Dear Amy: My wife and I are in our late 30s and work full time. We had twins last summer. Our twins are my parents’ first grandchildren.
My parents are doting, to put it mildly. They live about 400 miles away, but despite the distance we see them every six to eight weeks, usually for a long weekend.
My problem makes me sound heartless. My mom has been through a lot in the last year or so dealing with some seriously ill family members. She says that she needs to see her grandchildren for a mental escape.
During the past couple of months, she has tried to increase her visits to every three to four weeks.
We’ve tried to tell her that we love her but that when trying to balance our new family with work, errands, friends and other family members, a family visit from her every month is too much.
The message hasn’t gotten through. When we try to come up with dates that work, it is never soon enough for her, and she acts hurt.
Are we being selfish? How can we tell her plainly and nicely that she can’t come for a three-day visit at the drop of a dime and that we have to be able to arrive at mutually agreed-upon times to visit?
– Momma’s Boy
Dear Boy: If you suspect that your mother is depressed over recent events in her life, you should do everything possible to try to help her through this rough patch, but not at the expense of your own family.
Your children are fortunate to have a doting grandmother. But your mother needs to think not only of her own needs but of yours as well.
You might help your mother to share in your babies’ daily growth by hooking her up to the Internet so that you can send her a weekly photo and frequent e-mails detailing their progress. You are going to have to repeat to her that you’ll have to stick to a six-week visit schedule for the next few months. And if she acts hurt, you should ask her what hurts and why – and tell her that you love her and miss her but that this is how it is going to have to be for now.
…
Dear Amy: This is going to sound heartless but I don’t feel heartless.
You ran a letter in your column from “Missing My Daughter Too” – about a woman who was serving in the armed forces who left her young daughter parked with her mother during her deployment.
Am I supposed to feel sympathy for these people? A woman who really didn’t care enough for her child that she thought going to some foreign country was the thing to do? Where is the motherhood in this? There is no such thing as a single mother.
So spare us from your sob stories about mothers who have abandoned their daughters, because that’s exactly how I see it.
There is nothing so important that it should keep a mother away from her daughter.
– Mr. Old-fashioned
Dear Mr.: This does sound heartless. A grandmother who was taking care of a child because of her daughter’s overseas deployment wrote the letter in question. The letter also mentioned that the child had a father, by the way, who was deployed to another part of the world. (The parents were divorced.)
You don’t seem very concerned about this father’s choices in terms of his own military career’s impact on his daughter’s welfare.
This situation is not ideal for families, but our nation’s military is fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. The men and women who do this work overseas are making extreme sacrifices. Their families are making very serious sacrifices. The least the rest of us can do is to support all of them by watching their backs and pulling together as communities to help these families get by during a very trying time.
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