Shared Resonance: Raised by Grandparents

I’ve met a few folks, especially Gen Xers, whose grandparents were their primary caregivers. Long before we’ve shared our common experience, I intuit the signs: dry humor and outdated jokes; a predilection for pickled herring, black licorice, or other old-school snacks; and a “waste-not, want-not” indoctrination that could only come from being raised by survivors of the Great Depression. There’s a deep kinship in seeing someone gleefully distribute after-dinner mints, giggle at me about my Norwegian ways, and then scrape every gram of our leftovers into takeout containers—before dropping packs of oyster crackers into their handbag.

You feel it in other ways that aren’t so great, of course. Being raised by Gramma and Grampa generally meant your parents worked long hours, couldn’t fully care for you, or something worse. It meant that unless you had a large family, you likely didn’t have kids your own age to play with, just at the age you’re supposed to be learning how to socialize with peers. I’ve seen another correlation among my friends raised like me: We were largely parentified. I've learned lately that’s what it's called when a kid feels they have to grow up fast so they’re not a burden… so they can contribute… so they’ll be okay if caregivers get sick or die.

Mine did, way too early. Gramma Nettie died when I was eleven, after a year-long fight with comorbid diabetes conditions. But I’m grateful for the time I had with her. She called me Bunky, after a precocious, rule-following comic strip character from her youth. When we were out on errands, she passed me the red Lifesavers from her purse, since she knew they were my favorite flavor. And if we went out for lunch, she always dumped the breadsticks into her purse for later.

Gramma made sure I had an appreciation for seasonal shifts, learning & reading, playing tabletop games, and baking cakes and cookies. On winter days, I remember waiting for her to call me into the kitchen as the metallic smell of baseboard heaters assaulted my nose. Sometimes I got impatient, especially when there was a fresh snowfall, so I’d bide my time making snow angels or throwing myself from the swing into a snowdrift.

When it got too cold or I got too impatient, I’d check in on Gramma before she was ready. She often sat at the kitchen-table radio, writing down recipes from her favorite local talk show in one of her spiral notebooks. I made sure to save one of these after she died. I remember grabbing and hiding it in my bedroom when the adults started dividing her things. I felt bad about it at the time, but not now; the rest of her notebooks were either thrown out, or they rotted in the basement of my childhood home.

In one such notebook lies the greatest of her recipes: cranberry bread. Everyone loved it so much that she experimented with it to make it even better. She frosted it, added black walnuts, played with proportions of baking soda and powder, etc. Here are the two versions of the recipe, just the way she wrote them, so you can see what I mean:

cranberry oarange bread 2 c sifted flower ¾ c sugar 3 tsp baking powder ¼ tsp salt ½ tsp nutmeg grate rind of 1 oarange ¾ c oarange juice 1 egg 2 T tbs oil 1 c cranberries choped sift dry ing. into bowel add oarange rind and mix combine oarange juice egg and oil add to dry ingredients stir just until flower is moist fold in cranberries bake in bred pan greased 350˚ 60 to 7 min

doubel cranberry bread 4 cup flower 2 cup sugar or 1 cup sugar ½ sugar sub 3 tsp baking powder salt 1 tsp soda 1 ½ cup orange juice 2 eggs 4 tabel spoon grated orange peel 2 cup chopped cranberries heat oven to 350˚ mix to gether dry ingredients add orange juice eggs + shortning mix till well mixed add orange peel stir in cranberries greese bottom of pans bake 55 to 5 min less for smaller pan

Of course, now, I see the missing punctuation, retraced words, poor spelling, and inconsistent abbreviations. But Gramma’s genius is there; without a science education of any kind, she played with acid and base, fat and leavening; lowered the sugar in a bow to her diabetes.

I finally brought myself to make the cranberry-orange-walnut version last Christmas. I had to steal away into a separate room, where I misted the slice with tears.

Gramma worked hard, but she wasn’t a fool. For everyday baking, she knew those cheap cake and muffin mixes were just as good or better than any silly notion of “scratch baking” had people believing. Her favorite grocery store hack was using the Betty Crocker Angel Food Cake Mix instead of buying a dozen eggs and separating them. Even as a 5-year-old, she’d have me do every step of that cake, except for putting it in the oven: reading the directions from the box, measuring ingredients, using the whisk attachment on her Sunbeam Mixmaster 12-speed Mixer, and using the rubber spatula to get every drop of the batter in the angel food cake pan I’d greased. It was detailed work to cover not merely the pan’s sides, but also the removeable bottom, with its hollow tube. Afterward, we’d cool the pan upside down on a soda bottle while she squished some fresh or frozen berries for the topping.

“It’s not ready yet, Sher,” she’d say, as I impatiently jiggled the pan. “You can tell. Watch the steam stop, then tap the pan all around. Even inside the tube. It’s got to be cool to the touch before you even think about jiggling it.” The cooling process took so long for my ADHD-brain that I usually went off to do something else by the time she turned out the pan. Sometimes I forgot about our baking until a fresh slice greeted me on the dessert plates at dinnertime.

Few things make me feel more seen, loved, and connected to a common story than exchanging memories with friends raised by grandparents. It’s like the longings of childhood isolation is fulfilled in these connections—like viewing an acorn next to an oak sapling with its seed still attached to its taproot.