Wanting more from difficult parents
DEAR CAROLYN: Since our second child was born, my husband has grown more resentful of my parents. They are very particular people, also very loving, and they want a lot of time with us — they bought a town house in our city — but don’t ever offer to babysit. I have to ask, and it always feels like a significant ask. I make sure it is balanced out by time with all of us together and on their terms.
Lawn care, mundane errands and my mom’s crazy sleep schedule are perennial excuses why they aren’t available, so there’s a false scarcity of time I have to navigate. Also, if a diaper accidentally gets left out or if the kids make a mess at mealtime, there’s a 50-50 chance it will put a damper on the whole day.
This past weekend, I put the kids down for a nap at my parents’ house because they were so tired. I forgot to make the bed my daughter slept in, and my parents were so upset about it they ignored my calls for 24 hours, when my mom called to say how insulted they were and they were leaving town early.
I apologized, and they decided to stay “to work on the lawn,” but they never took us up on getting together that visit. My husband loves them, and they love him, but the drama and unreliability are a problem.
They just invited us to their 40th anniversary dinner, no kids, and I’m resentful that I need to pay for a babysitter to hang out with them, when babysitting from them is so scant. They want us to go on vacations with them. And the thing is, aside from this kind of petty drama, we all get along. But seeing them takes a lot out of me — navigating all the scheduling and emotional demands from them and also talking my husband down when he gets frustrated about it. I feel like I can’t voice my own frustrations about it around him, or else I’ll feed his resentment.
— In the Middle DEAR IN THE MIDDLE: And you haven’t grown more resentful? That five-alarm unmade-bed freakout would have been the end of something for me.
Yours is really two questions, because baby-sitting and the freakout are different things. Easier one first, the baby-sitting:
Stop. Asking. They don’t want to, and don’t owe you. And never ever again dismiss someone’s use of their own time as “false scarcity” because you’re miffed they don’t spend it on you.
Grandparental baby-sitting is manna and I understand wanting it so badly. But that is not the same as being entitled to it. Such care is voluntary and optional, so the only right thing to do with this issue is drop it and hire your help. The last baby sitters you want are the ones who don’t want to do it.
Except maybe the same parents who have emotionally abused you? This is the more complicated Answer 2.
Maybe your folks are indeed loving and you’ve overemphasized their “very particular” — holy wow, chaotic, volatile, manipulative — side. But your scrambling to please everyone sure does look like the other side of the controlling-parent coin.
Even without that abuse-level severity, your husband has every right to be done, done, done with parental antics that turn you inside out. He’s still abiding them on your behalf. But see what I’m guessing he sees: you’re negotiating your own family’s schedule, ministering to your parents’ feelings, “talking” your husband “down” instead of giving him room to feel what he feels. And why?
Why is it your job to orchestrate how everyone else feels?
This is where your two questions have one answer: boundaries. Recognize what is their business, like whether they babysit or how they feel about something; recognize what is your business, like your schedule and how you feel about something; recognize when you’re getting sucked into other people’s whirlwinds, and when you’re creating your own.