My friend said: “As a parent the welfare of a child may count for much, a humongous percentage of the parents’ PAGKUKUMAHOG. And yet parents can be dismissive of a child: a child in tantrums, a recalcitrant child, a contrary child, recriminatory, disobedient.” Not so according to him with regards to grandparents in whom the years should have instilled wisdom and affective capability. Their greater store of leisure makes lolos and lolas ideal dispensers of “quality time” to the youngers. That’s why these two sectors of a human family go together so famously well. Of course these are exceptions; but by and large grandparent and grandchildren are most likely to cotton to each other. Since the oldsters have presumably seen the folly of their ways and the grandchildren the waywardness of unsupervised years, tacitly, their pairing up resolves whatever conflicts their parental upbringing has, Frankensteinlike, compromised such childhood.
Again, I trust I’ve not gone off the deep end in afflicating the wondrous phenomenon of grandparenting. For in the case of my friend, his sins of omission/commission as a parent are somehow atoned for in his later years by a job-like longanimity of spirit in his transactions with his APOS. As many a grandparent must have perceived before and as many more will realise, it is an APO STOLESHIP and nothing less. Viva Sto. Niño!
Note: see Victor Hugo’s Classic on being a Grandparent. Also Randy David wrote about this an essay of 2008.
