Word: duggan
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...Ollie Duggan still has a vision of what grandparenting is supposed to be. In that fantasy, her two grandchildren, Joey and Lorrie, arrive to spend the night at her home in the mountains of Clyde, N.C. She cooks their favorite foods and spoils them with gifts. When they act up, she looks away, knowing her job is to dote, not to discipline. When the children leave, she returns to a life of leisure and travel, earned after raising four children of her own. The dream, says Duggan, 68, is of "a time in my life when I can come...
...only a dream. In 1983 Duggan's son Terry and his wife split up. First they deposited their nine-month-old daughter with his mother; within the year, they also dropped off their three-year-old son. The moves were only temporary -- at first. But the children's mother announced that she wanted to live her own life. In 1986 Terry died of a heart attack. With that, Duggan resolved to raise her grandchildren as if they were her own offspring. Now her travel plans have been supplanted by worries about how she will save enough money for her grandson...
...Duggan's wistful question is echoed by thousands of American grandparents who are finding the luster of their golden years dulled by responsibilities they never anticipated. Yes, they love their grandkids. And yes, they stand ready to serve as the family National Guard when a crisis arises. But a host of social ills -- from drug abuse and divorce to financial hardship and teenage pregnancy -- have turned many graying citizens into full- or part-time custodians of their grandchildren precisely when they were preparing to ease into retirement and a new independence. Unexpectedly robbed of the "grand" part of grandparenting, many...
Even grandparents who have saved for retirement are feeling the pinch. Ollie Duggan adopted her grandchildren so she could draw further on her dead husband's Social Security to defray the costs of child care. "I'm the mother, the grandmother, the granddaddy, the daddy. I'm it all," she says. Peggy Plante, 49, understands that frustration well. Plante quit her job in a Braintree, Mass., real estate office in 1988 to care for a sickly infant granddaughter born to two teenage, drug-abusing parents. "We give up everything," Plante says, "and nobody looks out after...
...Duggan, who said she volunteered to don the cow costume because "it hides my face," she may have milked the role for all it was worth. She likes kissing people, she said. And, she added, "I have gotten a lot of marriage offers...