For me it's only been a little over 3 weeks. Lost my mother to a sudden massive heart attack. We (my dad, younger sister and I) didn't see it coming. Any how, for me I haven't had sudden burst of tears yet. Not since the first week. Though, while standing in the basement looking at the picture of her sweet face next to her urn...I have lost it 2x. Thinking of the past, the good times...etc. As one of the members said "...it is only natural". What I at the moment can't and don't want to consider is how it will be when I loose my father as well. As I am presently a single male. So I would only have my younger sister to rely on when that day comes. Assuming I haven't found some one, gotten married and have started a family of my own. We all know our parents will eventually leave us. But till it actually happens to you... My 2 cents...

Lilyspider, "more detailed questions" have a place on the public board, since that's the entire point of these boards in the 1st place. That said, I couldn't have helped you because I don't PM. I don't talk on the phone, either, so my cell is a nice texting machine. The easiest thing to do is just sit down and follow everyone's posts you enjoy. If THAT isn't a PIA, it would save you from doing it later. I don't think they have to OK the follow, do they? Or is that Facebook. Rhetorical. I don't care. Things continue to improve, become more logical, and therefore, more useful. I appreciate all their hard work!

I am sorry you are so tired and worried. Sounds like you have a lot on your plate. Your question is how to deal with this without blowing up at your DIL and DS. First and most important, go get counseling yourself or with your husband. The counselor will help you figure out how to set boundaries and how much to give of yourselves. Second, take time to exercise, get plenty of sleep and eat healthy foods. That old adage about flying with children...put the oxygen mask on your own face first so you can help them with theirs.... You will be able to do more for the children in the long run if you stay healthy. Third, your grandchildren have 2 loving grandparents who live next door, a nanny, and 2 parents. They have a network of people. Their love network doesn't look like what you wish for them but they have one. They are loved, they are cared for. Stop focusing on what they don't have and start looking at what they do have. I'm not there, you are, and your concerns may be entirely or partially valid. Having said that, they are 5 and 2. Soon the 5 year old will be more and more involved in school, activities, etc. The 5 year old will go to school all day, then have music lessons, sports activities, friends over, etc. That doesn't mean she won't need you or her parents, but she will be busy. The money your DIL makes will come in very handy for college, extracurricular activities, etc. As the grandkids get older you probably won't be needed nearly as much and that time is probably closer than you think. When that time comes, if you have damaged your relationship with your DS and DIL you will wish you hadn't. Also you may find that your DIL is better with the children as they get older. The comment about DIL not allowing anyone else in the family to be a leader in the family is not germane to this discussion. Your son could still have tea parties with his kids, take them camping, build block towers, bake cookies with them, play soccer in the yard. DIL is not stopping him from that. Stop letting those leadership thoughts live rent free in your head. As you said yourself, your son could make different choices, he doesn't, and that's on him, not his wife. I don't know, only you do, so I could be very wrong. I suspect you are enabling your son. I think that because you said he was checking his phone a lot during the day. If he was at home with the grandkids, were you over there taking care of them? There is a fine line between supporting and enabling and a good counselor will help you figure out if you have strayed over into enabling territory. A counselor can help you figure out if part of this is because the family doesn't look like what you expect with your DIL running a demanding business. My husband was building a business when our children were 5 and 2. He would have went on an 11 day trip, returned and went to work the next day and no one would have thought anything about it. He worked long hours then 6 days a week, and on Sunday went to church, came home and napped. He came home every night, gave the kids a bath, ate something and went back to work. This is a tough time for a young family and sometimes that can spill over onto the grandparents. I'm not dismissing your concerns or saying you're wrong. Just one glance at my husband with his little kids and even a total stranger could tell he treasured them, enjoyed them, loved them with his every breath. It's probably not the trip that concerned you but the way your son and DIL interact with their kids when they're present. The generosity issue is a good one to bring up in counseling. I'm not sure why you would want your DS and DIL to be financially generous with you. You have stressed that material things are not your focus, that you make decent money, so not sure why you feel a loss if they don't give you expensive gifts. Perhaps because your DS and DIL give expensive gifts to people they value and you feel not valued. A counselor could help you learn to let that go. Invest in exercise, getting plenty of sleep, eating healthy and counseling. That time will be well spent, and the sooner the better. It may take time to find a good counselor who is the right match for you, so get started now. You may have to try more than one. I hope you find something that helps. Best of luck with your grandchildren.

Such things as telling off a mentally ill person do no good. They create negative karma and don't impact the negative person in any way other than to reflect back at them the negative energy they are giving out, which is how their life is going anyway, most of the time. I have already tried that strategy to the max and long-ago abandoned it. There are two issues for me. One is handling an aging parent with mental difficulties. The key is compassionate detachment. It would be the same if you had a younger relative who refused help for something like addiction, etc. Some people can't handle it and completely cut off all contact with the sick person. I have seen that play out in many families. Others get completely caught up in their family's dysfunction. I am treading a middle path, and I think I do that quite well . . . most of the time. My father's sickness frustrates and saddens me, but that is not the source of grief for my mother. It is occasionally painfully ironic, but that is just the tip of the iceberg with him. Mentally ill people do not learn from their mistakes or learn from advice given by other people. If they did, they would not be sick. Sometimes there is no fix, just accept and detach. You know, the old "let go and let god" of AA. I think I was not clear that I am already pretty much in that space as far as self-care goes. That isn't really the source of my grief. It's not just when I'm with my father that this grief for my mother hits me, so I probably shouldn't even have brought up his presence at the dinner. It is just that I so often do or see things I could have done with my mother so easily which would have made her happy, and it pains me to try and still do them, and find it difficult to find anyone ELSE who actually enjoys them the way my mother would. My husband does not, my father does not, and I have few relatives to share old memories with. I do tea parties for work also, and other things for work my mother would have enjoyed. Not the same thing. No one else in my social circle is knocking themselves out to carry on family niceties that include me. So yes, I can do it and I do, but I don't really have a partner in crime and my energy is limited. There are only so many tea parties I can plan. BTW, my whole wedding reception last summer was a tea party in honor of my mother. My cousins helped me do that. Then my cousin died six weeks later. But I still have a lot in common with her daughter and we do whatever we can when we can, but she lives quite far away. It's rare when I can get a friend or family member to visit, most are tied up with kids or grandkids. As a side note, the last time I saw my mother I came over for Sunday dinner, helped her cook and serve and cleaned up from it and left her with a batch of muffins for that next week's tea or breakfast. So I did what I could when she was alive. She never got to finish the muffins, she died from a fall while unloading groceries later that week, she had gotten home at tea time but didn't get that last tea break which would have come after the groceries had been put away. It pained me so to go to a church function at Christmas, one I had attended as a child, and see zero home-made food at the reception, and all paper plates even though the church had a full set of nice dishes--no one volunteering to wash them in the full kitchen that goes unused most of the time now. In their defense, the older ladies who were there were working hard to pull it off, the same group that I see almost everywhere and the ranks are thinning. So it's not just an issue of my mother passing on, that whole genteel way of life is fading away. I belong to some of the social and charity groups my mother belonged to, the ranks get thinner and thinner and older and older, with no young (we're talking 40's or early 50's) people to take their place. Not to mention the professional and community clubs that have just left town already, like AAUW, for example. I can't hardly get a friend to have the time to come over for a nice dinner, even if I could pull one off, most are sandwiching just like us.