Jeopardy: A Grandmother's Story

This article is written in the genre of creative nonfiction. It brings the reader into the dreaming, peridreaming, and waking mind of a grandmother whose normative expectations for her son's marriage and family disintegrate. It is neither an autoethnography nor a memoir. Its intents are (1) to unpack some of the consequences of an alternative childraising ideology on three generations and (2) to widen the scope of symbolic interactionist writing and theory by embodying the tenets of SI rather than talking about them.