Part two
Damien Cave continues with the article "My grandparents were pioneers in the battle for visitation rights."
It was like that from the start. Before my dad drove east, they offered non-stop advice, sent every baby accessory imaginable, regularly visited and kept every memento they could find. All the earliest pictures of me come from their camera.
Such hovering couldn't have helped my parents' marriage. But once my dad met Colette, my stepmother whom I've always called Mom, the focus shifted. My grandparents no longer sought to augment their daughter's efforts. They aimed to get as much time with me as possible, for my mother and for themselves.
"It was just an insurance policy," Grandpa told me when I asked last week why they sought visitation rights. "We didn't even know we could do it until someone told us. We went for them because up until that time, we had been lied to, often. We just wanted to ensure that we had the 'pleasure' [sarcasm is his] of spending time with you."
What they really feared was a disappearance, Grandma told me. They saw me often before the split, but once Dad took off, the visits became erratic. Dad had become a massage therapist and we moved often. He rarely told anyone where we'd gone.
In Saratoga, about a year after he came East, he filed for divorce, claiming abandonment and seeking full custody. At the time, my grandparents had hired a private investigator. He never found us, but a friend of my grandparents did. He was a lawyer who happened to be in court near Albany on the day of a hearing. He saw my mother's name on the docket, then told the judge that he knew the family. They'd never let Damien go without a fight, he said.
He was right. When the custody battles finally ended, I was 8. Dad said he didn't strongly oppose my grandparents' rights, largely because he didn't take them seriously, and he just wanted the divorce to be over. With my grandparents' help, my mother won broad rights as well, and that concerned him more.
Eventually, however, she drifted further into alcoholism and out of my life. She would often call and promise a visit, then never show, nor even call. Between ages 8 and 18, I saw her less than a dozen times. She's sober now and I see her more often, but in the meantime, my grandparents replaced her. In her absence, they called almost weekly, and made plans six months in advance. Every winter, the three of us would go skiing for a week, and every summer I visited them in Scarsdale. From there we either took a trip, such as to Niagara Falls, or did the New York thing -- museums, plays and Yankees games.
Their consistent presence was exactly what I needed. Combined with the domestic routine my stepmother brought to Dad and me, those visits made me feel like I belonged to a normal family, one that wouldn't disappear or drastically change without warning. Slowly, I outgrew my fears and shame. My emotional muscles relaxed, and I simply grew up. A family, I began to see, was a patchwork of support systems, not a couples-based, genetic flowchart.
My father and stepmother largely encouraged that feeling, and the visits. But tensions often arose over gifts. We lived a frugal, blue-collar life, so whenever I returned to our rundown apartment with the latest Atari game, or the hippest Nikes, they worried. "They're trying to buy your love," Dad would say.
Truth is, my grandparents -- both entrepreneurs who pulled themselves through the Depression -- didn't know any better. The gifts weren't as much about gaining my love as showing their own. Still, I was a brat who was poor but manipulative enough to know how cool those games or sneakers would make me. My dad and stepmother's fears that I would become a stinking materialist were not totally unwarranted.
Sadly though, those fears grew to epic proportions. The result was the cold-war battle I mentioned earlier. To this day, my father and stepmother are convinced that I've gone over to the dark side, fallen in love with a rich, Jewish, sophisticated snobbery, thus snubbing the Christian hard work that they've come to revere. When I asked my dad if he ever felt jealous of my relationship with my grandparents, he said, "No," but admitted that "money is control." The wealth I saw when visiting my grandparents influenced me more than it should have, he said.
By the same token, my grandfather has a hard time believing that my father has taught me anything worthwhile. Like "The Swede" of Philip Roth's "American Pastoral," he is cut from the cloth of a post-World War II era. He didn't understand why my parents got married in the first place, can't fathom the simple, religious life my father now lives and -- above all else -- finds it appalling that my father did not take on debt to help me pay for college.
Ultimately, these issues of class are not relevant to every story of grandparents' rights. But underlying them are several simple truths. First, and this should come as no surprise, grandparents' values often don't coincide with parents'. Second, because of such disparities, fights are inevitable, particularly when grandparents are given a legal foot in the door. And third, a parent-grandparent mix of influence creates a parent-grandparent child. This is not necessarily a boon to a child's development, but judges should have the freedom to decide the issue. Tying their hands, limiting their vision to parents alone, will only hurt the thousands of children who, like myself, need the stability that an older generation offers.
In the long run, that stability is what will last. Without my grandfather, I would never have learned the joy of classical music or the taste of a Brooklyn Danish. Without Grandma, I might never have come to appreciate modern art, nor have been told about the importance of birth control. Together they pushed me to study at Oxford, and trusted my decision to forego law school to become a writer.
But ultimately, their love and consistency have been their greatest gifts. Neither would have been possible without the habit of visits mandated by the courts. There have been problems, but also great moments of strength. In the words of my grandmother: "We're dysfunctional, but so is everyone else. What counts is that we're there for each other."
http://www.la-legal.com/modules/article/view.article.php?c4/39
