In a tough part of town not long ago, a husky man with a voice to match orders half a dozen grandmothers–and one grandfather–to empty their heads and hearts of other people’s troubles. At least for a little while.
Next, he tells them to take off their glasses and place their palms on the table. “You can keep your teeth in,” he allows. “I’m not taking mine out.”
Finally, he demands the silver-haired survivors of the Great Depression, Jim Crow laws and potty-mouthed rappers do something these grandparents rarely give themselves permission to do. He asks them to relax.
“Relax your shoulders,” he says, his husky voice now sweet and slow.
“Relax your arms.
“Relax your fingers.
“Relax your toes.
“Think of a safe place when you were a child.
“Were you with your mother? Your uncle? Your grandmother? Was it your turn to lick the cake bowl?
“Relax.
“It’s not your job to take care of anyone else right now. Someone is taking care of you.
“Relax. Relax. Relax.”
The room is silent as the grandparents–their eyes closed, their heads tilted back–drift through time to Mama’s kitchen or to the rope swing dangling over the creek or to those cold nights when Daddy tucked them in.
They do not get to stay away long. They never do.
“Slowly. Slowly,” the man says after just a few minutes. “Let’s come back to Marshall. We have more work to do.”
They open their eyes and return to Room 129, where the Marshall High School Grandparents Club holds its weekly seminar: Who Cares for the Caregivers? It is 45 minutes of breathing exercises, stress management techniques and sharing tips on how to deal with age, arthritis and angry teenagers. Most of the grandparents in the club are raising their own biological grandchildren as well as mentoring several “adopted grandkids” at Marshall.
Grandparents, of course, have been taking in their children’s children since the beginning of time. George Washington wasn’t just the father of our country, he was also a grandfather. “George and Martha raised grandkids,” says Amy Goyer, coordinator of AARP’s grandparent information center.
But in recent years the ranks of grandparents raising grandchildren have multiplied. The number of grandparent-headed households increased by 30 percent from the 1990 census to the national head count in 2000. Today, about 4.5 million children under 18 live in homes headed by grandparents. In Illinois, the number is about 213,000, with Chicago accounting for nearly half the total. The aftershock of drug abuse–jail, AIDS, death–is the No. 1 one factor cited for the phenomenon.
Earnestine Rice, a grandmother of 13 and the attendance coordinator at Marshall, started the grandparents club five years ago. Day after day she encountered weary, lonely, overwhelmed grandmothers–and the occasional grandfather–who had been called to the school because their grandchild had ditched class again or gotten into another fight or cursed out the science teacher. The school didn’t call the pupil’s parents; they were locked up in prison, confined to mental hospitals, lost in a crack house. Or they were dead.
Rice didn’t know how to help. Then one day in 1999 a grandmother walked into the attendance office because her grandson was cutting class. He had a good heart, but a hard head, she said. He was angry. She couldn’t talk any sense into him, convince him how important an education was. She couldn’t . . . she began to weep. She was at her wit’s end. That boy was dragging her to the grave. Any minute now she was going to drop dead of worry.
Rice put her arms around the woman and assured her she was not alone. The truth was, if Rice had a nickel for every time a grandmother came into her office with a similar story, she could retire from the Board of Education. She told the woman that she should come back in a couple of weeks and by then she’d have started a support group for grandparents. No. That sounded too serious. Come back, Rice told the woman, and join a brand-new club, a grandparent’s club. We will have fun, she promised, and do some good at the same time.
The boy left Marshall a few months later without graduating. “You can’t save everybody,” Rice says. But the club kept growing. Now there are about 20 active members, including two grandfathers. Dozens of other grandparents have signed up over the years. Yet many of them can’t attend the weekly sessions because they had to get jobs or they were forced to put off retirement to make increasingly distant ends meet after taking in their biological grandchildren. They can’t even spare the $2 a month for dues.
One of the beauties of being a grandparent is that ordinarily you can enjoy your grandchildren and then send them right back through the woods and over the river to their parents. No one foresees that the little darlings will stay. Retirees may squirrel away money for that long-dreamed-of trip to Europe or Africa, not to bring up a second set of kids when they’re 57 years old, the average age of grandparents raising grandchildren.
The median family income of a grandparent-headed household is between $18,000 and $25,000. Nearly a quarter of grandparents raising grandchildren live below the poverty line, which is $18,850 for a family of four. Juggling new bills, new children and old age can also mean added health risks for the grandparents. “It’s very stressful,” says Goyer of the AARP. “Grandparents often put their focus on the grandchildren, and they stop taking care of themselves.”
These older Americans are unsung heroes, or as some call them, “Silent Saviors,” who step up when their children fall down. “These grandparents are providing respite for their grandchildren, and they’re providing respite for the state of Illinois,” says Barb Schwartz of the Illinois Department of Aging. “If these kids went into foster care, the system couldn’t support it. Yet, they don’t have a respite. Most of them don’t have a support system.”
They do at Marshall. They have each other.
Their clubhouse is a row of chairs against a wall in front of Rice’s desk. The grandparents gather there on Tuesday and Thursday mornings just before they hit the halls and the lunchroom. They know love is like money: Most people can always use more. So they roam the building–dragging their tired bones up three flights of stairs if necessary–looking for students to mentor and love.
They are obsessive huggers, wrapping their arms around anyone within reach, students, teachers and even a visiting reporter. The hugging grandmas reminded the startled reporter of his own Nana, gone now for more than 30 years.
The other day a slightly built boy with soft braids came into the attendance office and bragged to the grandmothers that he and his 16-year-old girlfriend were soon going to be parents. Evelyn Selph, 60, gently took his hand and pulled him toward her chair along the wall.
“I hope you’re teasing about a baby,” she said.
The boy shook his head. No, he wasn’t kidding.
“You’re not ready to be a father,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked.
“You’re 15, that’s why not.”
Then a male teacher walked in and angrily told the boy to never come into his classroom again. The temperature dropped. The tension climbed. The boy who had been smiling with the grandmothers, listening to their gentle pleas to stay in school, turned sour with the teacher. “OK captain,” the boy said. From behind her desk, Rice shook her head as the teacher stomped out, mumbling.
“A lot of teachers don’t know how to approach these situations,” she says. “That’s one reason I came up with this club. The grandparents have wisdom, they have mother wit.”
Many of the Marshall grandmothers are daughters of the South. They grew up poor, picking cotton and harvesting hard times. But they never stopped dreaming. “I would take myself off the plantation to the big city in my mind,” says Rice, who came to Chicago from Alabama in 1965. “Kids today aren’t taught how to dream. They’re so full of anger and hurt.”
Nedra Johns, 18, says no one in her family ever encouraged her to dream or to go to school. No one, that is, until she fell into the embrace of the Grandparents Club. “I was kind of a troubled student,” she says. “I never had parents to watch over me.” When she was 7 her mother died of an AIDS-related illness. As for her father, “I don’t know where he is.”
After her mother passed away, she was sent from relative to relative. She cut school and showed up late. “I didn’t have no one telling me to get up and go to school.” Then she met Rice and the other grandparents. They ganged up on her. They dropped in on her classes. They called her at home. They checked her report card. They prayed for her. “They’re older and they got out of their beds to check on me,” she says. “It gave me an incentive to do better.”
Nedra graduated from Marshall last year. Rice still keeps in touch, calling her at her dorm at Chicago State University.
Justine Williams was one of the grandparents who helped Nedra reach the day that she walked across the stage in a cap and grown. It was a bittersweet moment. In her 37 years of grandmothering, Williams has watched one granddaughter she raised go to college and become a teacher, and another drop out of Marshall as a teenage mother. “Even though you can’t always help your own, you might be able to help someone else,” she says.
With 30 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren, Williams thought she had the club record, but that belongs to Lillie Logan, who at 70 has 42 grandchildren. Logan also has cancer, but still goes to Marshall whenever she can.
Most of Williams’ grandchildren grew up with their parents. Williams had eight children and she played the traditional role of grandma or M’Dear as her family calls her. She and her late husband, Amos, took 11 of their grandchildren in when one of their eight daughters died of a drug overdose in 1994. “She’s the one I lost to the streets,” Williams says.
The grandparents club gives Williams a place she can go to be around people like herself, veterans of life and loss. People she can confide in and take comfort from. She has buried two daughters, a husband and numerous friends. “I enjoy being with the other grandparents,” she says. “We talk the same talk, walk the same walk. We can relate to the same problems, raising grandkids in a drug-ridden and materialistic society.”
Currently, four of her grandchildren and one great-grandchild live with her in her little house on the West Side. But the house is like Union Station, with the various generations of her family coming and going. “They always come back to Granny,” she says.
Like a gray-haired soccer mom, she tools around in a tan station wagon, dropping off grandchildren at school and picking up great-grandchildren at play. One day recently she was driving through heavy traffic to pick up her youngest grandchild, Denzel, who was born a few months before his mother died of an overdose in a friend’s apartment. “I’m still mad about the way drugs were allowed to flood the neighborhood,” she says. “That’s the only frightening thing about raising these kids, the drugs.”
While Williams’ other grandchildren call her M’Dear or Grandma, Denzel simply calls her Ma. She is the only mother he has ever known.
It is his 11th birthday, and Williams is standing in the schoolyard when he comes skipping out the front door. Denzel bounds into the backseat of the station wagon. Ice cream, cake, balloons and hot dogs are waiting for him at home. But first Williams must drive three miles across the neighborhood to pick up three of her great-grandchildren. “They don’t feel I ever get tired, I can’t get sick,” she says.
One granddaughter called recently, saying she was going to move back in because her gas was about to be shut off. She hadn’t paid her bill. “I took my Discover Card and paid it,” Williams says. “There are too many here. I don’t know how I got into this.”
She’s laughing when she says it. She loves being M’Dear. It makes her feel needed. Alive. Rich. As the children eat cake in the kitchen, Williams sits quietly in a stuffed chair in the living room, like a department store Santa Claus, as child after child comes in and climbs onto her lap.
Back at Marshall, Philip Blackman, who leads the caregivers seminar for the grandparents club, reminds the group that stress is a killer. At the last session he gave them a homework assignment: Carve out five minutes a day just for themselves. Did anyone do it?
Lillie Logan says she did. Until recently, she never left the house without making the bed. But the other day, with Blackman’s voice ringing in her head, she looked over her shoulder at her rumpled blanket and sheets. “I’m going to get back in it tonight,” she told herself, and walked out the door.
The grandparents slap five. Small victories can add up.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you deserve it,” Blackman says. “You didn’t get as old as you are without doing something right.”
Rice, the founder of the club, stands up. Her mother has been ill back home in Alabama. Rice is trying to figure out how she will feel when her mother dies. Some nights she can’t sleep; her heart races. Rice is a rock for her family and the club, but she’s also a daughter, anxious about what happens when her own rock is no longer here. “I’ve been a big old mess the last few months,” she tells the group. “You all have really helped me.”
The grandparents bow their heads and say a prayer for one of their own.
