“Why don’t you ever write about your grandchildren again?” readers sometimes ask me. “Good question,” I answer to buy time, like a trained politician.
It is not a question to answer in a few words. At first I was hardly even aware that I was no longer writing about my grandchildren. I had to search my digital files for the dates of the beginning and end of those columns NRC Handelsblad.
On February 28, 2005 I started with a piece about the birth of Glenn, our first grandchild. Of him I have written most—the inevitable fate of the firstborn. Then Hidde (2007), Fay (2009) and Jens (2010) were born. My last column about the grandchildren I wrote as ‘Okay boomeron December 4, 2019. It was not a conscious decision at the time. It wasn’t until months later that it dawned on me that I no longer felt the need to go through with it.
I had described all the striking events my wife and I had experienced as grandparents, and I didn’t want to repeat myself. Moreover, the eldest grandchildren in particular entered a phase of life in which they could suffer from the publicity their grandfather needed. The consequences of this should not be underestimated, as I noticed myself after describing my purchase of a new mattress. A few weeks later, a neighbor called out to me from her porch in broad daylight: “So, how do you like the mattress?”
Grandchildren become teenagers and in many ways take on a secret life that they prefer to keep to themselves. Why should they share their inner stirrings with their grandparents? They will of course remain the sweetest children in the world, but as a grandparent you will have to respect that they can no longer radiate the open-mindedness of the past. Then they were the ideal muse for the columnist, who offered him inspiration without requiring discretion.
I now have to think of four-year-old Hidde, whom we took to Klein Zwanenmeer on a Sunday afternoon, ‘for everyone from the age of two’ in an Amsterdam theatre. Hidde had started the day with us optimistically by singing the song they sang with him at the nursery in the morning: „Good morning… nice to see you again, look who is sitting next to you, do you know that? ”
We had hoped that he would keep his good humor in the afternoon, but unfortunately the actors failed to captivate him sufficiently. “I want to go,” he said several times after fifteen minutes, and he began to pace around restlessly. He did sit through the performance, but more out of pity for his shocked grandparents than out of interest in the ballet.
I also remember that Fay was bitten by a black-tailed prairie dog in Artis and later said sadly to the doctor at the hospital: “I left all my blood at the zoo.” As a columnist in the years that I wrote about my grandchildren, that was what I was mainly concerned about: the sentences you can’t make up
This is an edited version of the epilogue in my recently published collection When They Were Little, Chronicle of Grandchildren (Brooklyn Publishers).
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 7, 2023