Relationships

Editor’s note: We (the Proctors) and Meridian Magazine are working on a potential partnership with the Eyres to create a special Friday Family-Focus Forum each week in Meridian. “Family” will be broadly defined to include every child, sibling, cousin, uncle, aunt, parent and grandparent (in other words all of us who are members of our Heavenly Parents’ family and thus spiritual siblings with each other.) If it materializes, the Friday Family Forum will officially launch later this year with feature articles, art, and poetry on all of our family roles, including ancestry and temple work as well as every angle of relationship-improving within families.

While we are working on the possibility, Richard and Linda will be sharing a family-centric article with us each Friday. Today’s article suggests a question most parents and grandparents have asked themselves: “What will be my legacy? What do I want to leave with my posterity?” The Eyres suggest that your most valuable legacy is the lessons you have learned from your own life. For those who want to go deeper on this subject, the Eyres have set up a link for Meridian readers that allows us to get the same 40% discount on their new book The Grandparenting Blueprint.

The Big Question for Grandparents

What lessons has your life taught you? What are the core principles that guide you? Can you convey those insights to your grandchildren with enough power and conviction that they will embrace them and not have to re-discover the wheel or learn the lessons by trial and error or through the school of hard knocks?

We wrestled with these questions for a long time. We hope that, as a fellow-grandparent, you will learn a little, maybe pick up some ideas you can adapt to your own circumstances, and maybe be a bit more motivated to create your own version of the personal legacy you want to leave.

For what it is worth, let me (Richard) tell you my own story about identifying what I believe and transmitting it to our grandchildren. Linda goes about her grandmothering in a little different way and will share some of her approaches in a future article, but I think the ideas and thoughts here work equally well for a grandpa or a grandma. And let me say again that this is not as a guide or anything you should copy, because no two situations are alike, and each family (and each grandparent) needs to figure out his or her own unique life lessons and think about one’s own unique grandkids.

But there may be some value in “samples” that will work as a stimulation for us each to carve out our own pattern with our own grandkids, so here we go.

For me, there are certain questions which, once asked, won’t go away until you answer them.

Once I had asked myself the question, “What are the twelve most important things I know—the dozen key things I want my grandkids to know?” I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

And the question itself kept expanding. What emotional or spiritual legacy do I want to leave with my grandkids?

What do I want them to remember about me—what truths do you want them to identify me with?

What principles or practices will protect them as they grow toward adulthood?

If I had a magic wand, what qualities would I bequeath upon my grandchildren?

What do I really think are the keys to personal happiness and how do I give my grandkids those keys?

From “Principles” to “Secrets”

I remember the very day these questions really caught up to me. I had been thinking for a while about the idea of sharing some personal life lessons, but I hadn’t quite figured out how.

On this particular day, I was at our family summer home in Bear Lake, Idaho—it was early spring, and I was getting the place opened after the long winter—and beginning to plan our family reunion where all nine of our children and their families would join us from all over the world. As happens every year, they would converge on the lake in July for the games, discussions, traditions, cousin bonding time, tennis, meals, debates, planning sessions, water skiing adventures, and yes, for disagreements too, and sometimes a lot of chaos and frustration.

For years I had been realizing, progressively, how different grandparenting was from parenting, and how different my relationship and my responsibility was with grandkids than with our own children.

I had been trying to more clearly define this newer stewardship of “generation one” for “generation three”—trying to understand how I could be pro-active and effective in it without stepping on the toes of our children, the parents.

I was trying see grandparenting as a golden opportunity. After all, I had total access to these remarkable young kids, and the love between us was palpable, yet I didn’t have the responsibility or obligation of discipline, correction, or even teaching, clothing, feeding, and housing. I was free to just be with them, to appreciate them, to praise them, to encourage them, to accept and admire them without judging or monitoring them. It seemed to me that if I could get their attention, I could teach them whatever I wanted.

And that begged the questions: What did I want to teach them? And how would I get their attention?

As I walked along the lake shore that bright blue spring day, I realized that the answers were both big and small. I wanted to teach them everything I knew, everything that would keep them safe, and everything that could make them happy.

But it was clear to me on that solitary morning that they would forget the big and the general. What I really needed to find was the small and specific. So that day I started creating a list of the dozen life-lessons I wanted them to remember (and to remember me by.)

That summer, at the reunion, I gathered them all for a meeting and told them that I had some principles I wanted to share.

It fell flat!

Their eyes glazed over and I could almost hear them thinking “Yep, another lecture from Grandpa.”

I quickly realized that these “principles” were going nowhere. I tried a few other words like “lessons” and even “truths” but the eye-glaze deepened and there was lots of fidgeting.

I know a lost cause when I see one. I cut it off by saying “Well, I just wanted you to know I was thinking about this, and I’ll tell you more later. Now, let’s go out on the boat.”

By the next summer I had not only polished up and shortened my principles, I had re-branded them, and this time things went better.

I called them “Grandfather’s Secrets.”

And I split them up by the age when I thought kids would need them and “get them.”

Getting two or three kids together, on a boat or in the car was easy, and they were intrigued that I had a couple of “secrets” just for them. I “revealed” them and explained what they meant, and I offered them a little incentive (bribe) if they could memorize them. It started to get fun.

Develop Your Own, but Here are Some of Mine as Samples

I have two secrets for each even-number age.

Let me share one of the two for each age as a thought-starter and a little motivation for developing your own secrets. Note that they each have names, that they get “deeper” and harder to memorize at each age, and that each is an attempt either to counter common problems that kids have at these respective ages or to tap into natural capacities or aptitudes that they seem to possess in these years.

An age-8 secret:

JOY: “Joy is the purpose of life and a choice you make each day.”

An age-10 secret:

POPULARITY: “Good popularity comes from being nice to everyone—and it lasts. Bad popularity comes from only being nice to certain people—and it doesn’t.”

An age-12 secret:

MAGIC WORDS: “‘Please,’ ‘thank you,’ and ‘I’m sorry’ are truly magic words that keep us humble and develop in us the three eternal attitudes and aptitudes of asking, receiving, and forgiving—which can lift others even as they bring us awareness, perspective, gratitude, and insight. Asking may be the greatest skill. Asking questions to friends, parents, strangers, and God opens the windows of insight, empathy, and trust.”

An age-14 secret:

TRANSFORMER: “Sex between committed, married partners, is the brightest and most beautiful and miraculous thing in this world. Any other uses of sex can darken the light. Sexual feelings are a gift from God and can always be transformed from dark to light.”

An age-16 secret:

THE RING OF TRUTH: “Truth is light, and your spirit can feel it. Seek truth everywhere and learn to recognize and receive its resonance and to reject the discord of its counterfeits. This is the gift of discernment and it both enlightens and protects.”

An age-18 secret:

ADVANCED DECISION-MAKING: “In the second seventh of life come life’s pivotal decisions, which will largely determine the happiness of the remaining five-sevenths. Binary right/wrong choices should be made in advance, dated and signed in contract with self, while pivotal ‘multi-alternative’ decisions (marriage, major, career, children) should first be made tentatively through analysis, advice, and prayer—but not acted upon until spiritual or personal confirmation is received.”

Conclusion

Your “secrets” will be different than mine, but I promise you that the time you spend creating them will be personally rewarding. And I promise you that explaining them and telling stories about them to a small group of similar age grandkids can bring a lot of joy to them as well as to you.