Dead beat grandparents: A rant
Fri Oct 27, 2006 at 10:21:22 AM PDT
Any person you meet, when you get them really good and drunk, will profess that there is no family that is truly as dysfunctional as their own. Go ahead, ask anyone. It is the rare person in denial that will claim that their families are loving, caring, and balanced. Talk to that person's spouse and you'll get an earful, I'm certain of that.
Once I was in college and on my own (they didn't offer to pay and I'm better off for it), I gave up the fantasies I had of the normal parent/child relationship through hours of therapy, stacks of the pop psychology books, and countless nights drinking coffee with friends. I learned to just accept their defects and move on with my life. That is, before I gave birth.
So now that the boundary between myself and my birth family has been well established, they are moving on to the next generation. They are doing it to my son. Which, in my mind, is unacceptable.
On the one hand I'm fully aware that he will someday have to learn about these sorts of relationships and how to handle them. Someday, when he's a teenager. Right now he's 2 and it's my responsibility to protect him. And I will, no matter what.
All my life my father has made promises to me that he couldn't keep. And we're not talking big promises like buying a car. It's almost always involved spending time together.
It's always the same pattern. Two weeks out he'll call and ask me to put the visit on my calendar. One week out he'll call and say he's still coming, keep that date open. On Friday of the weekend he's supposed to visit he calls to say he can't make it. Something always comes up.
I don't know what motivates him to say he's coming but whatever that motivation is, I hope he finds peace with it before he disappoints my little boy any more than he already has. I've not yet established my strategy for how to handle it-- something tells me that screaming will have little effect (since it never worked in the past).
What I do know is that I spent a lot of years hurting because of this particular character defect. I cannot allow him to do the same to our happy little boy. It's time for a serious restructure in my relationships. I'm taking out the garbage, ladies!
