A week in the life of this Grandmother . . .
Last week was very busy. Two weeks earlier I had embarked on the creation of a support group for grandparents, some of whom had relocated as I did, to help take care of their grandchildren. Monday night, as I worked on the plans for our first meeting, I received a text from my son alerting me that his wife was in labor three weeks early. By the time Thursday night’s meeting arrived, many texts and phone calls later, their beautiful new daughter had been born.
Friday I flew to southern California to meet her. Saturday, I was back home with several other grandparents, aunts, uncles, and parents to celebrate the baptism of my eight month old granddaughter, and to see her five-year old cousin Bean watching her with sparkling eyes and a brilliant smile.
My life is full, rich, and joyful. My heart is bursting. Becoming a grandmother has brought me an unexpected bounty of love and happiness.
But let me tell you about our Meetup.
When I first moved to Santa Cruz I was so busy with my new house and garden, and of course with my new granddaughter Bean, that it took me a year or so to realize that I had left most of my friends behind and had not yet met any new ones.
Loneliness followed, and boredom, and eventually depression. (I later learned that this is common for recent retirees, so I’ll come back to this topic in a future post).
When I finally brought up the subject to my daughter, she suggested Meetup. She showed me how to download the Meetup app and how to locate meetup groups that might be of interest to me. I joined a fiction writers meetup, a WordPress Users meetup, and a dining out meetup. Over the course of the next year, I made several new friends and together we branched out into walking and hiking meetups as well as going to the movies or out to dinner together.
But I had never come across a meetup group for grandparents.
I had met several grandparents lately who expressed feelings of isolation, if not outright loneliness. “I’d just like to talk to another grandmother,” one woman explained, “to get another perspective, you know? Just to talk things over with.”
A woman I met at the farmer’s market one day watched me put a bag of vegetables in my granddaughter’s car seat, then asked if I knew any other grandparents in the area. A grandfather in my exercise class, hearing two of us grandmothers exchange stories, said he that he thought it would be fun to talk to other grandfathers, especially those who could give him suggestions for activities to do with teenagers.
So, just out of curiosity one evening late at night I scrolled to www.meetup.com to see how difficult it would be to start a new group. It turned out to be quite easy. Just fill in the blanks – what the group is to be called, what are the goals, when will you meet the first time and where — and press Enter. I invited about ten people I knew to be grandparents and went to bed.
Within a week fifteen people had registered, and five had RSVP’d to our first meeting. Only a few of them were people I had invited; the rest had seen ads for our group on the Meetup web site.
Our first meeting was basically a meet and greet, but I ended the evening feeling like I had just made five new friends. We had so much in common, yet our families and our situations were quite diverse. 
I’m looking forward to our next meeting in three weeks, when we will talk about challenges in caring for grandchildren, and plan some future activities with and without our grandchildren. I can’t wait to show off the pictures of my newest granddaughter with my new friends. My guess is that they will have pictures to share, too.
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Do you have a Grandparents’ Meetup near you? If you attend one, or start one in your area, please share your experience by posting a comment on this page.
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