Dear Thoughtful Pastor: I am a 53 year old childless single female with two younger siblings, both with children and spouses. I live about six hours from them. About a month ago, my mother mentioned coming to visit over the weekend. I told her that would be great.
Two weeks later, she told me she wanted to “hold off” on making plans to come down there. My sister, with her two kids, decided to visit my mother that week as it was their spring break.
I called her back about 10 days ago, repeating back what she had said to me and asking her if that was what she had said. She said yes, that she could not come if my sister would be there.
My response was something along the lines of, “so my sister’s visit trumps coming to see me.” We talked about it for several more minutes, no screaming and yelling, just conversation. I ended the call with telling her that I didn’t want her to come regardless of what time my sister came to visit her that week. I will add I was crying and deeply upset during this whole exchange.
I guess my question is: “Am I right to feel slighted or like the runner-up?” It was not my choice to not have children; I always wanted children, it’s just not how my life turned out. I wonder if she would have made more trips to see me (and vice versa) if there had been children added to the equation.
It is different, and at times, difficult, being the child without children.
As I’ve aged, I’ve figured out something: Parents/Grandparents actually might have lives of their own that don’t revolve around their offspring. Furthermore, our parents had parents who probably messed with their brains as much as our parents messed with ours. And finally, grandchildren do kind of trump all.
So, were you wrong to feel slighted? Of course not! You were slighted in the sense that a commitment to you changed because of a possibility with your sister and the grandchildren.
Let’s return to parent’s messing with our brains. Actually, let’s go back further to our own infancies, which none of us can remember but which our parents, with agonizing detail can. Infants are tyrants. To exhausted parents, it appears that everything revolves around the unspoken but demanding needs of the insatiable, adorable dictator that has landed in their home.
Nonetheless, no matter how adorable, most parents express relief when children become more independent, less demanding, no longer insistent that the world revolves around them.
In fact, that is one major element of maturity: figuring out that the world does NOT revolve around us. Some people never get there–they are called “narcissists” or “emotional black holes.” Jesus called those who insisted that their ways be followed by everyone else “whitewashed tombs.” They may look good on the outside, but behind the facades is rotting flesh.
I ask you to consider what it took me so long to figure out: parents also have lives. They are people, with their own hopes and dreams and things they want to do and also things they don’t want to do. And, yes indeed, they were affected and often scarred by their own upbringing and sibling rivalries and unmet needs just as every other single person is in some way or another.
Frankly, when they were in their late teens, I used to tell my now-grown children, “Just tell me now what you are going to tell your therapist about me when you are forty. Go ahead, I can take it.” Of course, I would have been devastated had they done so. I also assume they are all eventually headed to therapy to make sense of their crazy upbringing.
Back to the issue here. Your mother made a choice: she chose her grandchildren over you. And yes, that hurts. As in major hurt. But she gets to do that. She doesn’t have to dance to your tunes any more than she has to dance to your sister’s tunes. She decided what she wanted to do and it delayed something else she also wanted to do.
Now, you choose. You can feed that hurt until it becomes a source of bitterness that will rot your soul and forever destroy your relationship with your mother and your sister.
Or . . . you can take a deep breath while you think about alternatives. You might rejoice that she’s happy seeing her grandchildren. You might celebrate the life that you live, the one that fills your days and evenings and think about how it could be even better. You might consider the possibility that you’ve hurt her on multiple occasions and never knew anything about it because she wisely kept it to herself and dealt with it the best she could.
You get to decide.
[Note: this article is slated to appear in the religion section of the Denton Record-Chronicle on April 15, 2016.]
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