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A few weeks ago, my wife Joy and I had a surprisingly hard visit with our children and granddaughter in Portland.

Grandparents are not supposed to say that.

Well, it happened, and for a very important reason. Things have changed. My granddaughter Vivienne is not the same kid anymore. She’s now twelve, an adolescent.

If you think this is the beginning of a sad, poor-grandpa story, it isn’t. 

Frolicky Grandpa

At first, being a grandparent is like being in a Disney movie. It’s a family frolic. 

For long-distant grandparents like us a visit was The Really Big Frolic. 

In the flesh. Velvet-rope box seats. All that touching, holding, singing, and listening to the many things a little kid granddaughter wants to tell you about herself and her world. 

“Look, grandma, look grandpa. See what I can do!” All in all, it’s lovely and smooth sailing with the grandchild at center stage, the only star.

Viv wanted to be the center of attention any chance she got. She began to make instructional videos starring herself and talked on them like a YouTube influencer: “Hi guys. Be sure to..”

The only skill set we grandparents needed came from :

A smile a perfect gift for me
as wide as a mile.

To make me happy as can be
Smile, smile, smile, smile, smile!

Then along comes adolescence: Yo, Pinky Pie. Aloha and good-bye.

Exit Frolicky Grandpa

During our recent visit, it became clear that we’d become more incidental to Viv’s life. She liked spending time alone in her room and reading on her own. She was uninterested, sometimes highly annoyed, at being the center of attention.

Viv didn’t want to displease us, but she certainly wasn’t all that concerned with pleasing us either.

So, during that three-week visit, Joy and I spent a lot of time worrying and wondering. It’s uncanny how closely this sadness matched the description on .

We worried that the “grandchild won’t know you, or you them. You’re failing somehow, as if you should be doing more but don’t know what [and] running out of ideas and not finding any good ones.”

Topped off by this coup de grace on the already wounded ancient bull elk: “grief for the loss of relationships … overwhelmed at the prospect of the journey ahead.”

 “Grief for the loss and overwhelmed by the journey ahead” sounds like a deathbed scene. In a way, it is.

Well, you can grieve, or you can arise from the dead by adapting.

The first part of this journey is to see that adaption as a challenge. And you should see that older people are adept at meeting even one as emotionally disorienting as how you relate to a child who is that child no more.

Developing a new way of relating to a person you love is not exactly like trying a senior center ceramics class or walking onto the pickle ball court for the first time.

Call this capacity brain power. (The experts’ term is “executive function.”) Consider the relationship between emerging adolescents and their grandparents as the interaction of two brains, adolescent and aged.

The arc of the adolescent brain is rapid development. But along the way there are huge fits, starts, and bumps in the road. Beginning at age 10, the adolescent brain begins a wild ride continuing for roughly another ten years.

Getting rid of the old and bringing in the new can seem pretty stressful and out of control. So, at 12, the brain is taking gigantic, sometimes erratic, and hard-to-understand leaps. Extremely intelligent and mature one minute, very vulnerable the next.

The overall arc of old person’s brain is not development but decline. Of course it is. But this downward slope is not as steep or as sad as you might think.

“There is growing evidence,” the , “that the [aged] brain maintains the ability to change and adapt so that people can manage new challenges and tasks as they age.”

Developing a new sort of relationship with Viv is one of those adaptable tasks. Rather than distant child and grieving grandpa, I see my new relationship with her as one between a young woman who on some days functions like an adult while on others is vulnerable and an old person who still has the experience and brain power to deal with this.

What can I do to make this adaptation work? I don’t know yet. Developing a new way of relating to a person you love is not exactly like trying a senior center ceramics class or walking onto the pickle ball court for the first time.

Even though Joy and I were mainly mired in the poor-grandparents phase, we stumbled into a few adjustments.

The Beginnings of a Work in Progress: Three Portland Visit Vignettes

My son asked me to take Viv to her dance class less than one-and-a-half miles away. 

Viv didn’t argue but seemed a little skeptical that I could actually pull this project off. She told me the exact time we had to leave and assumed I needed directions even though I had been there before and have been driving in Portland since the early 90’s. She told me when to change lanes and where to make the final turn. 

Not exactly grandpa sharing his mana’o or holding granddaughter’s hand as they stroll to the slides and swings, but I’ll take it. It made me laugh.

One evening, as we sat in the living room, my son mentioned that Vivienne had written a poem in a 15-minute free writing session of her sixth-grade creative writing class. He asked her to read it. Viv agreed, though she certainly did not seem excited.

Now, she is a very smart person who has real writing talents. Even so, this poem blew me away.

It was a beautifully written and extraordinarily expressed poem about emotions. I told her how good I thought it was and that I doubted that in that short a time I could string that many words together, much less something of that quality.

She seemed pleased at the compliment but not infant-big-smile-for-grandma-and-grandpa pleased.   We did not applaud. I did not hug her. No one suggested making a video, which in my frolicky grandpa days I would have shared with many, many people.

The last week we were there Vivienne asked me if on the weekend I would take her to a diner she liked. I was so delighted.

Joy said she would go too, which made me secretly disappointed because I was hoping it would just be grandpa and the little Brooklyn preschooler I used to know.

The breakfast was very comfortable and uneventful. No probing, no trying to force conversation.

The visit had already reminded Joy and me that making conversation or giving unsolicited advice is a grandparent idea. “How’s school?” or “What are you going to do with the rest of your day?” is as much a non-starter as it was when your children were that age.

Viv helped Joy when she had trouble using the machine to pay the bill. 

A few days later Joy and I left for the airport. It was 5:30 a.m. Viv was still sleeping. We did not wake her to say good-bye.

It made me wistful, but it felt right.