Child-rearing Grannies

I lit a candle a couple of hours ago. There are several things I am not ready to think about right now, and the little light on my altar is my promise and my reminder.

Two of my grandkids that I don't get to see very often were here for a couple of days. Now they've left, I'm missing them. When they were here, I was stressed and tired. How do the Arapaho grannies do it, I wonder -- raise six or seven grandkids at a time all by themselves in their teeny houses? How do they stay sane?

I am by far not the wealthiest Anglo in the world, but even so I live in such rarefied air. I have a bedroom and an office/studio, and can spend long hours alone there. I can visit with friends without having to break up fights, wipe noses, watch what little hands and feet are getting into. I have clean water that comes right out of my tap. I don't have to worry about how to stretch the food or about how not paying the heat bill makes the babies cry. I have the treasure of being able to plot my own course through life.

I met several of the Arapaho grannies when I worked for a church on the border of the Wind River Indian Reservation. I knew them when they were feeling most vulnerable, when they were having to ask an Anglo for help to keep their little ones clothed and warm and fed, their need to ask an ongoing reminder of Anglo supremacy. None of us liked the roles we found ourselves in at those moments. Try as I might to be respectful, I was still the one holding the purse strings. Try as they might to remember their self esteem and their righteous anger, they were still the ones who had to ask.

There are so many situations like this around the world. Most people are forced to play the role of having nothing. A very few get to play the role of having a lot. There are no intrinsic differences between us; just the hard, cold reality of how these roles shape us in the most basic of ways.

So now that I have been reminded again of the luxury of my life, I have to ask myself how I am doing. Am I being a good steward of the resources I have been given? Am I being a good servant?

And have I yet come up with any good ideas that would change that horrid scenario where people of dignity and courage have to beg from others? Where the few have to suspiciously examine the guts of the lives of the many before a meager few dollars change hands? Where wealthy people of conscience feel like trash because they have the luxury of choice in respecting the person sitting with them, but that person doesn't?

I am extremely grateful not to be a full-time child-rearing granny. And to all the wise, steel-spined women I have met who are doing just that in the most adverse of situations, all I can say is -- thanks on behalf of the world that needs those kids. I hope we can together keep looking for ways of doing it better.