I would imagine being a single grandparent is more enjoyable than being a single parent because grandparents aren’t supposed to have full-time, 24-7 child-care responsibilities.

Except sometimes they do.

My mother became a grandparent in her late 40s after over a decade of being a single parent trying to survive in a remote dilapidated farmhouse on a windy West Virginia hillside where there was no doorbell, and if there had been, no one ever would have rung it to offer lawn care services.

By that time, she had gotten used to repairing things herself using what few resources she had. When she had to bust a hole in her downstairs ceiling to remove a dead kitten that had somehow squeezed through an upstairs floorboard, she covered up the hole with posters that remained for a decade because it was impossible to find a contractor willing to tackle that minor repair job.

Mom welcomed her new role as a grandparent when my sister had her first child at 20, and she often kept my niece for entire weekends. Then, on a few occasions when my sister was in the hospital, she kept her for much longer – several weeks at a time. Naturally, she had to take time off work, which probably would not have been possible had my family not owned the business.

At the time, I was a workaholic news reporter in my early 20s, not exactly sure what one did with a toddler all day. From looking at all the photographs my mother took, I could tell they spent a lot of time playing outside with the animals. My sister and her husband had a border collie named Mackenzie that also ended up living at my mother’s house because the dog needed more room to run than she had at my sister’s house. Such is the way for grandparents as with parents – we end up taking care of our kids’ pets.

Shortly after I had my son at 27, we sold our family business, and mom had some free time to spend with us. She coached me through a long spell of what most people would have called postpartum depression, though I don’t think I would have described it that way. How can you not be depressed when you experience a complete loss of identity, coupled with chronic sleep deprivation and social isolation? And, oh yeah, a colicky baby.

Much of what I learned about parenting, I learned from my mother, but my experience with mothering was in many ways the opposite of hers. She had continued working while her three kids were babies, wishing she could stay home.

“If I didn’t work, we didn’t eat,” she said. It was true. Even with both my parents working when I was a child, we lived in a tiny log cabin. I remember once when my father brought home a new pair of shoes for each of us and a bottle of soda. What a celebration we had. The soda may as well have been champagne.

My mother had loved breastfeeding even in the late 70s when it was considered optional. By the time I had my children, breastfeeding was a moral obligation. I did it, but found it very confining since my kids didn’t take bottles. The first time we gave my son a bottle of formula, his stomach swelled up and he cried for four days. We ended up at the hospital for a stomach X-ray. Turned out he was severely constipated and had a dairy allergy. “Don’t give him any more formula,” the doctor said. We weren’t about to.

The fact that neither of my kids could tolerate formula and didn’t take bottles, coupled with the meager wage I would have earned as a news reporter, turned me into a stay-at-home mom and freelance writer for six years. Friends who were editors would give me story assignments as a favor so I could get out of the house for an hour here and there between nursing and changing diapers. My mom would watch my kids. I didn’t get much satisfaction from my brief outings. Although people told me how lucky I was to be able to stay home, I thought my friends whose kids were in daycare all day had it easier than me.

Then when I took a long-term substitute teaching job, my mom moved into our house so she could care for my 4-year-old daughter full-time. Like a stay-at-home mom, my mother took care of my daughter even when she herself was sick, or tried to anyway. I came home one day to find my mother sick in bed and my daughter playing downstairs by herself. On days like that, I found that what they said about women’s choices between a career and family were true. There were no good options.

My mother became a single parent after 10 years of marriage. She was 36. She never dated much when I was younger, but once remarked that it seemed married men were more eager to date her than the single ones. She wasn’t interested in being somebody’s “other” woman. She preferred to stay single. At least she didn’t have to cook or keep house for a man. She often said to me, “It’s better to want someone you don’t have than to have someone you don’t want.”

My own experience with marriage and parenting was that I apparently had unrealistic expectations. Older women told me I was lucky. Lucky my husband worked a steady job, loved his children, didn’t beat me. I don’t know what I thought it was supposed to be like, but I did not feel lucky to be relieved of a full-time job in exchange for full-time childcare and housework. Most of the time, I felt lonely and resentful.

I was, however, lucky that my mother was willing to take care of my children when I needed to go, and that she taught them things I never could, like how to identify plants, how to play chess, how to sew. As they got older, she kept them for entire weekends, doing the things that grandparents do, even though she never had a husband to help her out, give her a break, or even pay the bills or fix a broken appliance, like I did. My mother taught my children to not just care for animals in the perfunctory way that I did, scooping the litter box and vacuuming the floor robotically, but to understand animals, talk to them. They’ve nursed many a sick stray kitten and even a wounded buzzard back to health at my mother’s home, where free-range guinea pigs hide under a garden shed when they hear the lawnmower start.

As a teacher, I read a lot of essays by students who say their grandparents were there for them when their parents were not. It’s no secret that sometimes parents run away. There’s the proverbial deadbeat dad, but the dark secret of motherhood that really is no secret is that sometimes we want to run away too. Sometimes we do.

Now that my children are older, they spend more time glued to electronics than they do helping my mother take care of her animals. They want to hang out with their friends instead of spending the night with grandma. She understands. She says the stray cats, rabbits, and guinea pigs are good company for a single lady in a wind-blown farmhouse on a hillside in West Virginia.