Reply to divorce from an adult child view

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]See, it's not just visiting one *home*.  It's visiting one family (mom and her boyfriend), with everything they want to do and everywhere they want to go.  And then visiting another (dad and his wife) with their activities and everything.  Both sides are trying to cram their stuff into half the time.  And there's way more people to plan around and compromise with-- stepsiblings and the boomers' own parents and everything.

Eventually I had to put my foot down and refuse to leave either house to visit new-partner extended family.  They come to us or we don't see them.  But because my mom is trying to play Matriarch of a Big Happy Family, she's constantly going on about how all "the cousins" (meaning my kids and her boyfriend's grandkids) get along so well.  But of course we're not a happy family, they don't get along, and I'm not willing to invest any time or effort in this charade.  But this is the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say "dragging my kids around"-- it's not just going to their houses, it's the whole holiday dealie.  And no matter what time of year it is, they're going to be trying to cram their stuff into half the time, and trying to make me spend time with various people that I don't care about and would literally never see again if they broke up.

Much of this has to do with your parents' and relatives' personalities though, rather than the fact they are divorced.[/quote]

Also, if my parents were married they would probably go to the same church as each other.  And they wouldn't have new spouses with extended families to pressure us to spend time with, and we wouldn't have to plan our schedules around so many people.  Even though my parents do like to bring their grandkids to church and show them off, and I think it's good and important that my kids spend time their *actual* cousins (rather than their pretend step-cousins), and that would be a manageable amount of stuff to do.  It gets out of hand when my parents are trying to have separate mirror-image families in their 50% of our visit.  So it really is because of the divorce.  Without the divorce, it would be manageable.[/quote]

I am picking up on a lot of resentment in your posts, you view your mother's relationship as a "charade" and your step siblings as "pretend" siblings rather than accepting your mother can live her life as she chooses, with whomever she loves, and you are able to place boundaries around areas that cross a line for you.  You are both adults.  Your mother is a human in her own right, fallible as they are.

You complain that visiting two homes is too hard, they pack it full with things they want to do, they want to live this false family life as if your family of origin didn't exist - but you also are pinning for some fictitious world where your parent's are happily married, live in the same house, attend the same church ...

I mean this as kindly as possible, but you might find relief in exploring this with a therapist.  And boundaries, boundaries, boundaries.[/quote]

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