r/absentgrandparents

I try not to dwell on these things, but in black and white it’s a painful realization!

Our three children in fact have never had grandparents here for Christmas, most birthdays, or their births. They even missed my courthouse wedding 25 years ago! I guess it started with absent parenting that moved on to absent grandparenting. I should have never expected more.

I don’t know if my kids realize what they’ve missed out on. We do our best to make the holidays the best for them, and for each other, and for ourselves. We don’t even mention the unmentionables… I truly hope that I am not THAT grandparent when the time comes!

This year we will move forward with another Christmas without them. What’s a painful realization that you’ve had recently?

Edited to add more details!
We have been a military family for over 20 years. We were at first a dual military couple, but ever since I got out in 2010, we have been a one income family. We moved around a lot, and never had the financial means or the time to travel back home for the holidays. My parents, however, have been retired and have always had the means. We even moved within driving distance to them for the first time ever just three years ago and they still haven’t visited us!! We’ve tried to go to them for holidays and events, but now we’re just deflated from trying.

I am already dreading the holidays. I already know that my husband's family will be a cluster f. We will be hosting a sibling Christmas because last year my husband ( or I) wasn't invited to his dad's Christmas. I have two littles and I would love for my FIL to want to spend a few hours with us this Christmas season. Well not my actual FIL I want a FIL who loves his grandchildren. I wish my husband had a dad who was excited to do a single holiday activity with our kids. I'm dreading the jealousy the sweeps over me when I see my peers have in laws who show up for Christmas. I am already prepared for triangulation that FILs wife will try when she hears about sibling Christmas. She has added a few of our literal neighbors on Facebook, yet they are totally uninterested in our actual children and their lives.

I'm tired of absent grandparents who won't show up for us, but will complain if we do something for ourselves.

EDIT: thanks for the validation yall. I made this post to let off some steam bc i was ready to say “tough shit. Come or don’t.” The only reason I’m holding back on them is bc my kids have a great relationship with my parents (when they bother to show up) and with the loss of my in laws I don’t have the heart to not fight for my kids’ to have an ongoing relationship with their living grandparents. The situation sucks. Absent grandparents sucks. And mourning dead grandparents sucks the most. At the end of the day, it’s all about love.

After over a decade of renting we just moved into our new house (yay!) and we are so excited to experience our favorite holidays in our very own home with our toddlers. So I thought it would be obvious that we would be hosting this year starting with thanksgiving, but knowing the bs my parents pull when it comes to being inconvenienced, I thought it would be smart to settle on plans now.

Plot twist, they don’t want to travel for thanksgiving.

And I get it, the six hour drive sucks and staying over at someone else’s house isn’t pleasant. But I argue it’s a lot easier for two retired people to drive up and stay in a guest room than it is for a young family of four to drive down and sleep on couches and futons. Plus my husband has work that Friday so he would need to take off work, and he’s very low on PTO as is since the loss of my MIL earlier this year.

I explained this to them via text and was met with “we would really like the grandkids to spend time at grandma’s house for the holidays.” All I could do was let out the biggest sigh, I cannot wrap my head around how to more clearly tell them “no”.

For context, last year after they no-showed thanksgiving I got into a big fight with my parents because I felt they bend over backwards for other family members like my sister and their siblings rather than being there for their grandchildren, especially if it means they get to stay home.

This is an ongoing issue.

I’m just about ready to say “the kids will be spending the holidays in their new home. You are more than welcome to join us.” Because like… what else is there to say? Ugh I’m so annoyed. There’s a lot more nuance and nonsense involved with all this but that’s the basics for the rant lol

TLDR: parents once again refuse to travel to see their grandchildren for the holidays despite having good reason to do so

I wanted to post about my parents and get some perspective from people here because I'm having a hard time figuring out how I should view the situation.

My parents have not been the most supportive grandparents since the birth of my daughter, who is now 2.5 years old.

Before my daughter was born, we had a discussion about vaccinations that became a pretty big point of contention. We required anyone who wanted to see her as a newborn to get certain vaccinations, and my parents fought us pretty hard on it. Ultimately, they didn't meet their first grandchild until she was around 3 months old, when we felt more comfortable with her level of protection. We also asked them to wear masks during that first visit.

The whole visit was honestly pretty awkward. My mom spent a good portion of the visit praying, and after about 15 minutes they left to go eat. It wasn't exactly the excited "first time meeting our grandchild" experience I had imagined.

Since then, they've been adamant about wanting to come visit every 3–4 weeks or so. They live about 70 miles away. The problem is that their visits don't really feel like they're coming to spend time with their granddaughter or to help us as parents. They mostly act like guests in our house.

When they come, we usually go out to lunch. They pay for lunch, which I appreciate, but that's generally the extent of their involvement. They've never changed a diaper, brought us food, or really done anything that makes our lives easier. They rarely interact with my daughter when they're here, and they barely talk to my wife.

They also don't really call or check in between visits. I don't get calls asking how I'm doing or how my daughter is doing. The visits have generally been driven by their schedule because my dad's work schedule makes things difficult to plan around.

This has created a weird amount of anxiety for me. Whenever I get a text from my parents, there's a part of me that immediately assumes they're going to ask when they can come up again. I don't necessarily want the visit because I know I'm going to have to mentally prepare for it, entertain them, and deal with the awkwardness. At the same time, I feel guilty for feeling that way because they're my parents and they're trying to maintain a relationship with their granddaughter.

One thing I've noticed that really bothers me is how different they seem around other family members.

When we're around extended family, they seem much more engaged with my daughter and much more communicative with my wife. They seem to make more of an effort to present themselves as involved grandparents. But when it's just us, that effort largely disappears.

That's what has made me wonder whether they care more about the image of being grandparents than actually being involved grandparents.

I don't know if that's actually what's happening, though. That's part of why I'm posting. I don't want to automatically assume their motives.

I've been in therapy for a while, and my relationship with my parents has been a major topic. One of the things I'm working on is setting boundaries rather than constantly trying to change or understand their behavior.

Recently, instead of letting my parents dictate when they're going to come up, my wife and I started giving them specific days that work for us. If they want to visit, we tell them which days we're comfortable with rather than rearranging our lives around their schedule.

That's actually helped me quite a bit. I don't spend the next few weeks wondering when they're going to text and ask to come up. We usually see them about once a month, but it's on a day that works for our family. Interestingly, since we started doing this, they haven't really contacted us much at all, and that's where I'm struggling again.

Part of me wonders if, now that we're not accommodating their schedule and they're not having to actively push for visits, they've simply stopped making an effort. Almost like the pressure to maintain the appearance of being involved grandparents isn't there anymore. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. I genuinely don't know.

I also want to be clear that I don't think my parents are the worst grandparents described on this subreddit. They're not completely absent. They do drive 70 miles to see her and they obviously want some kind of relationship with her. That's why I'm having trouble figuring out how to categorize what I'm feeling.

I'm still sad and disappointed by their behavior. I think I expected becoming grandparents would make them more emotionally involved in our lives. Instead, it feels like we're still doing all of the work of maintaining the relationship.

And now we're expecting a son, so we're about to have the vaccination conversation all over again.

I'm trying to figure out whether I'm expecting too much from them, whether this is a relatively normal but emotionally distant grandparent relationship, or whether other people see the same kind of "showing up for the title/image but not actually being involved" dynamic that I'm seeing.

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.