The
Grandma Mafia
The
Grandma Mafia
By Joe Bob Briggs
November 8, 2002
It has to be an honest-to-God Grandma, not an Old Crone. The difference between the two is that an Old Crone is just a scary crazy old lady with no attachments who hates the world. A Grandma is a woman who loves the world, and that's what makes her so fierce. She's got grandma genes, which means she's spent her life protecting things, preserving babies.
In tense alpha-male situations--I'm calling on my Texas childhood here--the only all but certain way to defuse it is to have a granny, or preferably a whole army of grannies, wade into the middle of the fracas and shame the combatants. It can be done with a tongue-lashing. It can be done with or without profanity. It can be done by sheer physical bravery. (Watch how fast she'll put that body between a bully and a scrawny kid.) Or it can be done by a soft plea to restore sanity. What I know is: Grandma will know what to do.
I've been thinking about this because of a recent New York Times report on an international conference of anthropologists and ethnographers who are puzzled by recent research showing that families with a resident maternal grandmother are healthier than families without one, even if everything else about the family is normal. In some societies, the survival of the family--actual life and death--is more often preserved by the presence of a grandmother than by, for example, a mere father.
No one in Texas would be surprised by this, although I've noticed that in New York the reverse is true. Watch some adrenaline-fueled testosterone tournament get started on the subway between some teenagers. Watch a couple of those young Pakistani cab drivers start staring each other down and playing chicken in traffic. Watch some gold-neck-chain weasel jump into a bus seat before a pregnant woman can get there. The grandmas don't show up.
Obviously a man can wade into these situations and, if he's sufficiently burly and authoritative, defuse the bomb, but if he directly challenges someone's manhood, the result is likely to be a fistfight or worse. If a grandmother does the same thing, she can shame the guy until he's a whipped puppy dog. He'll sulk in the corner in the corner, glare, feebly defend himself, and eventually back off. Unfortunately, it's the New York grandmothers who are more often cowering in the corners.
There are exceptions. In a certain public park in Tribeca, Jamaican nannies make all the rules. If any single men enter the park, they're shooed away and told not to come back until the children are gone. No cop could do the same thing--it would in fact be illegal--and no male would make the challenge. These are not even technically grandmothers--the nannies tend to be young-- but they've already assumed that fierce grandma moral authority.
I've seen old Russian babushki go up to rowdy teenagers in Moscow theaters and tell them to shut up. They don't like it--but they shut up. I've seen a nurse--a grandmotherly nurse-- singlehandedly clean the riffraff out of the waiting room of Parkland Hospital in Dallas, which tends to fill up on weekends with the associates of criminals being treated for gunshot and stab wounds.
I would go even further to say you can probably judge the health of a society by how aggressive its grandmothers are. The fearful grandmas in New York obviously feel disconnected from what's going on around them, so they don't step up. A grandmother in Mexico, on the other hand, is likely to think of every child in the village as her personal responsibility, and every young hothead as a threat to family life--which is, after all, the temple she's protecting in the first place.
The experts at the international conference couldn't decide on the ultimate reason that grandmothers are so important in preserving a culture. Sentimentality aside--we all love our grandmas--they didn't seem to do anything, and yet having them around increased the birth rate, cut down on the mortality rate, and made the next generation stronger and more functional. (Grandfathers, on the other hand, didn't seem to make much difference.)
The reason their contribution is not noticed, I think, is that it has no outward signs of productivity. They don't make anything (except maybe quilts). They don't earn money. They don't put food on the table (although some insist on continuing to cook it). When we think of the active grandmother, we tend to think of her as doing something harmless, like working at the church or playing the slots in Vegas.
What she does is . . . sacrifice. You can't see it because it's a negation of herself. You don't notice her because she's protecting someone else's vitality, not prolonging her own. One thing the researchers discovered is that grandparents living on modest fixed incomes set aside an average of 9 percent of their pensions for their children and grandchildren, and their gifts to the younger generations are far greater than gifts they receive in return.
What she's actually protecting, whether she knows it or not, is civilization. One grandma should be assigned to every combat battalion. The war would be over a lot quicker.
Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at joebob@upi.com or through his website at www.joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.
© 2002 Joe Bob Briggs All Rights Reserved