The Story behind GrandFamily World

Hello dear friend. Welcome Home.

It all started several years ago. You see, I was 55. He was mere hours old. That was the day we fell in love with each other.

I had plans for my fifties. My sixties. My seventies. Quiet ones. A winding-down career, a new relationship, the particular relief of finally having the house to myself. Then my grandson arrived, and none of that mattered anymore.

What I didn’t expect was how alone I would feel. Not just in the practical sense, though that was real enough. The family law system. Child protection services. The paperwork that never seemed to match my situation. I mean the particular loneliness of carrying something this heavy and looking around to find that nobody near you has the first idea what it weighs.

I looked for people like me. I found fragments. Forums with American legal frameworks that didn’t translate. Facebook groups that at first seemed a relief and then quickly became something I had to protect myself from. A little information here and there, aimed at someone whose life looked nothing like mine.

So I helped start something in a church basement in my small town in British Columbia. Week after week, more people showed up. I found my people. Then the pandemic arrived and the basement closed, and I realised the need wasn’t local. It was everywhere.

That’s where GrandFamily World came from.

I’m Mary Scheidegger. I’ve spent thirty years building digital tools for people who need them. I published the book I needed and couldn’t find. I coined the term GrandRaiser, because grandparents raising grandchildren deserved a word that held their heads up. And I am still, right now, raising our grandson, who is almost nine and very interested in Lego and having opinions about everything.

I built this for you because I know what it costs to carry all of this without anyone in your corner who actually gets it. Not someone with a binder and a pamphlet. Someone who has sat in the same courtroom, cried in the same parking lot, and kept going anyway.

This is not a resource hub. It’s not an agency. It’s a community built by a GrandFamily, for GrandFamilies, accountable only to the people in it.

You don’t have to explain yourself here. You just have to show up.

What you are doing today is raising tomorrow.