Reply to Dealing with family living thousands of miles away and feeling resentful of infrequent visits

Forum Index » Family Relationships

Reply to "Dealing with family living thousands of miles away and feeling resentful of infrequent visits"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Confused why you did not visit them more often. Hawaii is about ten to eleven hours flight, right? That's doable for one week, which would use half your vacation time for the year.[/quote]

Oh sure.  An EXPENSIVE 10-11 hour flight.  Sorry, but OP's parents sound kind of selfish.  They're done being parents and now it's back to ME ME ME.  Typical of the narcissists among the Boomer generation.[/quote]

Why should op expect her elderly parents to fly more than her?

Op I would try to negotiate more vacation time. Ten days really sucks.

It sounds like your house is not a pleasant place to be. My sibs complain the parents don't visit enough but when they do visit, they make them sleep on a pullout couch rather than giving them one of their snowflakes bedrooms. It's in the play room and the parents let the kids come in at six am and wake up the grandparents. Gee, and they wonder why they don't visit more[/quote]

OP here.  More vacation time is not an option.  Everyone at my office has the same vacation amount.

Why should I expect my elderly parents to fly more than me?  Maybe because they do multiple vacations per year to Europe.  They fly long distances just fine.  They just don't want to fly to visit me.

It's not that my house is not pleasant.  It's that they don't like the area here (they don't like big cities) and never want to go to museums or do anything fun.  They want to sit around, watch TV, and nap.  I always have a fun itinerary planned and they don't want to do any of it saying they are too exhausted from the flight.  They can always stay in a hotel if they prefer, I have no problems with that.

Overall, I am just very disappointed in how our relationship has turned out since they have moved.  For a few years they urged us to move to Hawaii, and they truly thought that we would when they decided to move there.  My husband was 100% against that.  [/quote]

It's quite telling that they expected you to move out there. They've chosen how they want to live and are not willing to compromise much. It's probably not very easy to find a job in Hawaii unless you want to work in the service sector, so the idea that they wanted you to move there for their own convenience is unfair. I'd love to move there too but, there are these really annoying things we all have to deal with called bills and unless they have terrific jobs lined up for you and your DH (your parents know better than anyone that Hawaii is not cheap a cheap state, remember almost everything has to be imported), you won't be moving there anytime soon.

As others on this board have said, you need to come to terms with who they are. Maybe they planned the move to Hawaii for years and it was their big dream before you were even born. At the end of the day, they're your parents but they're also individual people with their own hopes and dreams and they're going to do what they want to do. I wish my parents would leave my awful boring hometown that is a real pain in the rear for me to travel to but it's what they want and I know they don't like to make big changes in their lives. I'll visit them when I can and if they want to see their grandchildren, they'll visit us when they can. As much as you want your baby to know his/her grandparents, it's not necessarily your job to cultivate that without any assistance and effort from the grandparents. Planes fly east as well as west. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics