Raising Grandkids:
The Unwished-for Retirement Option
Gary Garrison
“Raising kids at age fifty-seven? This isn’t the plan I had for my life.” Yet here
was a grandmother talking to me over lunch at Tony’s Pizza in inner-city
Edmonton about how her fourteen-year-old daughter was raped, ended up in
a child welfare program, had a baby at sixteen, and began a life on the streets
selling sex and taking drugs.
She raised that baby — who
is now in high school — since
the baby was less than a year
old. She refused to allow child
welfare to get involved, worked
full-time, took on a part-time
job, gave up any thought of
retirement, and, in the middle
of all that, her husband of
thirty-two years left her.
In the meantime, her daughter
was in and out of contact with
her and gave birth to three
other children. In 2005, when
a brutal murder of a young
woman was headline news in
Edmonton, police approached the
grandmother to identify the body
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because they thought it might
have been her daughter. It wasn’t,
but more than ten years later, she
shuddered recalling the memory.
Even now, she told me, “If the
phone rings after nine o’clock,
my heart stops. Lots of nights I
go to bed crying.” She groaned
in agony, the wound still
festering deep in her gut. “You
don’t hear from them! You don’t
know where they are!”
The chances are pretty good
that everyone of retirement age
knows at least somebody who’s
raising their own grandchildren.
If you don’t know one now, you
almost certainly will before long.
You may not even know that
you know one already. I worked
on a volunteer board with a
woman for two years before I
found out she had been raising
her granddaughter for over
ten years. It’s not the kind of
thing people usually bring up in
casual conversation. In fact, she
didn’t know I was also raising
grandkids.
The 2011 census says that
in almost 75,000 households,
grandparents were raising
grandkids; the number is
certainly higher now. And that
only includes self-reporting
grandparents who have full