North Shore-raised journalist chronicles the newfound love of grandparenting
Diane Kilgore | May 3, 2016
Lesley Stahl, born in Lynn and raised in the sea-scaped town of Swampscott, is best known to some as a chronicler of stories on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Of the many vivid chapters Leslie has written in her world-traveling diary, the tale she now pens with curiosity, poignancy and societal resonance is that of becoming a grandmother.
In her new book, “Becoming Grandma: The Joys and Science of the New Grandparenting” Lesley shares her memory of transcendence as she cradled her daughter Taylor’s newborn in her arms. Stahl says baby girl Jordan made her think she was growing a new chamber in her heart. The seasoned White House correspondent under Presidents Carter, Reagan, and G.H.W. Bush, remembers “I nearly swooned staring at her like a lover.” She goes on to say, “I was at a time in my life when I assumed I had already had my best day, my tallest high. But now, I was overwhelmed with euphoria.”
As she describes the sensation of this miraculous milestone in her life, a time she had longed for, she wondered if she was feeling emotionally lost at sea because she was watching her daughter become a mother. She wondered, too, if there was a subliminal satisfaction of forwarding her DNA to the next generation. One of her friends spoke in awe of the streaming genetic continuity of life, knowing the primordial cells of baby Jordan, born to Stahl’s only child Taylor had been carried by Lesley in pregnancy. Stahl asked her circle of grandmother-ed friends if they understood her feelings of floating or why she pretended to hold her granddaughter in bed at night. In the book she explains she knew she sounded hyperbolic when she felt like she had a new lover and wanted to burst into song.
“Becoming Grandma” recounts how Lesley and her husband, Aaron, began to navigate all-consuming waves of joy in their uncharted bi-coastal swell of grandparenting. Together, as they welcomed the new life of their daughter’s daughter in Los Angeles, Stahl prepared to say her final farewells to her mother in Swampscott. Having lost her brother, Jeff, in 1999 to illness, Stahl faced her mother Dolly’s death alone. With a confluence of life’s ebb and flow, Stahl said “my gently buried emotions burst out like kettle steam.”
Dolly Stahl encouraged her daughter to pursue a life larger than the one Swampscott would have afforded. After graduating from Wheaton College, Lesley quickly transitioned from her responsibilities at Channel 5, originally WHDH, to a national profile. In 1972, hired by CBS as a gratuitous affirmative action employee, Lesley’s anchor chair in New York was marked “Female.” To make a name for herself, like the tough-talking men of industrial recognition, Stahl worked tirelessly as moderator of Face the Nation, and later as host of 48 Hours Investigates. Traveling frequently on assignment for days at a time, the investigator often missed out on her daughter’s daily routines. Opportunities to nurture her little girl were marginalized, her relationship with her mother drifted between courteous and contentious.
To understand her tidal wave of emotions, deploying the skills of one of our nation’s most recognized journalists, Lesley Stahl began questioning the mysterious feelings she was experiencing as her granddaughter’s life began and her mother’s life slipped away. She wondered if the physicality of her inner thoughts in someway reflected a subconscious desire to nurture the next generation and atone for the times she spent away from family, investing in her career.
My book “Becoming Grandma” is out today! The baby is born! There’s simply no end to the joys of grandparenting pic.twitter.com/sC2pShu2IE
The 74-year-old’s personal stories bookend the theories of Louann Brizendine M.D., a neuro-psychiatrist who explains the birth of a child triggers an almost architectural restructuring of the brain in women. Brizendine sites in “The Female Brain,” “love circuits” or neuro-pathways are flooded with the bonding hormone, oxytocin, altering women from within as they hold a child. Those pathways are the same activated in romantic love, and carnal love. The doctor says it’s no wonder our culture uses the same words for baby loving as those used in eroticism. When a grandmother holds a baby, her brain, like a new mom’s brain, can also be drenched in oxytocin. Brizendine’s book has been criticized by some women’s advocates but Stahl references it to explain what she calls “this new kind of love” that elicits a peaceful “grandmother stare of soft-eyed enchantment.”
“Becoming Grandma” is an illuminating update of our culture’s macro-cosmic evolution beyond a two-parent family through micro-cosmic review of the Stahl family’s history. It chronicles anecdotally the imperative women once felt to stay home and parent, then work and parent, now work and co-parent. By necessity, many families of today employ a non-traditional paradigm to nurture children, blending biological parents and step-parents, with biological grandparents and step-grandparents. In the book, Stahl explores the phenomenon of cross-cultural, cross-financial, cross-generational loving of children in a style reminiscent of Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall’s works. In one interesting study the book sites multigenerational benefits derived from proximal cohabitation of retirees and abandoned children. The retirees found, as Stahl had, babies and young children added vitality to their lives. Being exposed to such young innocence was actually a fountain of youth.
With cyclical nuclear biological parenting and grandparenting from birth through death becoming less of a realistic expectation and more an issue of pragmatism, the dynamics of generational roles are undergoing labor pains. As a child Stahl was encouraged to sail away from home. As a young mom Lesley had been medicated out of experiencing birth. At the time breast feeding, now considered to be de-rigueur, was frowned upon as an impediment to career trajectory. Consequentially, women who set a linear course for professional success are now, like Stahl, experiencing nuances of parenting for the first time while simultaneously reaping the benefits of their hard work. Infatuated and consumed with love for her first granddaughter Jordan and second granddaughter Chloe, Stahl amends her schedule to share time with her little loves but isn’t planning to relinquish her hard-earned success.
Stahl is typical of the culturally diverse Baby Boomer generation. Grandparents swept off their feet by love, aren’t staying home to rock babies but continue to rock careers leaving Gen X’ers to find non-familial child care options, which tends to limit their financial stability and growth. To supplement the young family, when able, Baby Boomers are symbiotically relied on to help with medical bills, education and an occasional vacation.
Because of Lesley’s willingness to be intimate, the book is touching. Because of Stalh’s thumb sketch analysis of our cultural’s reconfigurations, the book is thought-provoking. Readers of “Becoming Grandma: The Joys and Science of the New Grandparenting” will be blanketed in wonder by the storyteller’s unique observations and the monumentally profound nature of the universality of love’s gifts.
