What you can’t somehow cope with you endure. You will kill your soul trying to fix this lost cause. Quitting is hard, waking away is worse but at some point that is what must be done to save yourself. Leave the door open but save yourself and walk away.
What you can’t somehow cope with you endure. You will kill your soul trying to fix this lost cause. Quitting is hard, waking away is worse but at some point that is what must be done to save yourself. Leave the door open but save yourself and walk away.
I have similar feeling about what you say, too.
What I’d say is just tell the DIL that you’re there when she/they needs you, even to watch the kids, etc. AND THEN let them alone and wait. Eventually, a situation will crop up where they do need help. Let that happen.
In raising children most people will never have such an opportunity for impact of the future, to influence and mold an entire life and that of others to follow. Do it well and the legacy of your success lives on. Do it poorly and that legacy lives on too and screws up lives you will never know, even like the tentacles of a cancer.
You will never know how well you did until the deed is done, good or bad, and until it is too late to change it by much, if at all.
I will never have grandchildren so will never be tempted to correct my mistakes there.
Too bad the only instructions we really have in raising children is seated in the recollections of how we were raised; sometimes that can be good. Once upon a time we had close knit and close by families. That usually worked out well and most people thought it was a good thing. That has changed a lot now. Of course, there is the Bible which is a good set of instructions for setting a good example of life and living but a person has to start listening to what it has to say early and earnestly. That usually happens only by guidance from someone.
It is the children that count. Not long after I had retired and moved back to the farm I was at the corner store getting gas. A truck pulled up adjacent, a grandmother and bright eyed happy little girl got out. The girl had a skateboard but I gathered no concrete at home and so she was delighted to use the concrete at the station. "Look what I can do grandmother!" Only to be met with grandmother snapping her head off. Dejected she got back in the truck. Treatment like that will crush a child's spirit and ruin lives and the cycle just keeps repeating. There are better ways to grow up.
Growing up I thought everyone had parents like mine. I grew up to find out that hardly anyone was as lucky my siblings and I were.