The Matriarch Meetings

Conclusions 

     

     Something that became apparent as these interviews were completed was that there were similarities in how people perceive and interact with their grandmothers. The Mollie Berglund and Charity Nighswonger interviews were especially similar, while the other three interviews (Caroline, Desmond, and Blake) stood apart. There were aspects of those three interviews that overlapped with Molly and Charity's stories, but it's undeniable that those two had a unique likeness, This leads to the question: why? 

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      Mollie and Charity have one unique thing in common; they both grew up in multi-generational households where their grandmothers filled the role of another parent. In Charity's case, she moved in with her grandparents after her parents divorced. There she worked, grew, and spent her free time all with her grandmother which created a tightly knit family unit. Charity emphasized the stabilizing role her grandmother was in her life. In a similar sense, Mollie grew up with her grandmother right next door, and later living in the same household. Mollie relied on her grandmother as one would a second guardian, for food, transportation, and occasionally financially. She considers her grandmother a part of her immediate family, once again creating a familial unit where the grandmother is intricately involved. Both Mollie and Charity recall spending heaps of time with their grandmothers. 

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      Desmond, Caroline, and Blake did not have this exact same experience. They all feel incredibly deep connections with their grandmothers, but their grandmothers were not a central part of their day to day immediate familial unit. They did not rely on their grandmothers as a source of stability, as a second parental figure, or as a main caregiver in the same way. A unique characteristic of all three of these interviewees' grandmothers is that they had other projects, creative outlets, or broader families to occupy their time. 

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     The prerogative of this project was not to draw any specific conclusions about grandmotherhood or how to build strong familial relationships. The goal was to create a database of diverse grandmother-grandchild relationships to show how those relationships vary, and how that challenges the assumptions one could make off the Grandmother Hypothesis. Having accomplished this, however, it leaves room to explore further into the relationship between womanhood and grandmotherhood. Can one fully commit to both? Is it fair to continue asking older women to care for children after they dedicated such a large portion of their lives to raising their own? Are we asking too much of older women while fully aware we may never pay back their effort, time, and affection?