The Joy of Being a Grandparent

“When the kids were little, it was tough when you left town on business,” my wife told me one evening after I returned from another overseas trip.

“Now, it’s tough when you come home.”

That sentence stayed with me for years.

At the time, I was traveling constantly. Like many fathers of my generation, I confused providing for my family with being present for them. I loved my children deeply. But love and presence are not always the same thing.

When my wife explained what she meant, the truth stung. While I was away, she and the kids found a rhythm of their own. Then I would return from another week overseas and disrupt it. I wasn’t often absent physically, but emotionally, I sometimes was. Looking back, I can see how easily ambition and responsibility can disguise themselves as devotion.

A Second Chance at Presence

Sometimes in life, though not always, we are given a second chance.

For me, grandparenting has become one of those chances.

I have come to believe that joy rarely arrives through achievement alone. More often, it appears quietly through presence. In being fully there while the ordinary moments of life are still unfolding around us.

When our first grandchildren arrived, my wife and I faced a choice. We could remain in the beautiful retirement we had imagined for ourselves in North Carolina, or we could move and become part of the daily lives of our growing family. In particular, we had the chance to help care for our first grandson during his earliest years.

This time, I wanted to choose presence.

So we moved.

What I did not fully understand then was that the joy of being a grandparent is not simply about loving your grandchildren. It is about rediscovering parts of yourself that adulthood, ambition, and time slowly taught you to set aside. Patience. Wonder. Attentiveness. The ability to sit on the floor and become completely absorbed in a child’s joy, as if nothing else in the world mattered.

And maybe, in some quiet way, it is also about grace. The gift of being allowed to show up differently than you did the first time around.

Now I watch my own children, and their spouses, navigate the same difficult balance between work, responsibility, and family life. I am not sure it has become any easier. In some ways, it may be harder than it was thirty years ago.

But there is deep joy in being able to help — not by trying to relive parenthood, but simply by being present for it in a different way.

Continue the Journey

Author's note: Many of the themes in this reflection—family, presence, grace, and the relationships that shape us—also appear in my novel, The Meaning of Joy.

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