Lesley Stahl on Being A Grandparent: ‘You Discover A New Purpose, A New Calling’
By Movieguide® Staff
60 MINUTES correspondent Lesley Stahl is sharing her thoughts on being a grandparent in an essay for Guideposts.
Stahl wrote about the birth of her first grandchild and how it coincided with her own mother’s declining health.
“My mother and I had a complicated relationship,” she wrote. “No secret to anyone who knows us. But she was the best grandmother. The way she grandmothered had zero relationship to the way she had mothered me. Would the same be said of me?”
Stahl was a White House correspondent when her daughter was young, which meant she missed out on a lot of milestone moments. However, she said she was “determined not to miss a thing. We get to reboot with our grandkids, fix the mistakes or make amends for what we did as parents.”
She also talked about the difficulties of being a grandparent: “The first time Aaron [Stahl’s husband] and I babysat Jordan, giving the kids a night out, I don’t think I ever prayed so hard. We had all our instructions and were prepared to follow them to the letter. But Jordan wouldn’t take her bottle and bawled.”
Spending time with grandchildren can also be healing, Stahl claimed. After her husband was diagnosed with Parkinsons, he was out on dopamine pills. After the birth of their grandchild, he stopped taking the pills – and his symptoms didn’t return.
“None of the specialists could give us a straight answer,” Stahl shared. “My own theory was that becoming a grandfather was healing.”
In addition to her husband’s health issues, grandchildren also healed Stahl’s mother.
“When Jordan was five weeks old, Taylor and Andrew [her daughter and son-in-law] brought her East to introduce Dolly to her great granddaughter,” Stahl wrote.
“It was the answer to all our prayers. I thought maybe my mother was holding on, willing herself not to go until she met Jordan,” she continued. “Perhaps that was it. A few days later she died, very peacefully, her death colliding in me with the freshness of Jordan’s new life, the wonder of it.”
Stahl is now grandmother to two children, Jordan and Chloe, who arrived two years after her sister.
“Aaron, who was raised a Methodist, always says there’s a plan to the universe, there’s a higher order,” Stahl wrote. “Grandchildren come along and they send you in a direction you never dreamed you were going. You discover a new purpose, a new calling.”
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