u/GracieLouFreebish

My wife and I have two kids, 14 and 11, and we live halfway across the country from my dad. For 14 years now I have found myself absolutely wracked with guilt for not doing more to include him in my kids’ lives… sending more pictures, more updates, FaceTiming regularly, going to visit him.

My wife and I each have a part-time job on top of our full-time jobs and still cannot afford for the four of us to fly to see him… nor can we afford to take enough time off work to make the 40 hour drive with hotel stops along the way. By contrast, he is well off and he and his wife take lots of small trips often, but only to come see us once every few years.

For years my dad and I have been going in circles saying “we have to facetime soon!” to each other but every time I’d ask him for a specific day and time when he was available, I’d get a noncommittal response. Or he’d say he’ll reach out in the morning and then suddenly it’s 4pm and he sends a photo of him at a painting class with zero mention of our now failed plans to catch up. We FaceTime maybe four times a year on average and two of those are usually super short with the whole extended family involved Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I have ADHD and bearing the weight of the decisions and logistical planning is really, really not easy for me, especially when I feel like the other person isn’t cooperating. In the past year or so it has really hit me that he’s getting older, he won’t be around forever, and he barely knows my kids. I know he loves them and he asks how they’re doing regularly, but it feels like going through the motions and there is no active engagement.

My kids both have phones specifically for communicating with us and their relatives, and I finally decided that enough was enough and I was going to brute force a standing weekly FaceTime session where he could talk to each of them separately for fifteen minutes back-to-back on Saturday mornings. Half an hour total out of his retired life. It worked for two weeks; my kids would text him right before and then they would have their conversations. It was awkward because they don’t know each other well and my dad’s idea of a conversation often involves putting a silly filter on and making faces or flipping the camera to face his dog and cat while he paces around his house.

After those first two weeks, he now reschedules on them nearly every week without offering a specific time to make it up. It’s always “how about tomorrow afternoon” and then crickets until the following Saturday. My kids have gotten to the point where they’re annoyed and hurt that he doesn’t seem to care to engage with them for even a short amount of time each week, and it really breaks my heart. I have completely let them off the hook; if he wants to talk to them, he knows where to find them. He can reach out and handle logistics.

This has been a really difficult pill for me to swallow because he was really engaged with my siblings and I growing up and I was always so excited for him to be a grandfather. The distance is not easy, but I put myself in his shoes and I’m genuinely baffled as to how he has these awesome kids in his life but does not care to know them beyond asking what they want for Christmas and birthdays. Like he cares about them, but only on a surface level. He’s great with them in person but then goes years without knowing who they are in the slightest. If I’m ever lucky enough to become a grandparent, my kids will have to gently ask me to be around less or cool it with the calls/texts/Facetiming.

To pour salt in the wound, one of my siblings had a baby last year and he retired and moved to an apartment five minutes away from them (he was previously an hour away.) I’m glad he has a local grandchild, don’t get me wrong, but it’s extra painful when he blows off my kids in the morning and then I see pics of him with the new baby later that day.

I’m done blaming my own shortcomings for his lack of relationship with my kids when he can’t even set aside half an hour once a week to check in with them. I’ve expressed my disappointment to him multiple times and he has apologized and said “you’re right, there’s no excuse” but the behavior doesn’t ever change. I can’t imagine being told my grandkids are disappointed in me and not doing everything I can to make that relationship right. Life is too short to put any more time and energy into this relationship only to be let down over and over again, but goddamn does it break my heart to take a step back in defeat.