An interior decorator was explaining the products she was using to update a family room and pointed to the wallpaper that now hung on two of the walls stating "don't worry, this is not your grandmother's wallpaper."
A chef known for taking everyday recipes and turning them into gourmet specialties brought his dish out of the oven exclaiming, "this is not your grandmother's pot roast."
A retailer in Washington stocking items for needlepoint designs contrasted what she does from the "old, stuffy hobby" because "this is not your grandmother's needlepoint."
Alright already, we get the idea. Anything classic, conventional or traditional gets associated with grandma. And to what end? Seemingly to associate the former with something outdated, antiquated, even…dowdy. The inference is that the one unlike your grandmother's is modern, stylish, and state-of-the-art. I can speak only about the grandmothers in my life, but to that end I do have something to say. Enough with putting down our grandmothers' stuff.
My grandparent's home was beautiful. The décor was bright and pretty, but most of all, impeccably cared for.
My husband's grandmother had a kitchen many of us would deem small, yet out of that kitchen came remarkable baking and delicious meals every week that kept everyone fed, no matter how many people came through the door.
Grandmothers are enterprising, creative and industrious women. This incessant need to separate what our grandmother's did with what we do today is not only disrespectful but also totally misguided.
Those grandmothers, whose tastes and talents we now so easily disparage, were the ones getting things done. They ran businesses. They raised children. They served on committees and drove fundraisers. They had the ambition and ideas to see things happen, and the wisdom to know how to get it done. And they're still at. Perhaps even harder than ever.
We have robot vacuums, self-cleaning this and that, and appliances we can operate through our smartphones, yet my home never looks as immaculate as my grandmother's did. We have large kitchens stocked with every cooking device at our disposable yet we're hard pressed to replicate what grandma did with four burners and an oven.
It's easy to look at past generations and dismiss what they said or did because we question its pertinence to the complexities of life today. There's little relevance, we might assume, to our lives. But how wrong that assumption would be. Our grandmothers and their grandmothers…and the grandfathers too, by the way…are people we would be well served to emulate; not negate.
Those that came before gave us lessons in building family, faith, and community; along with examples of honest living, unbounded hospitality, and genuine care for friends and neighbors. Certainly there are exceptions to this broad brushstroke, but the best in us is likely the legacy of what they passed on.
For a lot of grandmothers, hospitality was a normal state of affairs; not an event to be planned for. The door was always open and the coffee always on. Our grandparents took care of their neighbors because they knew their names and spent enough time with them to be aware of their needs. What we could learn!
We like to operate from the premise that anything we come up with today is that much better than anything from the past. We want to be on the right side of what is contemporary and not be handcuffed to what is deemed old-fashioned. But while we may not share tastes in décor, handiwork or food, (then again, we might) we are the poorer for it if we reject out of hand what is associated with our forerunners. There are things we would do well to reclaim and say, "yes, this is my grandmother's."
Those hands that hung that wallpaper, cooked that pot roast and created that needlepoint shaped the families and communities we now call our own. If you have someone in your life who fills the role of a grandmother, take her hands in yours and be grateful. That's my outlook.
