How Becoming a Grandpa Reshaped My View of Masculinity

I once thought that being with my wife in the delivery room to witness the birth of our first child was the most life-changing experience I would ever have.

But I was wrong about that.

After our kids grew into adulthood, each marrying their high school sweetheart, everything changed. One Valentine’s Day, our daughter handed us a card, and inside was a sonogram of our first grandchild. I wept for joy and hugged everyone and everything — including the cat. Nine months later I walked into the hospital room and held my grandson, Henry, for the first time. As a writer, I’m supposedly good with words, but the tsunami of emotion that hit me was almost beyond description.

It was the beginning of a journey to understand what being a grandpa is all about.

The only thing I could find on the web about grandfatherhood was the movie Bad Grandpa. So I started a blog called Good Grandpa and began writing stories. Then other grandpas started reaching out to share their stories — and that’s when things got interesting. I ended up writing a book, also called Good Grandpa, that gathered the wisdom of grandpas from all walks of life.

This learning quest was not linear. There were turns in the road that deepened my understanding of grandfatherhood and what it means to be a man.

The author holds his newborn first grandchild, Henry.

Courtesy Ted Page

One of my first conclusions was that the reason why the bad-grandpa cliché persists is because grandfathers, traditionally, have been less involved than grandmothers — less involved in taking care of grandkids and less vocal about being grandpas in the first place. Lesley Stahl (of 60 Minutes fame) published Becoming Grandma in 2016, yet not a single male celebrity has stepped up to write about becoming a grandpa. By my count, there are at least 10 blogs published by grandmas and nearly none by grandpas. Why is this? I think many men see their masculinity as somehow lessened by advancing age and grandfatherhood itself.

Allow me to paint a picture of masculine energy based on my personal experience. I started out in advertising in the 1980s. I had a view of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building from my office window.

To my mind, however, this was just a launching pad. Fueled by ambition and drive, I started my own agency and named it Captains of Industry. Within a few years we were making viral marketing campaigns starring the likes of John Cleese and Florence Henderson. While my agency was founded by men, half our team was composed of great women who shared our ethos.

Flash forward (years of career success, the beautiful blur of raising our kids), and suddenly I was a grandpa. I didn’t know how to reconcile this new life stage with the man I’d always been: the captain running the ship.