Dear Abigail,
My sister has chosen to have a baby on her own using a sperm donor. I am excited to have a niece or nephew, and for my children to have a cousin.
My parents, who are in their late 70s, are stepping in to help co-parent with my sister. While she has a very good job, she is moving in with my parents indefinitely. She says she needs my parents’ support because she has to maintain her social life. She can’t take a baby on a date, she told me.
My parents have not babysat for my kids since my youngest was born, almost three years ago. I live an hour from them. When I asked them to watch my kids last year so my husband and I could celebrate our anniversary, they said no. They were just too busy.
My parents paid for my sister’s fertility treatments. To make it fair, they gave me the same amount of money. This was appreciated, since paying for day care eats up most of my salary. But why do I receive help only when my sister needs something?
I don’t understand why my sister would want to move back in with my parents, or why my parents are encouraging her to do so. I don’t understand why my parents would help raise my sister’s child when they are not willing to even babysit mine.
How do I get past this? My sister and I have always been very different people. I don’t want the same things she wants, so why does it matter what my parents are giving her? I have a great life. I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to feel like a stranger in my own family.
—Megan, 41
Megan,
Which one of your kids is your favorite?
Think hard and tell the truth. Which one do you love the most?
You know, as well as I do, that these are absurd, unanswerable questions. You have the kid who shares your sense of humor, the one you can tease. The one who is easily affectionate and the one who’s full of earnest complaints. The one who is proudly self-sufficient and the one who comes to you with puppy eyes. The one you worry about and the one who puts you at ease. And the descriptions shift their referents on a merry-go-round and none of it corresponds to the measure of your love.
Your parents’ apparent favoritism is reasonably irritating. Your complaint is also one of the most common in family life. Parents should allocate their attention and resources more or less evenly across their children. Wealthy families are often more comfortable doing this with inheritances and monetary gifts, thinking naturally in terms of investment and long-term planning. Middle-class families, by contrast, tend to treat what money and time they have less like a bequest than a crisis fund. In practice, they give disproportionately to the child who seems likeliest to sink.
“You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child,” is so pervasively quoted and accepted, no one even knows who said it. It doesn’t matter. We know in our bones that it’s true. When we look across our children, we tend to devote the bulk of our attention and, yes, occasionally our resources, to the ones we worry about most.
It is natural to feel stung that your parents have declined ordinary grandparent time with your children while building their retirement around your sister’s baby. Your parents would not even watch your kids so that you and your husband could celebrate your anniversary. And now, your sister’s whole life is an anniversary celebration, with your parents as her permanent live-in babysitters. It’s ridiculous that they have allocated their time so unevenly.
Maybe your parents enjoy the control your sister grants them over her life and child. Maybe they like to feel needed, and your sister most certainly needs them. Or maybe your mother just has an easier rapport with a daughter who takes her advice, compliments her wisdom, and lets grandma’s judgment prevail in raising her baby. Maybe that’s what your mother relishes—the chance to run mission control for her daughter’s family—something I’m guessing you don’t give her.
But do not mistake these for the uneven dispersal of love.
You seem to interpret your parents’ behavior as evidence that they care more about your sister’s needs. But it isn’t that at all. They don’t see her baby as the principal recipient of their largesse. They see her baby as the necessary object of their charity. They’re preoccupied by the depths to which their new grandchild could fall. And your kids—who entered this world with the inestimable gift of married, self-sufficient parents—benefit from a sturdy ground floor, beneath which you and your husband will never allow them to plunge. Your sister’s baby seems so vulnerable by comparison.
You’re not a “stranger” in your own family. Your mother would probably be surprised to hear you say that. She more likely has a different word for you: the winner. Unless you intend to make your mother and father co-parents in your own family—and by God, you shouldn’t—don’t treat every gift or hour of help they give your sister as evidence of your alienation.
They stepped in to give your sister a child. Now, they babysit while your sister goes fishing for a husband unencumbered, to up her chances of catching one. Your parents must feel invigorated by their centrality in your sister’s life, flattered by their alternating roles of stand-in spouse and wingman.
And there they are, at the end of her dates, waiting up the way you would for a teenager tempted to break curfew. They seem to have an endless reserve of pity for her and very little regard. None of this is something you want.
Nor is it an unalloyed gift to her child, whose life will balance the benefit of her grandparents’ attention against the absence of a father, a mother trying to build a love life, and the disquieting knowledge that her only parent remains so dependent herself.
You don’t want your sister’s life, Megan. And you don’t want your parents’ paternalistic oversight. Whether they tell you or not, you have their admiration.
That’s a gift I suspect you’ll never need to share with your sibling.
Onward,
Abigail
This has been Tough Love with Abigail Shrier. Click here to write to Abigail for advice—and she might reply to your letter next!
Last week, Abigail wrote to a 24-year-old wife who’s itching to have a baby, even though she’s still in med school, and wanted to know: “Am I crazy for not wanting to wait?” Catch up here.
And click here to get Tough Love delivered directly to your inbox every Thursday, as soon as it’s published.