The role of grandparents: "If you don't like how I do it, you pay someone else."

BarcelonaI see the nursery school's number on the screen and my heart stops.

– Hello, are you Marc's mother?

– Yes, that's me. Has something happened?

– You should come and get him.

– Is he okay? Does he have a fever?

– No, he has lice.

He has lice. And what am I going to do now? I have a class and then a parent-teacher meeting. Ugh, I can't cancel it now; they must have organized their whole day around this meeting.

– I'm a teacher too, and I can't leave right now.

The teachers understand. It's not so easy to activate the on-call system, and we have many children in our care. We can't just leave the school like that.

–The protocol says you should come pick him up.

And if I don't go, what else does the protocol say? Will they quarantine him? Will they put a swimming cap on his head? What do I do? I'm sure you can already guess the answer. I used the phone call lifeline, that is, I spoke with the affected child's grandmother to ask if she could come to the daycare and help me, yet again, to balance work and life.

It's impossible to do everything. Seriously, our generation was the first to blindly believe that we could be professionals and mothers and also have time for our partners, our friends, and ourselves. We've been deceived. In my experience, there aren't enough hours in the day to fit everything in without sacrificing sleep or jeopardizing your mental health. And that's even though I have a job that allows me to have a schedule and holidays that fit with my children's. But I admit I needed a lot of help, especially when the children were small and all too often got sick.

Grandparents have been the key pieces that have allowed me to fit the puzzle together properly. Have they acted more as babysitters than as elderly relatives? I'd say no, they've always acted as the elderly relatives. My mother was clear and firm about this. I remember one day we were arguing about something related to raising them, and she told me: "If you don't like how I'm doing it, you pay someone and give them these instructions. I'm their grandmother."

And from then on, I kept quiet, accepted that she was absolutely right, and discovered a side of my parents I'd never known. More indulgent, yes, but also more generous and close than they'd been with me. I remember that as a child I only had one Barbie with no accessories whatsoever, while my children have had treats that would have been unthinkable for me. The grandparents have acted as babysitters out of necessity and as grandparents out of generosity. And I admit that I envy the bond my four children have, especially with their grandmothers. They don't have the grudges they have with me, and they've always been more affectionate with them. When my mother got sick, they took her around in her wheelchair and even learned how to change the battery on her oxygen machine. The relationship between two such distant generations is unique, delicate, and indescribable.

I'm starting to wonder if I'll be able or even want to be a grandmother in the future. Will I be healthy enough to make it? Will I be able to help them at all because I'll be working until I'm sixty-seven (or, given the current situation, perhaps even longer)? Or will I enjoy being a grandmother more than being a mother? Because I must confess that having children has been wonderful, but motherhood has been awful. It's incredibly draining, and I've had a constant feeling of guilt for not being present enough, for not being able to do everything, and for not being the good mother I imagined I would be. Motherhood has stolen many hours of sleep from me, but thanks to the help of the grandparents, it hasn't completely stolen my dreams.