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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Eager saints and sweet-toothed sinners
The blessed Halloween of my youth
By Kate Convissor
[10/29/99]

Halloween hand-wringing
Are the stories about trick-or-treat mayhem for real?
By Jill Wolfson
[10/29/99]

Please, God, don't let him be a penis grabber
Then again, if he is a penis grabber, keep him away from mine.
By Jonathan Kronstadt
[10/28/99]

Wild Thing
Books for bad children
Bring on the ghosts, the ghouls and the unhappy endings.
By Polly Shulman
[10/27/99]

High noon for nurturers
Penelope Leach faces off with the Ezzos in a nasty turf war. Someone needs a spanking.
By Shelley Emling
[10/26/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

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The victory my grandmother spoke about jeopardized my father's second marriage, and seemed to confirm my mother's greatest fear -- that she wasn't, and would never be, a good mother. The latter issue isn't relevant to the case coming before the court: Troxel vs. Granville involves grandparents whose son committed suicide. But the court's decision will touch the millions of divorcées who, like my mother, already feel condemned for choosing the wrong mate and losing full custody of their children.

For us, the children, problems also arise. Grandparents with formal rights become parental. They think they know best, and they often do. But visitation rights create a sense of entitlement and give teeth to such claims even now. For years, my grandfather has referred to my grandmother as "your mother." And, even now, though I am 25 and filled with opinions of my own, my parents and grandparents often resemble cold-war superpowers: They don't talk, but work behind the scenes to guide me toward their respective ideologies.

And yet, despite these hassles, I must side with the majority. Life without my grandparents would have been a lesser life, a poorer existence. My earliest memories have nothing to do with a nuclear family and are without settings because I was moved around so much. But through it all, my grandparents were there, calling, visiting, sending cards and gifts. To them, I was "the baby," the first grandchild and the first boy to come from four daughters. To me, they were dependable, a security blanket I would never lose.

It was like that from the start. Before my dad drove east, they offered non-stop advice, sent every baby accessory imaginable, regularly visited and kept every memento they could find. All the earliest pictures of me come from their camera.

Such hovering couldn't have helped my parents' marriage. But once my dad met Colette, my stepmother whom I've always called Mom, the focus shifted. My grandparents no longer sought to augment their daughter's efforts. They aimed to get as much time with me as possible, for my mother and for themselves.

"It was just an insurance policy," Grandpa told me when I asked last week why they sought visitation rights. "We didn't even know we could do it until someone told us. We went for them because up until that time, we had been lied to, often. We just wanted to ensure that we had the 'pleasure' [sarcasm is his] of spending time with you."

What they really feared was a disappearance, Grandma told me. They saw me often before the split, but once Dad took off, the visits became erratic. Dad had become a massage therapist and we moved often. He rarely told anyone where we'd gone.

In Saratoga, about a year after he came East, he filed for divorce, claiming abandonment and seeking full custody. At the time, my grandparents had hired a private investigator. He never found us, but a friend of my grandparents did. He was a lawyer who happened to be in court near Albany on the day of a hearing. He saw my mother's name on the docket, then told the judge that he knew the family. They'd never let Damien go without a fight, he said.

He was right. When the custody battles finally ended, I was 8. Dad said he didn't strongly oppose my grandparents' rights, largely because he didn't take them seriously, and he just wanted the divorce to be over. With my grandparents' help, my mother won broad rights as well, and that concerned him more.

Next page | Between ages 8 and 18, I saw her fewer than a dozen times