'I'm done making my kid's childhood magical'

I refuse to let my mom be around my son more than once a month or so.

She's made it clear through her unsolicited, inane advice and flaunting of my wishes that she doesn't respect my parenting skills, so in turn I don't respect her desire to see her grandchild.

 

It's a fine line. I know with my mom, it started as her volunteering for my sister and it quickly evolved into being taken advantage of. Everybody's situation is different... My in-laws are great with the boys, but for some reason they lay on the guilt if we ask them to watch our kids for even a couple hours. They'll volunteer a couple times a year, but we're usually given little notice and have to scramble if we're going to try to set up a dinner with friends... We end up doing a tradeoff with my sister-in-law once a month. We take her kids for the night and then the next month she takes ours for a night... It works pretty well.

 

There's no fine line in my situation. She'd take them every night if she could. Seriously. We have to fend her off.

 

That's great.

 

Not always.

 

I think this is spot on.

Families are smaller these days.

Nothing wrong with trying to make things special for your kids, but remember they're kids. They're just as likely to have fun playing in the cardboard box than the costly stuff that came with it.

I think we -- as adults -- often underestimate kids' resiliency. It's usually a lot stronger than our own. Love your kids unconditionally and they'll probably turn out OK. (And if they don't, there was probably nothing you could do about it anyway).

 

LOL... I've told stories on this board about my cousin with Aspergers. His mom died a couple years ago and shortly after that happened, my cousin, his wife and two kids moved from Redwood City to Atlanta. They definitely hung around until my aunt died and then got out of there as quickly as possible. My cousin's wife is a law professor at Georgia State and had been commuting for over a year.

So they moved to Atlanta and they find out a week after they get there that my uncle (a strange guy to put it mildly) had bought the house two doors down from them. Their oldest son is a great kid and he wants to work in sports so he and I talk semi-regularly. His mom had called me to talk him out of going into journalism. He told me his mom "freaked the fuck out" when she found out my uncle had bought the house two doors down without saying anything about it. Their kids are 17 and 15 so it's not like they're in need of childcare.

My uncle's daughter lives in Michigan and she and her husband laugh endlessly about her dad following her brother to Atlanta. This is the same guy who showed up at her house unannounced at one point and stayed for a month.