Your Grandparents Were Messed Up People and You Let It Go

Here’s why that’s a good thing, and what it means for your kids

This is my great-grandparents’ family in the 1930s, including all seven of their legitimate children. My own grandmother is the tall one in the middle of the back row.

---

The title may sound to you like I’m writing to grandkids. That’s true, but not the way you might think. I’m writing here to parents. Active parents who are trying to parent; parents who have kids they have to wrangle, and who may be a handful from time to time. Parenting is a life stage in which it is easy to get weird about trouble you had with your own parents, and crawl uselessly into your own head about “being better,” whatever that means. I’d like to offer you a piece of advice you may not have heard, and may even viscerally disagree with when you first read it: it is good for kids to know their grandparents, even if their grandparents are messed up people, because (hard truth) almost all grandparents are messed up people.

Hear me out.

First, let me define “messed up.” Broadly, this means “imperfect,” but imperfect is a word with too neutral an implication for where I’m going. Calling someone a messed up person is slangier, but carries a more direct implication that sometimes their flaws lead them not just to make less effective choices, but to do things that interfere with other people’s lives. There is no place to see messed up people more clearly than within a family. Inside a family everyone is figuring out their own lives in real time, right in front of each other. Often, and of particular interest to my thesis here, parents are doing this while raising children; that makes things even more complicated.

A few years ago, my parents decided to gift each other a DNA ancestry test for Christmas. They love genealogy, and were excited to get their results. As part of the test, there was a little box to check where you could get notified if the company matched your results to relatives in their database. They happily checked that box.

A few months later, my father got a notification from the company that a relative had popped up in their system via a new test; the company asked his consent to share his contact information with this person. He was naturally inclined to agree (genealogy, remember?), but a specific fact in the message he received gave him pause: the system had found a first cousin on his mother’s side.

My father knew all his first cousins, just as he knew all six of his mother’s siblings. His mother, my “Grandma Dean,” was part of a large family, but one that lived in a very small rural ranching town. It was the kind of town where everybody knows everybody. If my father had a “bonus” first cousin then this cousin would be traceable to that area, which had ominous implications.

Nevertheless, wanting to know the truth, my father made contact with this new cousin, a woman in Idaho. She revealed that she had been put up for adoption as a baby and was finally taking the plunge to find her birth family, in the way many adopted people do as adults–not to “get answers” to right a perceived wrong, but just “to know.” So they chatted about timelines and what different people had told them when, and my father did some other asking around in the family based on that, and he pieced together something wild.

His grandfather (my great-grandfather) had an affair with a neighbor (his best friend’s wife, in fact), fathering twin girls with that woman. Those girls were very well known to my Grandma Dean and her siblings, as they had all grown up together as neighbors and were extremely close friends. “The twins” were even known to my father, who recalled them being around at the small-town gatherings he would attend as a youth. One of those twins, due to choices totally unrelated to anyone in my family, would eventually “visit family” elsewhere for a while as a teenager. As was common-but-unspoken in those days, that kind of phenomenon was typical of girls who had “gotten in trouble” and needed to deliver and adopt out a baby away from anyone who knew them. That baby in this case was this new cousin, who had grown up in Idaho and had a fine life, but decided one day to see if she “could figure out what happened.”

So to reiterate what happened: my great grandfather (my father’s grandfather), a successful rancher, community pillar, church elder, and “devoted” father of seven, had gotten into some extracurricular shenanigans with a neighbor, fathered two more children, and quasi-raised them as very close friends of his legitimate brood (said legitimate brood is in the picture at the top of this article). No-one ever knew for sure, though there were always unspoken suspicions and on reflection it would have been impossible for my great-grandmother to have been ignorant of it. The outrage writes itself: what a cad! What a cheat! What a hypocrite! That’s a pretty messed up thing to do to your wife.

But for my father, this was his Grandpa. My dad had spent summers on the ranch, learning how to work and how to love the simple tasks of outdoorsmanship. For him, “Grandpa” had been a stern but devoted patriarchal figure. My dad had known nothing but unconditional (if occasionally grumpily plainspoken) love from his grandfather. He had no real clue, even from his own mother, that “the twins” she grew up alongside were anything but really tight friends of the family. My dad does not condemn his grandfather. He can’t. He wasn’t there, and had no involvement in how or why his grandpa betrayed his grandma. My dad was not “wronged” by his grandfather, who only ever treated my dad with love. The relationship (now memories) my dad had with his grandfather is still one he recalls with the love of a grandson for his grandpa. He accepts that his grandpa did something base, but treasures the love he shared with his grandpa anyway.

My Grandma Dean (my father’s mother) eventually married my Grandpa Dean, and the two of them had two sons. As those sons started families of their own, they also moved physically apart. My uncle and his family stayed within a few hours’ drive, but my dad and his family moved to California, two states away. Whenever Grandma and Grandpa would visit (or we would visit them), their conversations with my parents consistently stayed about my uncle’s family. Anything my parents described to them about our family’s accomplishments would be met with an odd backhanded compliment that segued into a mention of something happening in the other family.

Likewise (and my parents only realized this years later) the same thing was going on whenever my grandparents visited my uncle’s family: anything he or his family did was always greeted with discussion of what my dad and his family were doing. While my dad found it more odd than off-putting, my uncle hated it. He was always a little distant, feeling like my dad was somehow the favorite.

What was up with that? Well, many years later when some frank discussion finally happened between my parents and aunt and uncle, they realized this was a hamfisted attempt on my grandparents’ part to make sure both their sons stayed well informed about each other. This was a decision made to make sure the sons and their families did not grow apart to match the physical distance. That sounds good in theory. But in practice it meant that both their sons and both their daughters-in-law felt like they were being belittled for not being as interesting or accomplished as the other family. Both spent a couple of decades feeling alternately judged or jealous, and my mom dreaded visiting anyone on my dad’s side of the family for a long time. That was a messed up way for my grandparents to deal with their kids.

But for me, these were my grandparents. I spent summers and Christmas breaks staying with them, getting fascinating glimpses into the prehistoric-to-my-eyes way they lived and faced life. Grandma was a kitchen wizard who filled the house with the scent of bacon every morning (she floured her bacon, lending it a delightful crunch that I’ve never since seen). Grandpa was a backslapping good ol’ boy who let me sneak Cokes out of the fridge (which were otherwise forbidden to me). I loved them both. For me, Grandma and Grandpa were awesome. I knew nothing but unconditional love from my grandparents (even if Grandma threatened me with a flyswatter that one time). I had no clue, even from my own parents, that this weird communication pattern of half-compliments and inadvertent comparison was going on among the family in the generation above mine. I do not condemn my grandparents. I can’t. I wasn’t there for any of those conversations, and had no involvement in how or why my grandparents made the parenting decisions they did. I was not “wronged” by my grandparents, who only ever treated me with unconditional love. I accept that my grandparents made a poor series of choices about how to communicate with their children, but treasure the love I shared with them anyway.

A set of my own children’s grandparents (their mother’s parents) were a hot mess. “Papa” was in the navy and was absent for long periods of his kids’ childhoods. When he was home, he was rigid and distant. “Mimi” was an attention-craving hypochondriac, a black hole of self-pity who had been exaggerating her physical ailments for so long that she had rendered herself legitimately bedridden. Together they produced a yours-mine-and-ours blended family that lived a nightmarish life of inhibited communication and transactional affection. One of their daughters cut ties completely. Their son went to prison. The whole family was astonishingly dysfunctional.

By the time my children were born, Papa had retired from the navy and was well into a second career, and I got to see their life pattern up close. Repeatedly Mimi would end up with over a dozen prescriptions interacting in her system, leading to a breakdown (she once accused Papa of having sex with their dog). The doctors would then wean her off half of them, at which time she would miraculously improve, only to begin anew the process of believing she had some new ailment. When she was lucid, her catalog-shopping habit could not be constrained by any budget. Papa indulged Mimi’s every whim, for to deny her was to live in hell. He was too proud (or perhaps honorable or stubborn) to admit he was miserable, but the fatigue behind his eyes was clear. She was too selfish (or drug-addled) to admit she was ceaselessly torturing him. They were almost textbook examples of messed up people.

But for my kids, this was Mimi and Papa, and they loved them. They knew nothing but unconditional love from their grandparents. When Mimi was coherent she was unfailingly matronly and kind to her grandkids. Papa would buy a hilarious truckload of barely legal fireworks every Fourth of July and we would light them off in the street. They do not condemn their grandparents. They can’t. They weren’t there for any of the messy choices, and had no involvement in how or why those decisions got made. They were not “wronged” by their Mimi and Papa, who only ever treated them with love. They accept that Mimi and Papa’s life was a dumpster fire, but treasure the love they shared with them anyway.

I want to point out the pattern I see here, because I can’t possibly be the only one who has experienced this. People do messed up stuff to each other. And some of that messed up stuff spills over onto their kids. There are a lot of moving parts to any decision or set of decisions, and over time as families do family stuff a series of bumps and dings are going to show in the portrait of that family’s history. But a mother and father love their grandchildren unconditionally, even when that same mother and father have some dramatic history between themselves or with their own kids.

As I look back at this, I’m struck not by the dumb choices made by multiple generations of my family, but by the fact that each generation of kids kept it from interfering with the grandkids’ relationships with their grandparents. My grandmother could have kept my father away from her parents out of some misguided sense of suspicion-driven payback. Her father was a cheat–how dare he think he should be allowed a relationship with his grandchildren? My parents could have kept us from my grandparents using similarly self-justified reasoning. Grandma and Grandpa talked down to my parents and made them feel inferior–how dare they think they should be allowed to have a relationship with their grandchildren? I could have kept my own kids from their grandparents. Their life was a disaster–how dare they think that I should risk spreading it onto their grandchildren?

But these dramas leapfrog generations, and children benefit from knowing the love of their grandparents, even if those grandparents are messed up people. Grandparents are uniquely positioned to show grandchildren what unconditional love looks like. There may be all kinds of drama between parents and the children they raise. A mom and dad need to make and enforce rules, sometimes those rules are misguided or enforcement is uneven, and sometimes you’ll get it in your head that there’s a gulf between you and your parents. But grandma and grandpa are different. The relationship between grandparents and grandchildren is naturally resistant to drama and beef.

You parents, do yourself a favor and think back to your own childhood, and the relationship you had with your own parents and grandparents. If you’re being honest, there’s a pretty good chance you can pick out two things.

First, you know you had experiences of drama and trauma with your own parents as you learned how to be a family. Second, you know you had experiences with your grandparents that helped you understand that family could be a source of love and compassion even when you were giving your parents the silent treatment. There are different relationships people cultivate when they’re leapfrogging a generation. Important relationships. Relationships that teach kids things those same kids’ parents simply can’t teach them. It has always been this way to some degree.

Now consider for a moment the structure and makeup of your family if those intergenerational ties didn’t get created. Look at your parents. Suppose your parents, who experienced their parents’ parenting (warts and all), chose to withhold you from your grandparents out of some misplaced sense of payback (or overprotective zeal). What would be missing from your life? What memories? What learning? Would that have been kind of a messed up thing for them to have done to YOU, even though they would have thought they were doing it to their parents? Would you have benefited from being used as a pawn in a family power struggle you knew nothing about or could not understand?

Now look the other direction. Suppose you withhold your children from their grandparents, your parents, because you experienced their parenting (warts and all), and have decided your parents shouldn't be allowed to see their grandkids so they “understand how hurt you are” or whatever. Is that kind of a messed up thing for you to do to your kids? What are you keeping them from learning from their grandparents? What intergenerational ties will they miss? What memories? What learning? Will they benefit from being used as pawns in a family power struggle they know nothing about or cannot understand?

Let me suggest a possible lesson that is learned slowly as these intergenerational bonds are created: the power of forgiveness. It is easy for grandkids to forgive their grandparents. Most kids end up with a list of grievances and grudges against their parents (it’s not healthy, but it’s reality). Grandkids don’t; grandkids let stuff go. Since grandkids find it easy to forgive, they can even serve as examples to their own parents. If your kids learn that grandma and grandpa were messed up people (and all grandkids learn this eventually–you knew your grandma loved you even though she threatened you with her flip-flop that one time, and you knew your grandpa loved you even though he flirted inappropriately with diner waitresses), and they can forgive them for it, then can’t you forgive, too? Maybe you just need to see that happen so you can give yourself permission to let go of the grudges and drama you’ve been hanging onto for too long anyway.

Conversely, if a grandparent experiences the love and forgiveness of a grandchild, isn’t that a step in the direction of other reconciliations? Is it possible that your parents, upon experiencing the love of their grandchildren, will recognize messed up things they did, and try to make amends now that they can see it? And especially now that they see that it is possible to try and reconcile without causing more trouble? I think so. You can think that, too. But you have to consciously decide to look past your own doubt and let this process work. Have some faith in your kids and their capacity for love. Have some faith in the kinds of good things it can create.

No family is perfect. The record of interactions between parents and children always includes regrettable things. Some of those things can get resolved comparatively quickly, and some resolve only slowly as two generations become three, as everyone’s perspective grows longer and more encompassing. Your grandparents were messed up people, but you never really saw it and just knew they loved you, so even when you finally learned “the truth” you let it go. Your parents are messed up people right now, but your kids will never really see it and will just know their grandparents loved them, so even when they finally learn “the truth” they’ll let it go.

Guess what? You’re messed up too. So too will this be for you. Think carefully before breaking this cycle.