Sts. Anne and Joachim are the patrons of grandparents. Which we are, and several people on New Gathering also are. Also St. Anne would be the patron of our Anne. So happy feast day!
My mom had a devotion to St. Anne, and chose her as her confirmation saint. She was 32 at the time, but since then lived to have 12 grandchildren. Now she would have 19 great grandchildren, though she didn't live to see any of them.
Mom visited the shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupre in Quebec, on the trip she took to Canada. She went with one of her sisters, who probably didn't visit the shrine, since at that time she was a bit agnostic and didn't have much use for Catholicism, and even less for the evangelical tradition she grew up in. Dad didn't like to travel, though he could be talked into it, if the destination was in easy driving distance and involved pretty scenery or and interesting historical site. Canada is not an easy driving distance from Nebraska, so he wasn't along on that trip.
Anyway, Mom happened to visit the shrine on Mother's Day, which is the same in Canada as it is here. They gave out little ribbons to the mothers in attendendance, which had printed on them, "Bonne fete Maman" in gold letters.
In the current issue of Commonweal, Mary Gordon has a piece remembering the trip her family took to St. Anne de Beaupre when she was a child. Interesting memories, but her dad certainly was a character. A good father, but would have driven me crazy as a husband.
Pilgrimage | Commonweal Magazine
BTW, the statue pictured is in the side chapel in our parish, St. Anne and the child Mary.
I will remember to say a prayer of thanks for my grandparents.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the good wishes, Katherine. As you know, I am a sceptic about much of the non- scripturally based stories from “Tradition”. I looked up Anne and Joachim years ago and found that the first mentions are from the Protoevangelium of James, in the mid- 2 nd century.
ReplyDeleteOf course Jesus had grandparents, but we don’t actually know anything about them. And nobody wrote about Joseph’s parents apparently.
However it’s nice to think that someone is looking out for us grandparents! Our youngest son and his family will be here in a week. The grandsons are growing up fast - now 8, 6, and 4. The other two grandsons are 11 and almost 9. The two granddaughters are almost 7 and 5. No more babies.
I don't take anything from the Proroevangelium seriously, I think it's mostly fan fiction! I like to think Mary and Joseph both had good parents. Given life expectancies back then it's possible some or all of them weren't alive when Jesus was born though.
DeleteI can't believe my oldest granddaughter is 17, and will be graduating high school next spring. The youngest is 11, so no babies here either. They grow up way too fast.
"Proroevangelium" should be Protoevangelium
DeleteNo grandchildren here. My friends with grandkids criticize the other set of grandparents for not helping with the kids or not helping out financially or buying them the wrong stuff and blah blah. Seems to be a lot of granny competition out there. Plus there's supposedly a "maternal advantage," son's kids never as close to his parents as daughter's kids, but seems to me that whichever grandparents live closest get the advantage.
ReplyDeleteI don’t feel competitive with my grandchildren’s maternal grandparents. I’m grateful that they are enough younger than I am, with more energy than I have, to participate more actively in the children’s lives than I can. Just as I wasn’t as anxious to become a mother as most women I know, finally having our first six years after we married, I wasn’t particularly anxious to become a grandmother. My sons and their wives didn’t get any pressure from us. Jean, proximity does make a difference. I love the grandchildren, but know that they won’t have a lot of memories of us. We live too far away from them and now can’t travel to see them as we used to do. Fortunately their other grandparents can travel. Our middle son’s in- laws see the kids all the time - every week or even more frequently, except when they are out of town. They live ten minutes away in San Jose. Our youngest son’s in- laws live in Europe but make long trips here, and our son and his family spend two months there every summer. My eldest son’s mother in law lives in Florida. She also makes long visits to them a few times a year in California, and they go to Florida every year. Their grandfather died some time ago. Those grandparents weren’t married. She lives in Florida and he lived in Jamaica. They all have energy to play with the kids, or interact in some way. We used to do that, but now we mostly watch them play.
DeleteJust my general observation about grandparents. It seems like it can be a fraught landscape, especially where blended families with ex-spouses and half-siblings are concerned, and when there is an imbalance if wealth or status. It was customary in my family to keep in-laws at a cordial distance.
DeleteMy mother-in-law was competitive granny when it came to her son's kids. She may have been with mine, too, but too polite to show it in my presence.
DeleteI speculate it's a symptom of general dissatisfaction with the partners the adult children end up with - something I've observed is *very* common. Although I don't think my mother-in-law was *too* unhappy with me in that regard.
I speculate it's a symptom of general dissatisfaction with the partners the adult children end up with - something I've observed is *very* common.”
DeleteYup.
My mother in law so disliked her four children’s choices of spouses that she predicted that all of us would be divorced within a few years. I know ( because she actually told me herself) that she wrote a letter to my husband’s brother after visiting him when he was stationed in Japan with the Navy, and his wife, a toddler and a newborn there, telling him that his wife was a terrible wife and that’s he should divorce her. She was the sister in law who died last September and was an incredibly nice person - everyone in the extended family loved her except her mother in law. I’m very sure she suggested the same thing to my husband. At one point she upset me so much that I could barely get through his nuclear family occasions for years afterwards. I avoided speaking to her - just minimal stuff like please pass the salt. I even asked my husband once if she had suggested divorce to him as she did his brother. He didn’t answer, so I know the answer was Yes. All of our marriages except one have passed the 50 year mark. I had long disliked being around my husband’s parents because they argued a lot, constantly belittling one another. They lived close to us and were good with the kids. But when the kids reached school age they also hated to visit their grandparents because of the arguments. My husband’s parents were so opposed to the youngest daughter’s marriage that they tried to stop it, and only provided minimal support after many angry hours of talking to her to try to get her to break the engagement.. His older sister was briefly married in her mid- 20s - a shotgun wedding. The marriage ended after she had a stillbirth and she never remarried. Mothers in law can be so toxic they can bring about what they want - the divorce of one of their children.
My brother's MIL was hard to take. She lived next door to my bro's family in Oklahoma and was constantly calling my mother with "updates" about the grandkids. These were thinly veiled brags about what all she had spent on or done for them. When my folks got caller ID, my dad would field calls from the other gramma and go into his deaf act. After 20 minutes of "who'd you say this was?" and "how's that?" "You bought that where?" she stopped calling for fear of getting Dad.
DeleteI always kinda liked her just for entertainment value. She was born in Arkansas and about as close to a real-life Blanche Dubois as you could get, complete with lace hankie and the vapors.
My mother in law was a lovely person. I miss her. She told me I was the daughter she never had. I didn't love her the same way I loved my own mother, but close.
DeleteWith my own grandkids, it's kinda true that my daughter-in-law's folks see them more often than we do. They actually live farther away. I get along fine with all of them. But I just have to accept that things are the way they are. None of us live in the same town like when we were growing up, so it's different than then.
My older son and daughter-in-law don't have children. We are very close to both of them. My son was so helpful when I was going through a bunch of doctor appointments and surgery this spring.
My MIL bullied the other DILs, but she left me alone mostly because she despaired if Raber's ever getting married. She was a strong personality, but I liked her. My FIL was raised Amish and didn't like me much. I was not a stay-at-home mother like the other girls and he said I had a "hostile womb" when it took 12 years for us to have a live child. Raised Amish, so lord knows what nutty stuff he thought about women. After my MIL died, he moved in with another son and wife. I let Raber deal with his Dad. I would send cookies for him and The Boy to take over there. Everyone was happy with that arrangement. As dementia set in, he forgot me entirely.
DeleteKatherine, you were very lucky with your m-i- l. I have a friend whose own mother was toxic, and an alcoholic. Her husband’s mother was shift to her. My friend really grieved when she died at age 100, and writes a tribute to her on FB every year on her birthday. She never mentions her own mother. I have tried very hard to stay out of my sons’ business, not to offer suggestions, and to praise their wives occasionally and effusively. It’s not hard because I do very much like all three spouses and think they are great wives and mothers. We have always lived far away from all of them, so maybe it’s easier to for me.
DeleteGift to her - not shift.
DeleteWhen I was a kid, my parents took us to St. Anne de Baupre on a Canadian vacation. I think there was a World's Fair in Montreal - they packed it all into the same trip.
ReplyDeleteGoing to a foreign city to visit the Catholic churches is a very my-parents kind of vacation. Today they're in their late 80s and still visit the Catholic churches wherever they travel.
Ask them to take Raber in their next vacay. We have to visit Bishop Baraga's tomb whenever we go to the UP. His cause has never gotten a lot of traction in Rome, but locally he's a saint by acclamation: the Snowshoe Saint. Local natives have lots of wonderful stories about him. Apparently a great guy. They had a huge statue of him at one time in L'Anse.
DeleteJean, I'm not familiar with Bishop Baraga, but now you've piqued by curiosity!
DeleteHere ya go: https://bishopbaraga.org/
DeleteFor Stanley - an interesting article at Politico
ReplyDeletehttps://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/27/california-sunlight-dimming-experiment-collapse-00476983
Thanks, Anne. Probably the world’s best climatologist is an American who occupies Oxford’s Halley Chair of Physics, Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert. He totally opposes geoengineering applied to climate. From my view, it would add another variable in the climate, adding more variation to a naturally chaotic system. Even if it worked, while we add more CO2 to the atmosphere, if the civilization supporting it collapsed, it would make things even more hellish for the survivors. I suspect billionaires like the idea because they imagine themselves as godlets controlling the climate, not just the mere human worldu. Best we make walkable cities, public transportation, cut back on meat consumption and eliminate billionaires either by taxing them until they are no longer billionaires or……some other way I won’t mention. BTW, I just got a lecture message from America Media about a post not being nice. I called the present government a bunch of first graders elected by first graders. I also, in refusing to apply the sacred-for-me name “Israel” to a political entity that’s performing genocide, used the term “Zionist Project” instead. Big no-no. So I got a smarmy little lecture about respecting thise I disagree with (like Attila, Hitler and Pol Pot, I suppose) and a radio button that said “acknowledge”. They’ll be having curling matches in hell before I press it. Farewell, America Media. You once were a rest stop for my weary soul. Oh, for the days of Reece, how I miss them.
DeleteI get regular admonitions from America. I finally told them that they seem to have a double- standard for comments. They let some amazing stuff stay, like several comments a couple of months ago that called Pope Francis a liar. Some regularly disparage anyone who isn’t a far right Catholic.
DeleteThe moderator and I have carried on quite a discussion for the last month or so because I finally started commenting to Dear Moderator before clicking the Acknowledge button. So far he or she has responded to my objections to their policy. We will see, but since every single one of my comments is held, I can’t edit, so there are always typos. . Some appear in a couple of days. But some of them just never show up and there is no explanation of whatever comment sin I had committed. I am getting tired of America too but will keep it until it’s time to renew. Then I probably will stay with commonweal, and so far, NCRonline still doesn’t have a paywall.
I have to say - Mary Gordon's father would test the limits of my empathy. I've known other men who wouldn't work - were capable of it, but for whatever reason, didn't. One was supported by his mother until she died; not sure how he's scraping by now. Another was on disability his entire adult life, but nobody knew what the disability was. Like Mary Gordon, his children (who are of my generation) were deeply ashamed of him.
ReplyDeleteSorry if I'm coming across like General Patton calling soldiers with PTSD cowards.