PSA- Yes, you are a jerk if you don't invite your older parents to Christmas

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm curious. We have all read about the significant number of GenX kids cutting off their parents. I read an NYT article recently and to me, the person who wrote that book is conducting malpractice. In the case of actual abuse, I am sorry, but it seems like the younger generations never learned grace or to accept that their parents were humans and imperfect. I still have young ones, and love spending time with my parents--yes, even my conservative, annoying mother, so haven't had kids go no-contact yet. But the way things are going, it will probably happen some day. It's so sad to me.

I’ll bite.

My mother became pregnant at 19 during a summer internship in California. She never told the guy. She didn’t want to have to be bothered with the logistics of custody and the other parent on the other side of the country. My grandparents died when I was a child, so I can’t ask them, but considering we lived with them on and off, I assume they supported this.

My mother gets all the glory for how hard things were for her being a “single mother”. She worked nights, so I was left home alone and was often hungry and scared. When she would lose her jobs, we’d flee in the night to my grandparents, where my mother would use their babysitting as an opportunity to go out and do drugs and guys. She was arrested for shoplifting when I was around 10. I was shuttled between random people’s houses that summer while my mom was in jail. I was exposed to things and situations that no child should be exposed to.

As an adult, I can’t help but wonder if my life would have been more stable had I lived with my father. It may have been worse, but there’s an equal chance it could have been better. Either way, there’s a 50/50 chance my mother would have had more money from child support, and a 50/50 chance I would have had somewhere stable to live when my mom was in jail. Or during summer breaks. Or holiday breaks. Or just routinely. I’ll never know.

My mother is in her 70s now and has always been stuck at 19. She’s immature and rude and just ornery. She makes my life a living hell.

And no, her decisions when I was a minor child do not deserve grace. And she wasn’t just imperfect, she was willingly imperfect and selfish, to my detriment.

Thank you for sharing your story. This is a good example of how nuanced people's situations are and how the people how think there are hard and fast rules about how you interact with your parents as an adult, often don't understand the broad range of experiences people have and how different families can be. Not every family is the Cleavers with two parents doing their best and mostly wanting to give their kids a good life. In fact that's a minority of families.

I think what a lot of people don't understand is that for many of us, our parents had a couple decades to create holiday traditions and experiences that were positive and meaningful, and had they done that, maybe we too would feel an obligation to incorporate our parents into our holidays as adults. But if your holidays growing up were largely negative and stressful, if your parents failed to provide something good and meaningful for you as children, then if you can find a way to create that as an adult, the last thing you want to do is risk it by bringing in these people who have a long history of making holidays miserable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the advice is better written as:

Be someone your family is EXCITED to spend the holidays with.

Not really because OP is addressing people who don’t want to host but whose parents would like to come.

I think it's the same issue.

If you are someone that others are happy to spend time with, it will happen. If you cling to ideas of how things are "supposed to be" over everyone else's feelings (most especially the feelings of those you love dearly) then things will be difficult and conflict will arise.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A few hours? More like they spend 4 days and nights as our houseguests, making things difficult and generally making me dread Christmas. Not this year, sorry. They have 3 other grown children they can spread the love this year and visit one of them for once.

You’re an adult and can say not to hosting for four days. It doesn’t mean you can’t offer up your home for Christmas brunch. Use your words and be firm about what the invite entails.

This assumes people live close enough to just come for brunch. Or can afford to stay in a hotel and will entertain themselves while you do things you'd prefer to do with just your nuclear family, or do traditions they cannot or will not engage in.

Both my parents and ILs live too far away to just come over for one meal. If they come, we are 100% hosting them for a minimum of 3 days -- every meal, entertainment, accommodations in our house, etc. It means my kids having to be on "grandparent behavior" the entire time.

We always travel for Thanksgiving specifically because we want to spend Christmas at home, just us. I think a lot of families make this compromise.

When I was a kid we always spent Christmas at home. I can only think of two Christmases when my grandmother was present and it was just her (her husband died long before I was born) and she only spent Christmas Eve with us and then went to my aunt's house where she spend Christmas morning -- no one just hosted her for the entire holiday.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A few hours? More like they spend 4 days and nights as our houseguests, making things difficult and generally making me dread Christmas. Not this year, sorry. They have 3 other grown children they can spread the love this year and visit one of them for once.

You’re an adult and can say not to hosting for four days. It doesn’t mean you can’t offer up your home for Christmas brunch. Use your words and be firm about what the invite entails.

Sure. When my parents or my husbands parents say they want to fly in for Christmas from the west coast I’ll say “we would love to have you for Christmas brunch! You’re welcome anytime after 9am and by mid afternoon we will be heading to see Moana 2 so we’ll have to wrap things up by then”. And if they ask if they can stay the night or if they need to fly in and fly out on the same day, or find accommodations for the night and fly out the next day, I’ll say “the invitation is for Christmas brunch.”

+1 lol. OP is out of touch. Many extended
families are spread out these days. Jobs left some urban areas in the Midwest in the 70s through the 90s and never returned. Kids went to college, got a job in a big city, and didn’t settle down in the same areas as their parents. “Invite them over for a few hours on Christmas Day!!!” Doesn’t work for a lot of us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the advice is better written as:

Be someone your family is EXCITED to spend the holidays with.

Not really because OP is addressing people who don’t want to host but whose parents would like to come.

I think it's the same issue.

If you are someone that others are happy to spend time with, it will happen. If you cling to ideas of how things are "supposed to be" over everyone else's feelings (most especially the feelings of those you love dearly) then things will be difficult and conflict will arise.

I also think this is yet another issue where social media and comparison has led a lot of grandparents to have expectations that don't make sense for their specific family. They see people posting photos of these multigenerational Christmases on Facebook and think that's how it's supposed to be and if they don't have that, they've failed somehow. But (1) those photos often conceal the fact that not everyone is happy with that situation, and (2) families are different!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the advice is better written as:

Be someone your family is EXCITED to spend the holidays with.

Not really because OP is addressing people who don’t want to host but whose parents would like to come.

I think it's the same issue.

If you are someone that others are happy to spend time with, it will happen. If you cling to ideas of how things are "supposed to be" over everyone else's feelings (most especially the feelings of those you love dearly) then things will be difficult and conflict will arise.

I also think this is yet another issue where social media and comparison has led a lot of grandparents to have expectations that don't make sense for their specific family. They see people posting photos of these multigenerational Christmases on Facebook and think that's how it's supposed to be and if they don't have that, they've failed somehow. But (1) those photos often conceal the fact that not everyone is happy with that situation, and (2) families are different!

(3) It’s likely they actually HAVE failed somehow, and choose to be in denial about that fact, because it’s easier to blame others than be introspective.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm curious. We have all read about the significant number of GenX kids cutting off their parents. I read an NYT article recently and to me, the person who wrote that book is conducting malpractice. In the case of actual abuse, I am sorry, but it seems like the younger generations never learned grace or to accept that their parents were humans and imperfect. I still have young ones, and love spending time with my parents--yes, even my conservative, annoying mother, so haven't had kids go no-contact yet. But the way things are going, it will probably happen some day. It's so sad to me.

I’ll bite.

My mother became pregnant at 19 during a summer internship in California. She never told the guy. She didn’t want to have to be bothered with the logistics of custody and the other parent on the other side of the country. My grandparents died when I was a child, so I can’t ask them, but considering we lived with them on and off, I assume they supported this.

My mother gets all the glory for how hard things were for her being a “single mother”. She worked nights, so I was left home alone and was often hungry and scared. When she would lose her jobs, we’d flee in the night to my grandparents, where my mother would use their babysitting as an opportunity to go out and do drugs and guys. She was arrested for shoplifting when I was around 10. I was shuttled between random people’s houses that summer while my mom was in jail. I was exposed to things and situations that no child should be exposed to.

As an adult, I can’t help but wonder if my life would have been more stable had I lived with my father. It may have been worse, but there’s an equal chance it could have been better. Either way, there’s a 50/50 chance my mother would have had more money from child support, and a 50/50 chance I would have had somewhere stable to live when my mom was in jail. Or during summer breaks. Or holiday breaks. Or just routinely. I’ll never know.

My mother is in her 70s now and has always been stuck at 19. She’s immature and rude and just ornery. She makes my life a living hell.

And no, her decisions when I was a minor child do not deserve grace. And she wasn’t just imperfect, she was willingly imperfect and selfish, to my detriment.

Thank you for sharing your story. This is a good example of how nuanced people's situations are and how the people how think there are hard and fast rules about how you interact with your parents as an adult, often don't understand the broad range of experiences people have and how different families can be. Not every family is the Cleavers with two parents doing their best and mostly wanting to give their kids a good life. In fact that's a minority of families.

I think what a lot of people don't understand is that for many of us, our parents had a couple decades to create holiday traditions and experiences that were positive and meaningful, and had they done that, maybe we too would feel an obligation to incorporate our parents into our holidays as adults. But if your holidays growing up were largely negative and stressful, if your parents failed to provide something good and meaningful for you as children, then if you can find a way to create that as an adult, the last thing you want to do is risk it by bringing in these people who have a long history of making holidays miserable.

Okay, the PP's story is a seriously legit reason for cutting ties with your mother. You're just sore that your Christmas dinners weren't nice enough?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A few hours? More like they spend 4 days and nights as our houseguests, making things difficult and generally making me dread Christmas. Not this year, sorry. They have 3 other grown children they can spread the love this year and visit one of them for once.

You’re an adult and can say not to hosting for four days. It doesn’t mean you can’t offer up your home for Christmas brunch. Use your words and be firm about what the invite entails.

Sure. When my parents or my husbands parents say they want to fly in for Christmas from the west coast I’ll say “we would love to have you for Christmas brunch! You’re welcome anytime after 9am and by mid afternoon we will be heading to see Moana 2 so we’ll have to wrap things up by then”. And if they ask if they can stay the night or if they need to fly in and fly out on the same day, or find accommodations for the night and fly out the next day, I’ll say “the invitation is for Christmas brunch.”

+1 lol. OP is out of touch. Many extended
families are spread out these days. Jobs left some urban areas in the Midwest in the 70s through the 90s and never returned. Kids went to college, got a job in a big city, and didn’t settle down in the same areas as their parents. “Invite them over for a few hours on Christmas Day!!!” Doesn’t work for a lot of us.

+1, both DH and I are from rural small towns and staying in those towns was never really an option unless we wanted to be a school teacher or a waiter (and even with those jobs, there's no guarantee we would have gotten jobs there). We live in the DC area largely for work. For a time we always went back to one of our parents' houses for Christmas, but now with our own kids and the high cost of travel and the stress of traveling this time of year, we don't. And while I love my parents, this is really NOT the time of year I want to host them -- we have so many obligations this time of year with school stuff and work stuff and by the time Christmas rolls around we just want to relax and do nothing. I don't want to have to plan meals with their needs in mind or work our schedule around them or come up with ways to entertain my dad who gets antsy if there aren't events planned and will take it out on people by domineering the TV to watch car racing 24/7 if he is bored.

Happy to host them at other times. Happy to visit them at other times. This is just the reality of Christmas for us -- it is not a good time to get together. It more expensive and less enjoyable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm curious. We have all read about the significant number of GenX kids cutting off their parents. I read an NYT article recently and to me, the person who wrote that book is conducting malpractice. In the case of actual abuse, I am sorry, but it seems like the younger generations never learned grace or to accept that their parents were humans and imperfect. I still have young ones, and love spending time with my parents--yes, even my conservative, annoying mother, so haven't had kids go no-contact yet. But the way things are going, it will probably happen some day. It's so sad to me.

I’ll bite.

My mother became pregnant at 19 during a summer internship in California. She never told the guy. She didn’t want to have to be bothered with the logistics of custody and the other parent on the other side of the country. My grandparents died when I was a child, so I can’t ask them, but considering we lived with them on and off, I assume they supported this.

My mother gets all the glory for how hard things were for her being a “single mother”. She worked nights, so I was left home alone and was often hungry and scared. When she would lose her jobs, we’d flee in the night to my grandparents, where my mother would use their babysitting as an opportunity to go out and do drugs and guys. She was arrested for shoplifting when I was around 10. I was shuttled between random people’s houses that summer while my mom was in jail. I was exposed to things and situations that no child should be exposed to.

As an adult, I can’t help but wonder if my life would have been more stable had I lived with my father. It may have been worse, but there’s an equal chance it could have been better. Either way, there’s a 50/50 chance my mother would have had more money from child support, and a 50/50 chance I would have had somewhere stable to live when my mom was in jail. Or during summer breaks. Or holiday breaks. Or just routinely. I’ll never know.

My mother is in her 70s now and has always been stuck at 19. She’s immature and rude and just ornery. She makes my life a living hell.

And no, her decisions when I was a minor child do not deserve grace. And she wasn’t just imperfect, she was willingly imperfect and selfish, to my detriment.

Thank you for sharing your story. This is a good example of how nuanced people's situations are and how the people how think there are hard and fast rules about how you interact with your parents as an adult, often don't understand the broad range of experiences people have and how different families can be. Not every family is the Cleavers with two parents doing their best and mostly wanting to give their kids a good life. In fact that's a minority of families.

I think what a lot of people don't understand is that for many of us, our parents had a couple decades to create holiday traditions and experiences that were positive and meaningful, and had they done that, maybe we too would feel an obligation to incorporate our parents into our holidays as adults. But if your holidays growing up were largely negative and stressful, if your parents failed to provide something good and meaningful for you as children, then if you can find a way to create that as an adult, the last thing you want to do is risk it by bringing in these people who have a long history of making holidays miserable.

Okay, the PP's story is a seriously legit reason for cutting ties with your mother. You're just sore that your Christmas dinners weren't nice enough?

That's not what I said. I don't feel the need to detail the issue with my family or our Christmases or why I don't feel any obligation to invite my parents to my own Christmas celebration because it's not up to you.

The point is that families are different and if someone doesn't want to spend Christmas with their parents as an adult, I personally assume that person has a good reason I am not privy to. I don't instantly assume they are jerks. Maybe they are, or maybe their parents are jerks, or maybe no one is a jerk but there's a lot of dysfunction and they don't want to expose their kids to it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the advice is better written as:

Be someone your family is EXCITED to spend the holidays with.

Not really because OP is addressing people who don’t want to host but whose parents would like to come.

I think it's the same issue.

If you are someone that others are happy to spend time with, it will happen. If you cling to ideas of how things are "supposed to be" over everyone else's feelings (most especially the feelings of those you love dearly) then things will be difficult and conflict will arise.

I also think this is yet another issue where social media and comparison has led a lot of grandparents to have expectations that don't make sense for their specific family. They see people posting photos of these multigenerational Christmases on Facebook and think that's how it's supposed to be and if they don't have that, they've failed somehow. But (1) those photos often conceal the fact that not everyone is happy with that situation, and (2) families are different!

(3) It’s likely they actually HAVE failed somehow, and choose to be in denial about that fact, because it’s easier to blame others than be introspective.

Also possible.

OP's whole argument rests on this idea that all parents deserve to be included in your holiday plans for the rest of their lives, and that all adult kids who don't invite their parents for Christmas are bad people with no valid reason for doing it. It doesn't take much effort to see the huge flaws in this argument.

[Anonymous]

So much imagined “abuse” reimagined these days, with the help of social media. It’s such an effective conversation ender !! (Hey Emily, why don’t you ever see your - - - Just stop right there, Caitlin. I cut off my ____ because s/he ABUSED ME!!!!! Caitlin: oh.)

And the possibilities are endless when absolutely everything now qualifies as “abuse” and its running buddy, “violence.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So much imagined “abuse” reimagined these days, with the help of social media. It’s such an effective conversation ender !! (Hey Emily, why don’t you ever see your - - - Just stop right there, Caitlin. I cut off my ____ because s/he ABUSED ME!!!!! Caitlin: oh.)

And the possibilities are endless when absolutely everything now qualifies as “abuse” and its running buddy, “violence.”

I can see why you wouldn’t be receptive to the belief that people experience covert abuse. Shame on you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So much imagined “abuse” reimagined these days, with the help of social media. It’s such an effective conversation ender !! (Hey Emily, why don’t you ever see your - - - Just stop right there, Caitlin. I cut off my ____ because s/he ABUSED ME!!!!! Caitlin: oh.)

And the possibilities are endless when absolutely everything now qualifies as “abuse” and its running buddy, “violence.”

If I beat my elderly parents with a belt, that would be elder abuse and I could be charged and go to jail.

If I didn’t like what my elderly parents had to say and washed their mouth out with soap while making them watch in the mirror, that would be elder abuse and I could be charged and go to jail.

So yes, I was abused. I was subjected to violence. And if you think beating children with a belt and choking them with soap is OK, eff right off and I hope your family abandons you, one by one.

[Anonymous]

Nobody has to host anybody. If people don't want to host their parents, it's either because they need down time (as PP mentioned, busy time at schools, work, and no time to cater to someone wanting to sit on your couch and expect food and entertainment) or they know from their experience that the time spent with parents is unpleasant. It doesn't have to be abuse, it's enough to have someone trying to domineer, someone picking fights, someone getting drunk, someone commenting negatively about you or the kids etc. The list is endless. There is a reason why past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior and at some point we learn. We had MIL visiting one year from abroad early in the marriage and she decided to cook her own foods without even as much as mentioning this to me. I woke up on Christmas Eve morning to the kitchen steamed, all pots and pans used and her having "taken over". Yep, was the last time she came to "visit".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A few hours? More like they spend 4 days and nights as our houseguests, making things difficult and generally making me dread Christmas. Not this year, sorry. They have 3 other grown children they can spread the love this year and visit one of them for once.

You’re an adult and can say not to hosting for four days. It doesn’t mean you can’t offer up your home for Christmas brunch. Use your words and be firm about what the invite entails.

This assumes people live close enough to just come for brunch. Or can afford to stay in a hotel and will entertain themselves while you do things you'd prefer to do with just your nuclear family, or do traditions they cannot or will not engage in.

Both my parents and ILs live too far away to just come over for one meal. If they come, we are 100% hosting them for a minimum of 3 days -- every meal, entertainment, accommodations in our house, etc. It means my kids having to be on "grandparent behavior" the entire time.

We always travel for Thanksgiving specifically because we want to spend Christmas at home, just us. I think a lot of families make this compromise.

When I was a kid we always spent Christmas at home. I can only think of two Christmases when my grandmother was present and it was just her (her husband died long before I was born) and she only spent Christmas Eve with us and then went to my aunt's house where she spend Christmas morning -- no one just hosted her for the entire holiday.

The problem with this scenario (both of them) is that it becomes normal to always be "just the nuclear family"--and one day you won't be part of that. Then you'll be spending Christmas along while your kids do what you grew up doing, and what they grew up with. That's fine if that's what you want, but many of us do not.