Grandparents-in-waiting

FOR many women, the yearning for grandchildren is a secret one. I have women talked to numbers grandmothers but won't say so in public because of a reluctance to put pressure on their adult children.

It's a sensitivity Miriam Gallagher understands. She has three unmarried adult children, aged 34, 32 and 30. "I will be happy with their decision, whatever it is," she says. Our children must be allowed live their own lives."

Miriam is 66, her husband Gerhardt is 60 and they recently celebrated 35 years of marriage. "I wanted seven children," she says, but as reality kicked in, the numbers went down. I had three.

"As a child, I was very close to my own grandmother and lived with her for a time. We used to sit by the fire and she would read me Count Curly Wee from the paper, and when I could read I would read out the lighting up time for cars which had no relevance for either of us whatsoever. She made me feel very special. Much later, when I had my first child, remember my mother's great joy."

A playwright, filmmaker, actor and speech and language therapist, Miriam Gallagher has worked all her life with small children.

I can still be found in the Wendy House here playing with them. With your own grandchildren there would be an added dimension, looking at them, tracing the family likeness. I could see myself with them, reading them stories, but I would be very careful in the interference department. I'm sort of learning by default at the moment. Some of my friends are grandmothers and I'm seeing how they do it.

I would place no expectations on them other than to be themselves. I wouldn't be interested in pressure about exams or anything like that. And what would I give them? I would like to joyfully share a celebration of life together."

Miriam's situation is certainly not unique. Once upon a time there were yuppies (young upwardly mobile professionals) and dinkies (double income no kids). Now these have given birth in a manner of speaking to chignogs (children gone, no grandchildren).

Chignogs are the fifty and sixty something parents who decades ago would have been basking in a sea of grandchildren. Today they're still waiting in the wings to fulfil that role. Their homes have breakable objects secure from the reach of small, sticky fingers. Their fridges hold no ice pops, and they know nothing of Transformers, Flipper or Sonic the Hedgehog.

These summer times when extended family gatherings are in evidence, chignogs are distinguished by their small roadside picnics. Just two aluminium framed chairs and a small thermos are enough. And they don't need eyes in the back of their heads.

Chignogs are yet another result of declining marriage and fertility rates in Ireland as elsewhere. From a peak of 74,000 in 1980, the annual number of births plummeted to 48,530 last year. And the number of childless couples is increasing too from 15,000 in 1981 to 145,000 in 1991.

So women whose children flew the nest in the 1980s are not necessarily finding the 1990s fulfilled by the arrival of grandchildren. In fact, a new kind of empty nest syndrome is being created a nest empty of grandchildren.

Gemma and Derry Hussey have two daughters and a son in their mid to late 20s. All have left home. None are yet parents. "The phase of life that arises when there are no grandchildren is different for different people," says Gemma. "For women who have devoted themselves 100 per cent to childrearing, it may be a real problem. If he is very busy at the top of his tree and she doesn't have her own outlets, there can be an imbalance, which should be debated and prepared for.

The relationship between the couple can be very challenging. You are wife and husband again, not primarily parents or grandparents. Where children have been the glue, this could be a stress point in a marriage."

Relationships with grown children can be a challenge, too. I think when your relationship with your children does not depend on grandchildren, there is more effort. Later there is a danger you are immediately relegated to grandparents. You arrive to babysit or they come with the children, which makes conversation impossible. I hope I will be a helpful granny, but I hope I continue to have a good separate relationship with my children.

"It wouldn't cost me a thought never to be a grandmother as long as my children were happy. A more important feature would be that if my child wished for a child would want it for their sakes."

COUNSELLING psychologist Noreen Doherty feels that many people have a deep human need to reproduce themselves. "Most parents make a huge emotional investment in family and want something of themselves to continue to survive. Only your own grandchildren can satisfy that urge, the blood tie.

"Some people need to know it's not the end of the line. The Bible talks of living long enough, to see your children's children, important when people died much earlier. It's a primitive need, and I think with less belief now in an afterlife, it may be even more compelling.

"Another important aspect of human behaviour is the need to make certain assumptions. We tend to assume that each generation will repeat a pattern and embrace certain roles. We are thrown and dismayed, perhaps even blame ourselves, if our children deviate too much from what we visualised.

"I find the issue coming up in my group work. People will say things like Will we be around long enough to see the grandchildren, even more crucial as children marry later, delay parenting and have smaller families. There can be a feeling of disappointment."

She cites psychologist Roger Gould, who has looked at transitions through the life cycle involving adult children becoming parents. He suggests that middle aged parents feel they have completed their work. "What is done is done. The die is cast. Children, previously cherished extensions of oneself, are now to be respected as individuals as they become young adults. The circle closes as the adult raises a child who again becomes an adult."

Within this philosophy, Noreen Doherty says, "wannabe" grandparents eager to see the next generation launched can feel cheated as they look into a future where the circle may not close for them.

"It has implications for their relationship too. It throws them back on each other," she says. "Sometimes with the coming of grandchildren there is a reattachment, with the grandchildren as the bonding agents.

"Erik Erickson talks about the psychological tasks of middle age as giving to the next generation. Tangibly this can show itself in babysitting and nappy changing, getting involved, having a stake. Grandparents have a chance to re parent, correct early mistakes, spoil them a bit. Without grandchildren, there are untapped experiences and roles."

DR TONY Fahey of the Economic & Social Research Institute puts today's family patterns into an historical perspective. "The generation who married young in the 1960s and 1970s were the exceptions in the 20th century. Until then people married late, and we have now reverted to earlier patterns. So, people not becoming grandparents till their 60s and 70s or having grandchildren dispersed through emigration is nothing new.

"Older people are inclined, to look at young people leaving home as a lot of very sad fragmentation," he says. "But you could say the opposite. Choosing how to relate can enhance the quality of the relationship. One of the elements of the big open family in the past was that while they lived together, they rarely spoke to each other.

"A lot of 70s and 80s parents deliberately parented differently from the way they had been parented, so even though the children have moved away, there could still be a very open relationship. Families can be intimate at a distance."

Many parents and their grown children simply don't need the "glue" of grandchildren to keep them together any more. Mother and daughter Maura and Roisin Hennerty haven't shared a home for almost 10 years yet in conversation they check with each other constantly in a way that those who are emotionally close often do. Roisin, just 29 is the eldest of three and works as a marketing executive in Dublin. She lives with her partner and is childless. Maura is a medical coordinator and a mature college student.

"I feel the same way about grandchildren as I did about children if it happens well and good. If not, so what?" says Maura. "I'm very relaxed about it. I suppose what you don't have you don't miss. I see life in terms of my own life cycles rather than in terms of someone else's and I don't think I have ever lived through the children."

Roisin says she would like children, but is not sure when. "I always had the idea it would be around the 30ish mark, but now that I'm nearing that point I'm less inclined. I feel I would be up an awful lot . . . There giving is no sense in which I want to give my parents a grandchild. I certainly wouldn't want to depend on my mother for babysitting the result of having an overachiever as a mother"

"We are close," says Maura. "We would talk to each other on the phone every day, perhaps several times a day, and we see each other constantly. Whether or not there are grandchildren will make no difference to what we have."