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

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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]
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.

[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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