were also extremely entertaining, absolute riots of brotherly jokes and ribbing and stories and multiple conversations all at once, each brother one upping the other, and all with our own unique personalities on full display.

My dad would jump into the conversations here and there but often seemed to be more of an observer of the show he’d helped build through his post-war baby booming. When he did talk, it was often with the intent to build our vocabularies. He’d say something like, “The traffic in Cambridge was quite heavy tonight, partly because potholes were so ubiquitous,” raising one eyebrow. I learned a lot of words this way. When my brothers went off to college one by one, our dinners became quieter and quieter until it was just me and my parents. I really missed our ravenous, boisterous big family cacophony.

I remembered those dinners this summer when I experienced again, in a whole new way, our big family in all its glory.

Both of my adult children and their families were visiting us at our place in Vermont for two weeks. We braced for impact, putting in two extra leaves in the dining room table and stocking up two refrigerators with plenty of food to feed the coming horde. Suddenly we had six adults and four grandchildren at the table, our familial army of Atilla the Hun. One night we had three racks of lamb, an enormous pot of rice, salads, steamed broccoli, rolls and butter, plus brownies and ice cream. Our conversations rocketed in arcs back and forth across the table like stones flung by trebuchets, the assault on the giant platter of lamb was highly successful, my grandchildren cheerfully gnawing the chops while chatting happily with their cousins. Our youngest granddaughter decided midway through the meal to dispense with using a fork for her rice, and instead grabbed handfuls of it to stuff in her mouth (parental protestations ensued, but not before wet rice blanketed the floor like new-fallen snow.)

I loved all of it. The whole loud glorious mess.

Not long after the kids headed home, there was a bruhaha about a certain candidate for Vice President who disparaged women for not having children. He referred to “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”

What this attack dog said was of course purrrrfectly stupid on so many levels, but his statement was just one loud bark out of many now ringing out across the globe as politicians bemoan falling birth rates. China, which had a one child policy for decades, is now urging women to make babies. It’s a national crisis. They know they won’t be a global power in the future without actual humans to work in their factories or attend universities.

Many young people in the U.S. and Europe are also choosing to forgo parenthood, so the volume of the attack dog barks keeps rising higher.

The response from young couples is predictable. Hateful rhetoric in America, or dictates from communist regimes, is rightfully condemned or simply ignored. Young people are shutting off the noise and going about their lives, allocating money to car payments and rent versus diapers and daycare.

The hard reality is that our world has made it difficult for young people to have hope. They don’t want to bring children into a messed-up environment. They worry that our government is broken. They have a hard time juggling work and family, not to mention the high cost of living. As a result, on our present course, there will be a lot fewer families in the future adding extra leaves to their dining room tables.

What’s the solution? Step one is not judging anyone for choosing any particular lifestyle.

There is also another pathway, one that I’ve come to see in the course of writing the Good Grandpa book. I’ve interviewed many grandpas from all walks of life to hear their stories and learn their wisdom (including a Rabbi who has nearly forty grandkids. He said their family get-togethers are like being in Grand Central Station). In every interview, I’ve asked grandpas for their #1 most essential wisdom. Spoiler alert: what’s emerged is not one single concept across the spectrum of grandpas, but a constellation of North stars joined together by universal truths.

That said, I did hear one thing mentioned by quite a few men. Be kind.

These two simple words mean so much for our grown children. They don’t want to be told to have kids. But if we as grandparents are truly kind in every possible way, we help foster a family environment that brings hope to our troubled world. We can babysit grandkids, provide financial support, offer our wisdom. We can be there for them through good times and bad, let them know they are not alone in the incredibly arduous journey called parenthood. We’ve been there. We’ve done this. We’ve got this.

This is not a new idea, it’s an old one.

Many of the grandpas I interviewed spoke of wonderful childhoods where their grandparents lived with them or right next door. These days, that is all too rare. The Chinese and Indian grandpas I spoke with currently spend at least six months of each year living with their kids and helping care for their grandkids. We have a lot to learn from their cultures.

The other thing we can do as grandparents is to provide some historical context. Young people of child-bearing age may think our country is a wreck – there’s so much division and vitriol. Why would they want to bring a child into this? But those of us of a certain age were around when JFK, RFK and MLK were murdered. The Vietnam war was raging. There was rioting in the streets, student protestors getting shot on campus. Watergate was a shit-show. It was rough but life went on. The country went on, and maybe we learned a few things along the way.

Hateful language and governmental dictates will not fill our dining room tables with boisterous happy children. Kindness and love will.