agonyaunt | (no subject)

“Anna” is our only granddaughter. Our son died when she was small, and we got very involved in her life. We pay for her private school and her extracurriculars since her mother doesn’t make much. Well, Anna’s cousins from her mother’s side, “Charlotte and Claire,” have recently moved in with Anna’s family. Anna is forced to share a room with both girls, causing a lot of friction. Anna has a stepbrother who has his own room in the house but rarely occupies it. It is ridiculous to have three kids crammed into one small bedroom while the other one is unoccupied.

Anna could “share” the room with her stepbrother (sleep there when he isn’t around), or one of the kids could take the couch. Anna’s mother and stepfather told us to butt out and stop favoring Anna. The stepfather has been increasingly calling her spoiled and then whines if none of the other kids get gifts from us (yet his own parents don’t even send Anna a birthday card).
Anna’s mother had done a good thing taking on her nieces, but at a cost to Anna.

Anna is going to high school next year and doesn’t want to share her space with a pair of elementary students. Anna has spoken about moving in with us full-time over the summer, but is afraid of her mother’s reaction. Our relationship with our former daughter-in-law has frazzled since she remarried. She seems to resent our presence in our granddaughter’s life, especially when our pocketbook doesn’t pop out whenever she wants it to (she complained about not being able to afford dance and other activities for her nieces). We really don’t want to make things worse here, but our advice is always rejected. Anna moving in with us seems to be the best solution, but her mother will not see it that way. What should we do?

—Moving In

Dear Moving In,

You can offer to let Anna come stay with you, but there is no guarantee that her mother will respond favorably. Still, it’s worth talking to her about Anna’s challenges in the home, even suggesting again that she share a room with her stepbrother. Let your DIL know that you only want Anna to be happy and that you aren’t “favoring” her over the other children. Talk about how difficult it will be for her to share her space with much younger girls as a high school student, who will need a quiet space to complete hours of homework. If you live close enough, perhaps you can suggest that Anna spends the week with you and the weekend with her mother’s family.

It seems somewhat unlikely that Anna’s mother will allow her to move in with you (though it’s absolutely worth it to ask). If she doesn’t, continue offering Anna respite from the situation with her family and a listening ear for her to vent her frustrations. Let her know that she isn’t wrong for how she feels. Perhaps raise the idea of her moving in with you a second time a few months after your first conversation with her mother, reminding her of Anna’s unhappiness and your willingness to offer her a comfortable living situation. Be as respectful to her as you can, for the future of your relationship with Anna (while she lives in her mother’s home) depends on you and your DIL being able to get along.

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It's not that I'm not sympathetic to Anna, whose life has been rearranged, but you just know that when LW suggests "one of the children" could take the couch she doesn't mean the girl who lives at home with her mother, she means one of those other children.

And we don't know why those kids are there, but if this is some sort of CPS issue then probably they can't. Social services tends to frown on children sleeping on a couch, and they're not too happy about teenagers sharing a room with their opposite-sex siblings either. Hell, it's entirely possible, if this is some sort of CPS situation, that Anna's mother and stepfather had to get some sort of exemption to have three kids in one room.

They're trying to make the best of a tough situation. We don't know what that situation is, but people hardly ever send their young kids to live with relatives for an extended time just for funzies, not in our society. And who knows what else they're dealing with while trying to integrate their two nieces into the household? Are there legal issues? Do the kids have therapy or doctor appointments? Does somebody have to arrange for them to visit with their parents? None of this sounds fun, and all LW can say is that Anna's getting the short end of the stick.

As for the presents and extracurriculars angle, I suppose LW has no obligation to these kids, but having no obligation to provide even a courtesy gift to them doesn't mean I think it's a kind thing to do. And if I were in Anna's mother's situation I'd be strongly tempted to tell LW to stop buying gifts and paying for extracurriculars entirely if the alternative is to have a two-tiered system in my own house, making my life harder. (And yes, Anna's stepfather's parents ought to give the kid a gift on gift-giving occasions such as birthdays and Christmas, but this isn't a competition.) I had a difficult mother, the kids had a bit of a hard relationship with her, but in my wildest dreams I can't see her nitpicking like this. She was more generous with the neighbor's children than LW appears to be with her relatives-by-marriage, and those kids all lived at home!

Which brings us to LW's actual question, should she invite Anna to stay with her. Well. She'd hardly be the first or only person to do this for a grandchild/cousin/nibling/neighbor. And honestly, putting aside my earlier comments, three in a room does sound like a challenge. I think it could be a benefit to Anna if she could stay with Grandma and Grandpa during the week, so long as she could see her mother and stepfather midweek and called them daily. And it's sure to be cheaper than boarding school.

But LW needs to be more gracious about asking, and suggest it's to everybody's benefit. And honestly, LW needs to be more understanding about the situation Anna's family is in, and sympathetic to people who aren't Anna.

There was so much about this letter that was rubbing me the wrong way but I couldn't quite put my finger on why - I think your response nailed it.

Under no circumstances should Anna share a bedroom with her stepbrother. Period. Call me paranoid, but that's asking for trouble.

Yeah, that part was bizarre.

If he's mostly at his mother's house or at college then I doubt anything untoward would happen, but it'll serve to make them both uncomfortable and also to make it look like he's being kicked out of his own home. I'm just not seeing that as a solution here unless the backstory LW didn't tell us us that he's, like, in his 30s with kids of his own.

"Talk about how difficult it will be for her to share her space with much younger girls as a high school student, who will need a quiet space to complete hours of homework."

As the oldest of 5, there's no such thing as a quiet space in a house with that many people.

I have a lot of issues with my culture of origin, but one thing I do like is exemplified by the fact that my maternal aunt raised one of my paternal cousins. If they lived in Jamaica Anna would probably have moved in with her paternal grandparents around when Anna's mother remarried or at latest when the nieces arrived. They have space, so why not?

(There's a lot wrong with the LW's attitude, but Conuly analyzed that effectively, and one thing that is not wrong is the idea of giving Anna space that's available.)

I mean, you don't have to give presents to your granddaughter's cousins, but it definitely IS favoritism to give them to only one child in a household. If those kids live there, they should get presents too. There are parents who wouldn't allow one kid to receive them at all if the others were left out, and if you have money and they don't, it looks petty and rude to omit them. They're young children, so the presents aren't going to be as expensive as Anna's anyway. It probably would be best for Anna to move in with LW, but having taken this needlessly adversarial attitude to her mother for years is not going to make that likely. She sounds like a problem MIL.

She sounds like a problem MIL.

Hoo-boy. Of course, the comments over there are all "Oh, that woman had no trouble accepting LW's help all these years" and I'm sitting there going "Didn't she, though?" because it really sounds to me like LW kinda bullied her into it "for Anna's sake" and put some strings on it as well, if only the strings of "you must treat me as Lady Bountiful and be grateful".

Yeah, there's a very strong whiff of that in the letter! Anna's mother has probably been sick of her for years.

This sounds like a stepfather problem to me... If he is already blaming Anna and calling her spoiled and so forth, Anna would be better off out of that house. Stepfather and possibly stepbrother already resent the private school and other attention Anna is getting, and it's going to get uglier with Anna's mother demanding financial support for the two younger cousins, treating Anna as a cash cow hostage.

The introduction of the two younger children should have bumped absent stepson from his room and into the den or living room fold-out couch.

As for gifts, if Anna stays in that home, the younger children's special days and holidays need to be treated as Anna's and honored with gifts and treats! As Anna is in high school now, she is old enough to grasp the politics of equity for the elementary kids. Grandma doesn't need to treat every birthday like a Kardashian special.

The introduction of the two younger children should have bumped absent stepson from his room and into the den or living room fold-out couch.

This really might not be an option if Stepson is a minor and the kids are there under the aegis of social services. There might be a requirement that every child in the house, even part-time, has a bed in a non-public room with a door that closes.

Or a condition of visitation. Kid would likely spend MUCH more time at mom’s if he had to share with a (13 y.o., no, no, no) stepsister. If his dad time is minimal anyway, I’d set up the room for both of them, but she can go to grandma’s, bunk in with the cousins, or take the couch when he has his dad visits.

I don't think Abby getting kicked out of her room when her step-brother visits is going to increase family harmony.

I wish we knew how old the step-brother is.

Nor is it likely to improve matters if he loses his room and privacy when he’s not there.

Truth.