We were at the park last Saturday morning — just the two of us, same as most weekends. He was running ahead the way he always does, then doubling back to check I was still there. At some point he stopped, looked up at me with that completely unguarded face kids have, and asked: “Grandad, why are you always smiling when you see me?”
I laughed it off in the moment. Said something like “because you’re you, aren’t you?” and he seemed satisfied with that and went back to running.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about it on the walk home.
Why am I always smiling? It sounds like an easy question. A nice question, even. But the honest answer, when I finally sat with it properly, felt like something cracking open in my chest. Because the truth is: I’m smiling because loving him doesn’t cost me anything. There are no conditions attached. No performance required. No measuring whether I’m doing it right. I just show up — and that’s enough. And I’m sixty-three years old, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that before.
That’s not a happy realisation. Or at least, it’s not only a happy one.
The kind of love that always had strings
I spent thirty years in human resources. Thirty years watching people — including myself — tie their sense of worth to whether they were useful enough, impressive enough, needed enough. I was good at my job, and I liked it, but looking back I can see how much of my identity lived inside it. When the company offered me early retirement at sixty-three, I took the package. And then I fell apart a little, because I didn’t know who I was without someone needing something from me.
That pattern showed up at home too, if I’m honest. I spent a long time showing love by fixing things. Solving problems. Being the person with the answer. My wife Linda would try to tell me something difficult and I’d immediately go into fix-it mode — not because I didn’t care, but because I’d confused caring with being useful. It took us until our sixties to really reckon with that, and plenty of conversations we should have had years earlier.
With my sons it was the same. I gave advice when they needed presence. I pushed when I should have listened. I was there — I was always there — but I was there in a way that asked something back from them, even when I didn’t mean it to.
Love, for most of my life, came with the unspoken question: am I doing this right?
What grandchildren teach you that nobody else can
I’ve got four grandchildren now. Two from each of my sons, ranging from three to eleven. The ones who live nearby I see most weeks, and somewhere in those ordinary Saturday mornings I started to understand something I couldn’t have understood before.
When I’m with my grandson at the park, I’m not trying to prove anything. I’m not managing his impression of me. I’m not waiting to see if he approves. I follow his lead — he decides whether we’re looking at birds or kicking through leaves or just sitting on a bench eating the snacks I always forget to bring and have to find in my coat pocket. And whatever we do, it’s right. It’s always right.
I’ve written before about how being a grandfather is like being a parent with the volume turned down. The love is the same — if anything it hits harder, because you know more now. You know how fast it goes. You know what you missed when you were too busy and too tired and too wrapped up in your own importance. But the anxiety is gone. The performance is gone. You’re not worried about whether you’re shaping them correctly or making the right call. You’re just there.
And apparently that makes me smile.
What it revealed about everything that came before
Here’s the part that isn’t straightforward to write.
If loving my grandson feels simple — if this is what uncomplicated love feels like — then what does that say about every other love in my life? Not that those loves weren’t real. They were. They are. But they were complicated by expectation, by ego, by the constant quiet fear that I wasn’t measuring up or that I needed to be measuring up to something.
I started therapy in my early sixties. My wife suggested it and I wish, genuinely, that I’d done it thirty years earlier. One of the things that came up — and keeps coming up — is how much of my life I spent trying to earn my place in rooms I’d already been invited into. At work, at home, with friends. There was always a low hum of needing to justify being there.
That hum is almost completely gone when I’m with my grandson. He’s three years old. He doesn’t know what I used to do for a living. He doesn’t care whether I was good at it. He just knows I show up and I’m his, and that’s the whole deal.
When he asked me why I was smiling, the real answer — the one I didn’t say because how do you explain this to a three-year-old — is: because you’re the first relationship in my life where I’ve never once wondered if I was enough. And realising that at sixty-three, with everything behind me, is both a gift and a grief.
The lesson I’m still learning to carry forward
I’m not writing this to say my other relationships are worse, or that I haven’t been loved well. I have been. But there’s something in this simple thing — a child asking why you’re happy to see him — that holds up a mirror to the rest of your life.
I think most of us, if we’re honest, spend a lot of our loving lives keeping score. Not cruelly. Not deliberately. But we track whether we’re getting it right. We monitor whether we’re appreciated. We carry old stories about what love has to look like or feel like or require from us.
What my grandson is teaching me — what these Saturday mornings are quietly doing — is showing me what love looks like when you strip all of that away. Just two people. One of them very small. Both of them happy to be there.
I’m trying to let that teach me something about the rest of my life. About the way I show up for Linda, now that we’re finally home together all day and figuring out what that means. About the way I make time for the friends I still have. About the way I talk to my sons when they call.
Can you choose to love like a grandfather loves? Without the performance? Without needing anything back?
I think you can try. I think that trying is probably the whole point.
What a three-year-old’s question gave me
He won’t remember asking it. That’s the thing about being three — the moments that land hardest for the adults around you just dissolve for you by the time you get home.
But I’ll remember it. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time, probably. Because in the middle of an ordinary Saturday at the park, my grandson accidentally handed me one of the clearest things I’ve learned in sixty-three years: that the best love I’ve given has been the love that didn’t ask for anything in return. The love that was just about showing up.
I’m going to keep showing up.
And apparently, I’m going to keep smiling.
