The joys and sorrows of virtual grandparenting

By Richard Glover August 26, 2021 â€" 3.00pm

According to the photographs sent every day, my grandchild is growing older at a supercharged pace. His mother also sends regular videos. Here he is gnawing away at solid food. Or laughing at his father, a traditional occupation in our family. Or, desperately reaching for a toy, proving that he is oh-so-close to crawling.

Like almost every other grandparent in this time of the pandemic, we must acknowledge these achievements from afar.

So many grandparents - like Richard Glover - are getting to know their grandchildren via videolink.Credit:Shutterstock

This generation of grandparents â€" trying to make contact with small children over a video link, laughing and waving our hands like demented clowns â€" must be the first in history to hope their grandchildren slow down when it comes to life’s achievements.

I want to say: “Hey kid, take it easy. Are you not watching the daily press conferences? It would be good if you waited until at least November before deciding to walk.”

But, no, he seems keen to tick off the accomplishments that mark the first year of life.

I can see from the videos that his hand-eye coordination is coming along quite well. It involves his hand and his father’s eye. The Space Cadet, as I used to call him, did the same thing to me. I take a curious pleasure in the pain that’s being inflicted all these years on.

The child also has a defiant attitude when denied access to something he wants. Though only eight months old, he has willpower and self-belief aplenty, the fruit of his parents’ boundless regard.

Quietly, I cheer on my grandson in his campaign to get whatever he wants ... It’s wonderful to see such a clear case of karma in action.

Such self-belief emerged in the child’s father at the same age. It was the product of the same forces and had identically terrifying results. Quietly, I cheer on my grandson in his campaign to get whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. It’s wonderful to see such a clear case of karma in action.

More importantly, my small grandchild’s achievements are a joy to behold. We thrill to them. The delight he expresses playing with water. The pleasure he takes in his spectacular mum and dad. The excitement of that day when, courtesy of the BBQ, he first saw fire â€" his tiny body shaking with delight, and with awe that his dad, his very particular and own dad, was somehow in control of this beast.

I like, too, the way he regards bananas as not only a source of essential vitamins and minerals but also as a decorating option. In a few months, when he’s up and moving around, I might post him a pack of indelible markers. That way he can decorate his parent’s walls, much as The Space Cadet decorated ours.

It was a portrait of a large yellow rabbit with red eyes, as I remember it, rendered in the middle of the living room wall. Impossible to remove, it stayed there for years, right until I repainted the room.

Yet for all the pleasure of seeing my grandson’s current achievements, and imagining those to come, I desperately want to visit him in person.

I’d carefully planned, after all, the grandfather I wanted to be â€" giving the new arrival all the gifts I had given my own children.

This, to be precise, largely involved a tuneless rendition of The Road to Gundagai, sung every night to send them to sleep, and always ending in them begging: “It’s OK dad. I’ll agree to go to sleep if you’ll only agree to please stop singing.”

It was my main achievement in parenting, but not my only one. I also developed advanced level skills in lulling a baby to sleep, understanding that sleep only comes when the person holding the child is at their most uncomfortable.

You must hold the child to your chest, while simultaneously leaning backward, jiggling slightly, tilting to one side, and then cricking your neck in a way that will do permanent damage.

Then, after some hours, when they finally succumb to sleep, you walk carefully towards their room, bend low over their cot, thus putting maximum strain on the small of your back, and lay them down. You then leave your hands beneath them for a time, the small of your back throbbing slightly, before removing your hands slowly, like a bomb disposal expert aware that any sudden movement could trigger an explosion.

Mission accomplished, you creep slowly back out the door, soft-footed, like a cat burglar. At this point, they wake up. They then scream as if they were the victim of a street mugging.

You return to the cot. Maybe, you think to yourself, a song would work.

“There’s a track winding back to an old-fashioned shack....”

All these skills, perfected so many years ago, are now ripe for a reprise and yet, instead, it’s back to the video link, waving and leaping and laughing, in the hope that we might fix ourselves in his mind as part of his tribe.

At this rate, with the perpetually elongated lockdown, I’ll next see him when he’s got his driver’s licence and whizzes over in his self-drive car.

“Hello, Pa. I’m the one in all those Zoom conference calls. Glad to meet you in person. Something has come up in my history course at university. You wouldn’t happen to know the lyrics to The Road to Gundagai?”

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