Stress busting munchkins

Stress is a negative word. It evokes an image of a tired, harassed and anxious person, running against time, or sometimes even himself. Stress is unavoidable, but it can be managed and made to bend as per your will with little modification and manipulation. Not thinking about stressful issues helps. Dealing with the problem and tackling them with courage is the best solution. But, if you are lucky enough like me to be a grandparent, then you have achieved the impossible, you are officially in a stress-free heaven!

I am a freshly minted grandmother, albeit for the fourth time now! But every time the happiness is the same as it was for the first time. The anxious wait at the hospital though is stressful, but the joy of seeing the little screwed up face with eyes tight shut, makes stress run away a mile, galloping at a fast pace. And in my case, I have been beating stress intermittently for the last ten years, with the appearance of each of my grandchildren in my life. The only strife in my life now is when I see them bawl. I have barred their respective parents from disciplining them in our presence lest stress comes sneakily creeping in!

What is about the grandchildren that make us grandparents so happy and stress free? Is it because, now, we have the time and leisure to enjoy the babies and their growing up years? No but just to look at them makes one smile; and the fun fact that if they do pee-pee or poo-poo, we just hand them over to the parent concerned (or a nanny, as the case may be!) and take back a heavenly smelling baby to cuddle and hold again.

To be a grandparent is a gift from God for all the tribulations and trials that we have gone through as a parent. Just seeing your grandchild’s face light up on seeing us, makes it worth our while to raise our brats through all those harried years, for them to give us this joy. My firm belief is that God gives us our grandchildren to make up for the stress he made us go through in our children’s growing up years; and I am sure most grandparents reading this will readily agree with me on this. Is it perhaps his way of saying sorry? His way of rewarding us to have dealt with the stress of their infant days, when they actually didn’t know the trouble they were causing, but also those terrible teen years when they deliberately troubled us and made us regret giving them birth!

As a grandparent, the main responsibility of looking after the baby is not ours, which is a huge relief; we are there to supervise and help with the tasks when needed. Oh, the bliss!! If the baby starts crying, just look at the parent askance as if to say, hey, it’s your turn now! When we see our children doing all these tasks, one dimly remembers doing them too, but now it gives us a vicarious pleasure to see the harried parents multitasking, running from pillar to post, tending to their demanding infant. It’s our payback time now, for all the frazzled moments we went through when these whelps were growing up. If I could, I would just frame this picture for me to look at leisure and have a quiet laugh!

Grandchildren are the world’s best stress relievers. The day just flies with them around. We are never too busy to play with them unlike as parents, there was always loads of work to catch up on; here we have all the time in the world (and we make sure that we do) to be with them and become children ourselves. In fact, many times I have caught my baby granddaughter looking at me askance, as if to say, “Is she for real? What’s with her and her funny talk?”

They are a delight when they are growing up too, with their interminable curiosity and questions. “What do you do Ajju? I mean, my mom is an architect and my dad is an engineer, what are you, Ajju?” This question from my grandson had me foxed. Try explaining to an 8-year-old what a Journalist is!!Their innocent wisdom also knocks you off. “I don’t want to live for more than 20 years.”, the six-year olds (granddaughters) tell me, looking at me as if I am an ancient relic. Why? “Because twenty is so old and you die. I don’t want to die! ‘Imagine, beating this logic.

They keep us young and happy, away from the troubles that are besieging the world at large, which impact us too in some way or the other. I am eternally grateful to my grandchildren for giving me immense joy and I wish to be always surrounded by these little stress busters; till the day I finally bid adieu.