To Mary Lou Scott, 66, one of the hardest things about raising her granddaughter was the isolation.
The Hamilton grandmother was 55 when she and her husband won custody of the 9-year-old. Their daughter had a mental illness and wasn’t able to care for her child. They haven’t seen her for 10 years.
Scott, who spent her early 60s immersed in the tumult of the teen years, says the biggest challenge was not having any peers. “I didn’t fit in anywhere,” she says. She and her husband were much older than parents of her granddaughter’s classmates, and no longer had the spontaneity and freedom to keep up with their own empty-nester friends.
Scott did her best to adapt. On the Grade 7 field trip to Canada’s Wonderland, the kids talked her into going on Drop Zone, one of the scariest rides. “It’s what parents do,” she says, laughing. It was her first and last time.
Now her granddaughter is 20 and thriving in third-year university in Toronto, says Scott, a few minutes after proofreading one of her essays by email. She is proud – and relieved. There was a time she worried a lot about staying healthy and energetic.
“I remember saying to myself, `I have to have four more years to get my granddaughter on her feet’… What can you offer a child when you’re 70 and they’re 10? Who would you have to raise them?”
