THE recent announcement that elected, would send out a team of the British Labour Party if volunteer "foster grannies" into the playgrounds and tower blocks of what are euphemistically called urban developments will bring a wry smile to the face of Sheila Kitzinger, whose latest book Becoming A Grandmother, has just hit the shelves.
Indeed, Kitzinger, for the past two decades the authority on natural childbirth already looks set to become the guru of the grannies. A grandmother herself of her five daughters, three are lesbian and only one has married and produced children - she has written 22 books on birthing and parenting, has been translated into 19 different languages, holds a Professorship at Thames Valley University and, with the assistance of her married daughter, runs from her Oxfordshire home both the International Home Birth Movement and the lnternationl Water Birth Movement, not to mention the Birth Crisis Phone Line.
Becoming A Grandmother is full of sensible advice and warnings and any grandmother, actual or potential, will recognise herself somewhere in it. There's the reluctant one, for starters, who may not feel ready to be a grandmother yet. Added to this, the onset of the menopause may turn out to be a greater milestone than becoming a grandmother, with the collision of the two producing either a catalyst or a catastrophe. Grandmotherhood in our Western European culture is not valued and respected as it is in more traditional ones, says Kitzinger. Here, grandmothers may still be working or otherwise fully occupied and not able or willing to take on the role of the ever ready babysitter. Guilt begins to creep in. Don't let it, sings out. Kitzinger. Grandmotherhood "is a door flung open. A parched well filled with water. A tree in flower." Hmm.
Kitzinger herself is chatty, ebullient and earthy. When I interviewed her in her home a few years ago, she was advising new mothers to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles. How? "You do it as if you were swallowing a cherry with your vagina." On that occasion too, I seem to recall seeing, in the bathroom, a flamboyant painting of her husband in the nip, or was it of him, in the bath? I can't quite remember. You can blame all sorts of things on grandmotherhood including temporary memory loss.
Kitzinger has a much better excuse. When I phone her to inquire about a hormone she mentions in her book, she can't immediately recall its name: "It's one of those ones they replace, what's it called? Oh, dear, I've just had a dry Martini and it's gone completely out of my mind." Then, as if on cue, her little grand daughter wanders into the room: "Here's Laura who's three," she comments, for my benefit. "She's got lady birds on her mittens, haven't you, Laura?" Busy author, homely grandmother - the picture is complete.
Her book, she tells me, is based not only on her own experiences but also on wide ranging research. The trouble is that some of the research is recycled 1960s material and things have undoubtedly changed since then. She refers to the traditional role of the grandmother in Jamaica without commenting on the fact that young women in the Caribbean are now no longer prepared to be simply baby mothers. They want to get good jobs in the banks, in their local airlines in the tourist industry and this scenario does not include pregnancy. What effect will this have on the extended family and on the role of the grandmother in it?
And here in Europe, there is the growing phenomenon of the grandmother manque - the woman whose children have themselves not produced children, for whatever reason. Strange too, for a radical practitioner, is the omission of any reference to those lesbian couples engaged in the joint parenting of the child of one of them. How does a modern day grandmother adjust to that situation? Or the grandfather, for that matter, for the menfolk have very minor, walk on parts in this book. Chapter 10 deals with mothers, daughters and daughters in law but surely the sons deserve a chapter of their own as well?
Perhaps that will be the subject of the next but one book, for the next one is already on the stocks. It will deal with the iniquitous practice, in England, of chaining pregnant women prisoners to their hospital beds.
