Eagerly looking forward to a dreamy dinner on a friend’s boat, my thoughts were interrupted by the phone ringing.
‘Mu-um?’ came the plaintive cry at the other end of the receiver, ‘I don’t suppose you could do any babysitting this weekend?’
‘certainly not,’ I replied briskly.
‘You know I need a month’s notice. I have got my own life, you know’.
The fact that granny has her own life and doesn’t want to be a perpetual unpaid babysitter is something my grown-up children find very hard to accept. But the fact is that while I love all the grandchildren dearly, I am a very reluctant grandmother.
As one of the original baby-boomers, I have always lived my own life and, selfish to the last, I intend to carry on doing so.
I’m now one of the SWOFTIES, it seems – single women over 50 who like clubbing, Twitter and exotic holidays. This means I am far from being the cuddly, all-indulgent granny of popular image, dispensing sweets from the sweet tin on the sideboard as the grandchildren lay waste to my house while I smile fondly at them.
Instead, I – in common with many of my contemporaries – am spending my freedom years eagerly embarking on new adventures.
In fact, my life in my seventh decade is far more liberated, action-packed and exciting than those of my two sons and their partners, weighed down as they are with endless childcare and work worries.
When, in 2000, I wrote in this paper about the unexpected surge of love i felt for my two new grandchildren after never having wanted to be a granny, I didn’t think about what the next decade would bring.
Now there are five (three boys, two girls) very different and increasingly complex little individuals aged between ten and nearly six – and, of course, their demanding fortysomething parents. When the latter ring to ask if I can look after the kids while they flit off to Paris or new york, I tell them i will have to look in my crowded diary first to see whether it’s me who is flitting off to Paris or new york for a romantic jaunt next week instead.
I am single, have been divorced for 20 years and should somebody suitable come along, I’m up for it.
What my sons’ generation have to understand is that we, the grannies of today, are a completely different breed from those of yesteryear.
It’s time to ditch the traditional image of the whitehaired old lady in her rocking chair complaining about her sciatica, and replace it with the modern version: slim, glamorous, fit, on-trend and on the treadmill, the mobile or the computer.
I shop in gap, Zara and Primark; I don’t do pleated tartan skirts and wrinkled stockings. I have moved to a smart new flat with pale- coloured carpets, sofas and curtains.
It’s all immaculate, not particularly child-friendly and i want it to stay like that. So if I do agree to have the grandchildren to stay – if – it’s on my terms.
I don’t want sticky fingers all over my designer décor, cushion fights in the living room, play paints splashed all over the place, or mayhem created in their bedrooms for me to clear up. They will also have to eat up what’s put in front of them, or go without, and early bedtimes for them are a must – after all, I want to be able to sit down with my glass or two of wine rather than reading bedtime stories.
Mind, there is one grandmotherly diktat that they obey instantly. The grandchildren tell me that they are not allowed to watch television at home. I say that in my house the situation is quite the opposite, and they will be FORCED to watch telly while I get on with my writing, Skypeing, emailing and Tweeting.
I admit that I’m not proving to be that good a grandmother. But in this I am not alone.
Novelist and playwright Rosemary Friedman, now in her 80s and still working as hard as ever, writes in her forthcoming memoir Life’s A Joke: ‘I am not interested in being an unpaid nanny, to spend my days making fairy cakes and digging sandcastles second time round. ‘Because I am always at home and seem a natural babysitting target, the guidelines have been firmly established. I am unwilling and reluctant to let my diminishing time and energy be usurped by ten grandchildren.’ I wonder how many more of today’s grannies secretly feel the same?
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