Bet you didn’t know that there is a holiday in September called Grandparents’ Day. In the United States as well as some other countries. It falls on the first Saturday after Labor Day, which is September 13th this year. Not a big holiday–no parades, fireworks, or gifts.  It’s more of a family holiday where grandparents and grandchildren celebrate each other.

My late husband and I  were blessed with grandchildren (four), but I was shortchanged with grandparents.  My maternal grandfather was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1916, and his widow only lived to 55, dying before my parents were even married.  My paternal grandparents, who were divorced, had 12 grandchildren.  I seldom saw my grandmother. We had step-grands who didn’t take much interest in us, but we were close to my father’s father who had an apple orchard and a cider press and would try to stay connected with his oldest son’s  abandoned brood of three. A generation farther back, I lucked out–t with great-grandmothers

Ida Scoviille Hiewitt and Alice Muinger Stewart  are the great-grandmothers ones whose stories I will share on my weekly email missive to my daughters, niece, and nephew. I  knew my mother’s grandmother Alice and  my father’s grandmother Ida through stories told by my mother and my aunt. I will also honor in memory my own mother as a grandmother to my children.  What these three women had  in common was a genuine interest in young people and a willingness time to spend with them. 

My mother was close to her grandmother but also well acquainted with her grandmother-in-law, who raised my father when his parents separated. As a result, my mother had a huge fund of stories to share. Recounting family history through stories is a great gift from someone who knows the stories and can tell them well.  My mother told me many times how much I resembled both Alice and Ida in personality as well as appearance. Alice refused to raise her two children in the harsh conditions of homesteading in Kansas and brought them back to Connecticut, to which her husband reluctantly followed.  She also marched for women’s suffrage in 1913.  Ida married a small-time dairy farmer, but she inherited her father’s real estate business. She was successful enough to send all three sons to college in the early 1900s. 

My mother also told me and my children stories of her high school days as a social butterfly and the hardships of the Great Depression and even stories of her failures, like wrecking her sister’s car and getting arrested for driving without a license.  She longed to be a writer as did my sister and I, All three of us have found ways to express that gift, starting with being the associate editors of the Torrington High school newspaper in (respectively) 1926, 1953, and 1958!

I too storytelling seriously, a way to connect  my four granddaughters with their history. My number three granddaughter, Bella, would sit at my dining room table when she was in preschool and say, Grandma, tell me another family story.

Here is one favorite family story about their beloved Aunt Carla at the age of five.  We had just moved for a one-year stay in Boulder, Colorado, and I took the children to school to meet their teachers. I mentioned that Carla, not quite six, could read. Oh, the teacher said,  a lot of parents think their children can read because they have memorized some of their favorite stories.  Let me put it this way,  I said.  I was in the bank with my girls and Carla said, Mommy, do you like service charges? No, I said, why? Well, said Carla, that sign over there says “Don’t like service charges? Neither do we.”  Too young with a September birthday to put in second grade, Carla stayed in first grade in a one-person reading group! Many years later my older sister told me a similar story about my introduction to first grade  when I had been reading for two years. And my youngest granddaughter, despite her protest at age four that she couldn’t read until she was six, was clearly reading signs and menus and cereal boxes! Early literacy tied three generations of readers together.

Storytelling helps you understand where your cowlick and your left-handedness and height or lack thereof came from and which of the members of your extended family shared your gifts—athletic, musical, artistic, or storytelling. Or cooking, or caregiving, or carpentry. And stories of  how earlier generations met and married, and what career paths they chose and why.

It would be nice if your grandchildren made you a card or sent you a text for Grandparents’ Day. But the real challenge is for us grandparents to accept our role of being memory keepers and storytellers who link the generations together.

Holley Ulbrich is a retired Clemson economist with four granddaughters and one great-granddaughter.  You can visit her blog, Purple Sage 41, to read more.