The Times
June 9, 2009

Don’t exclude the grandparents
Almost half of grandparents lose contact with their grandchildren after family break-up — but when Susannah Hickling lost her French partner, she found that she needed her in-laws’ help more than ever
Susannah Hickling

I had known about Richard’s death for all of one minute when his mother started to scream repeatedly: “She’ll go back to England and we’ll never see the baby again!” Submerged in an ocean of grief with an icy numbness already creeping over me, I can honestly say that the thought of taking our 15-day-old son from our home in France back to London had not even entered my head.

In the weeks and months that followed, my mother and sister urged me to do just that. I did eventually go back — but not for another four years and not before I was satisfied that my son had built a meaningful relationship with his father’s family.
Even amid the most terrible sorrow, something told me that it was important for Joshua to get to know his paternal grandparents, his aunt and uncle and his half-brother and half-sister — people I barely knew myself, as a relative newcomer to their small village in Provence. They were a close family in an area where blood ties are so strong that they often exclude friendships. Joshua would also need to speak French, as Richard’s relatives spoke no English. And, anyway, having lost my soulmate, who was shot accidentally by a game hunter on a hillside near our home, when our child was barely two weeks old, I reasoned that I would be unhappy wherever I was.

The Grandparents’ Association estimates that more than a million children in Britain are not allowed to see their grandparents because of divorce or family tragedy. And a recent report published by pressure groups including the Family Matters Institute and Families Need Fathers pointed out that, while the law grants an automatic right to step-parents who have lived as part of a family for three years to apply to the family courts for contact, the same right is not given to grandparents.

In contrast to the UK — where 42 per cent of grandparents lose contact with their grandchildren after a family break-up — grandparents’ rights are enshrined in French law. I never wanted it to come to that, not because I thought that Richard’s family would take me to court but because it seemed clear to me that a mother has to act in the best interests of her child.
But I’d be lying if I pretended that it was easy. There were big differences in our views on child-rearing and in our cultural attitudes. I was in a village that even locals from nearby towns derided as “backward”. The advice from friends, family and parenting books was in stark contrast to the accepted practices there. It is common for the wider family to help to bring up the children in Provence, and mine interfered as only a Mediterranean family could. I was often a lone dissenting voice against their collective belief system.

When they urged me to put sugar on Joshua’s dummy to stop him crying, I told them that it was bad for his teeth. “But he doesn’t have any,” said his grandmother. “They’re there in his gums,” I insisted politely. Later, I saw the tell-tale sugary sheen around his mouth and felt the stickiness on his dummy. “Who did this?” I asked. My mother-in-law and sister-in-law looked sheepish. “You don’t want him to have sugar on his dummy — you deal with it,” warned my sister-in-law when we took a bawling Joshua out in his buggy later. I will, I thought. He is, after all, my baby.

It infuriated me that I could be entrusted to manage a team of people and a six-figure budget in the job I gave up to move to Provence, yet apparently I was an incompetent mother. But I kept my usually big mouth shut. I was trying to build a relationship, not engage in active warfare. And I was well aware that my partner’s family, like me, were mad with grief.
They were adamant that the good old ways were the best. These dictated that, for example, you should never let a baby take a nap under a fig or walnut tree (I had both) for fear of toxins in the leaves, but that you should feed him lambs’ brains.

I realised that being undermined was par for the course, but some of their ideas were terrifying. Richard’s mother and sister told me that if Joshua misbehaved he would be punished with the martinet, a whip with leather lashes. This was kept for disciplining their dogs but Joshua’s halfsister had once been hit with it as a little girl. Only once, mind you, they said. “I think that’s barbaric,” I said.

At one stage I was too frightened to leave Joshua alone at his grandparents’ home for more than a few minutes in case he was naughty — yet soon I saw that, far from being strict disciplinarians, the family doted on my son and spoilt him rotten. It helped that he was the spitting image of Richard, right down to the fair hair and the little triangles under his eyes when he was tired. Richard’s mother and sister even enjoyed changing his messy nappies.
Although they wanted to look after him all the time, it always had to be at their house, the hub of the family. A few months after Richard’s death I decided to return to the local drama group — but it started at 9pm, and getting both of us fed and out of the house with all the baby paraphernalia took two hours. By the time I had dropped Joshua at his grandparents’ home, I was too exhausted to be theatrical in French. And after I had collected him at 11pm and driven him, tired and cranky, back home, I was a shell. After two sessions I gave up drama and the hope of a life outside my home and my partner’s family. This is my life now, I told myself grimly. But it won’t always be like this.

Gradually things got better. As time passed, Richard’s family and I came to understand each other. They realised that I could care for a baby despite all that had happened, and our total misery at Richard’s death mellowed into the dull pain of missing him. We all became a bit more sane and Joshua, now 5, grew into a sociable and well-balanced bilingual child.
By the time I moved back to London 18 months ago, I knew that I had done the right thing by staying so long. I had proved that it is possible to maintain a relationship with your partner’s family even when that partner is no longer there. That proof is in the birthday card that his sister sent me a few months before I left: “To a wonderful sister-in-law who came into our family like a gift.” I felt guilty for all the mean things I’d thought over the years and was glad that I’d left them unsaid.

“Grandparents act as a link with the past,” says the sociologist Clifford Hill, research director of the Family Matters Institute. “They are very important to a child’s identity and stability. The absence of grandparents is a major reason why so many children are unstable.”
The Family Matters Institute, Families Need Fathers and the Grandparents’ Association are campaigning for a simplification of the tortuous and costly legal process that grandparents in the UK have to endure to see estranged grandchildren. A letter-writing campaign is urging MPs to include the issue in their party manifestos.

My son adores his father’s family and particularly his grandmother, who has always had the time to play with him that I, as a lone working parent, have not. He goes to a Saturday school to keep up his French, we Skype the in-laws every Sunday and go to see them in Provence twice a year. They, in turn, make an annual pilgrimage to London. Thanks to their love for Joshua and my ability, for once, to see the bigger picture, we have created an unbreakable link to the father my son never knew.

For further information and support, grandparents can Grandparents Apart UK 0141 882 5658