So, Christmas rolls around and, yet again, my girlfriend and I are taking the brunt of parental responsibility. This really can’t happen again, and I’m interested in how you would approach this.
Background:
My girlfriend’s family are dispersed:
- Her parents live in Wales. Her father has prostrate cancer and her mother is severely disabled following an early stroke at the age of 40. They are both now 70, and travel is at best a major hassle, and at worst really impossible.
- My girlfriend and I (aged 40) live in London, about 250 miles from her parents, and we both work right up to Christmas and afterwards, unlike her two siblings who both have more than a week off every year. We are childless (gay couple).
- Brother (45) lives in Scotland with his teenage children and miserable Scottish wife who rules her husband with a rod of iron and has zero interest in the in-laws or visiting Wales at all if possible.
- Sister (43) is a wealthy high powered exec with a robot Swiss husband and two young children who lives in Germany and runs her life like Bree Van de Kamp.
For the last 4-5 Christmases both brother and sister have conspired to NOT visit their parents over Christmas - not just Christmas Day, but not at all. Brother stays in Scotland as his wife ‘doesn’t want their children to miss out on the joy of spending Christmas in their own home’, whilst sister generally whisks her family off for a skiing trip in some swanky Austrian resort. Every year we get to November, hoping one of the others will make the trip to Wales and every year we end up making a two day dash in between work schedules when it becomes obvious no one else is going and her parents are facing Christmas alone.
We are both fed up with this. It’s a common complaint of childless and single people - ‘no family of your own? Then YOU can look after the parents’. Err, excuse me, we do have lives, you know.
I do not want this to happen next year.
What would you do, beyond getting everyone, including the parents (to enforce guilt), in one room and screaming at the siblings to sort it out. Tempting as it might be. Aside form everything else, it means, yet again, we won’t be visiting MY parents. Luckily, I at least have siblings who will do their share.
Grrrr. Maybe this is just a rant.