The Grandmother Effect

A few years ago, I was invited to a retreat being held with a native Hawaiian shaman at the home of some friends.  I am interested in the manipulation of electrons and the use of focus and intention to forward our lives, and so I thought I could hardly pass on the opportunity for his perspective.  It was a very long drive to the far North Shore near Canada, and it being winter, the last couple of hours in and the first couple of hours out were spent in white-knuckled snowblindedness, so I felt the price was high; but I came away with lasting thoughts.

The shaman's story, which is about the power in his native culture, is about grandmothers.  One group member wanted to know if he did not mean to say, “grandmothers and grandfathers, or ancestors.”  “No,” he said; “I did not.  Women are more powerful than men because they create life, not just attend to it. And so they are more important.”

I had grandmothers, one on each side.  They were integral to my life until I left home, and they have been an overarching influence on my pathway ever since.  I have “asked” them for advice many times, much less help in awful situations, even with them gone now for thirty years. They taught me their different strengths, having kind of breathed them into me when I was little, me unaware of the teaching. Like my own grandchildren (I hope) I wanted to be with them both because of their unquestioning devotion, their complete dedication to my needs and wants, and their staunch defense of my growing consciousness. 

Grandmothers are big in evolutionary theory these days: computer modeling tells anthropologists that because of grandmothers, humans were more prolific, life became extended, and men changed their preferences to monogamy (Discovery, 9/8/2015). Of course we did. A love so strong we lived into feebleness in order to help.

"Older women of the tribe spent their days collecting foods for their grandchildren. Except for humans, all other primates and mammals collect their own food after weaning.

Hawkes, from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah, proposed that when grandmothers helped feed their grandchildren after weaning, their daughters could produce more children at shorter intervals.

They then used computer modelling to show that by allowing their daughters to have more children, those ancestral females who lived long enough to become grandmothers passed their longevity genes to more descendants, who had longer adult lifespans as a result.

The team’s computer simulations showed from a start point of just 1 per cent of women living to grandmother age within 24,000-60,000 years about 43 per cent of adult women are grandmothers — a figure consistent with today’s hunter-gatherer populations."

The theory posits that the reason for menopause is that we wanted to stop having babies ourselves so we could help our daughters have theirs - or gain an "evolutionary advantage" as the scientists say (Grandmother Hypothesis, Wikepedia). Of course we did. A love so strong it changed the way our bodies function. 

I wonder now if my own grandmothers consciously taught me what they knew, how much they thought about being examples, how much they trusted to intuition for their roles in my life. Or if they just acted out of their natural instinct to serve and protect me, and to give me everything they knew how to give.

Of course we did.