Reply to Equitable/reasonable division of care among siblings

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[quote=Anonymous]I’m going to approach this from another angle. OP, you only have so much emotional bandwidth. Is it really worth expending your bandwidth worrying about unhelpful sibling who isn’t thinking about any of this. If unhelpful sibling decides they want to change something when they don’t get invited to Christmas, then they can do so. But honestly, this just seems like such a waste of your headspace.

And I say this as part of a couple that is likely to be the “least helpful.” When my FIL was dealing with going downhill for three years, the brother who lived next door did the most. We live an hour away. My husband mostly just did financial stuff. In my case, my mom dropped dead out of nowhere so no care needed. My father is a pretty terrible human who is remarried so his new wife and her kids will primarily deal with the two of them. Even if she dies first, I doubt my sisters and I will do too much (other than perhaps keeping him from literally being homeless).

In our particular case, the ability to help is diminished by having our own special needs kid. We have been doing intense caregiving for 15 years already. We still get up in the middle of the night, change diapers, bathe, dress, etc. There is no way we can add physical care and logistics for one more person into what we do. If other family members get upset about this, we basically don’t have the bandwidth to care much. And interestingly enough, not one of those family members who could be upset with us have ever volunteered to change a diaper, babysit, etc for our special needs child. And I’m not mad at them. It just is what it is. We all make our own decisions about what we can do.[/quote]

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