Has chatgpt helped you with anything mentally,emotionally, practically?
I spent around five years providing a significant amount of childcare for my daughter. I had my grandchildren three days a week, as well as overnight if she wanted to go out. A lot of the regular childcare was so that she could go to the gym every other day.
The difficulty was that it rarely ended when the babysitting did. She would come back to my house and often stay for hours, bringing whatever drama was happening in her life with her. There always seemed to be some sort of crisis or argument going on. I would have to listen to who had said what to whom, often accompanied by shouting and crying in my home. Sometimes there were genuinely serious issues, but other times relatively minor situations would become enormous dramas.
She would also regularly message me saying that she couldn't cope. As my son got older, there was a period when he spent quite a lot of time with her. I remember receiving very distressed messages from my daughter, only to ask my son what was happening and receive a video seconds later showing her drinking, laughing and listening to music. It became very difficult to know when something was genuinely wrong.
That isn't to say there weren't serious situations. She was rehoused because of domestic violence. A friend subsequently visited her new home, criticised her for having supposedly "jumped the waiting list" to get social housing, and then told her ex-partner where she was living. This resulted in another emergency move. Social services advised my daughter to have no further involvement with this person, yet several months later she invited the same friend into her new home.
So it was a mixture of genuinely serious problems, situations that had been dramatically exaggerated, and sometimes things that simply weren't true.
The effect on me was enormous. After babysitting and spending hours dealing with everything else, I would feel completely drained for days. Because I was providing childcare every other day, I never really had time to recover before it started again. My own home suffered badly and became a mess because I simply didn't have the energy to deal with it. At the time, I didn't fully appreciate how much the situation was affecting every other part of my life.
Eventually I told my daughter that she needed to arrange childcare for the time she spent at the gym. I suggested using a gym with a crèche, including our council-run gym, or using her son's free childcare hours. She didn't want to use the council gym, so I continued helping for a while longer.
The final straw came one day when she was out and repeatedly told me she was on her way back. First she missed the bus, then something else happened, followed by another excuse and another delay. At that point I told her I would no longer provide regular babysitting.
Afterwards, she told other people that I was awful, that I had taken away the only thing she had for herself, and that I never supported her. Some of the things she said about me were quite nasty. She doesn't know that I'm aware of any of this, and I've never confronted her about it.
What surprised me most was the enormous sense of relief afterwards. It felt as though a weight had been lifted. I hadn't realised until then just how much the situation had been affecting me, or how many other areas of my life had suffered as a result.
I haven't cut my daughter off and we still have a relationship. The difference now is that I no longer allow myself to be pulled into every crisis or drama in her life.
It was only when I talked it through properly on chatgpt and explored the situation in much more detail than I have here that my perspective started to change. I began to understand that I didn't need to justify saying no simply because I didn't have somewhere else I needed to be. I also started to recognise the wider impact the situation had been having on me and that it was okay to put a boundary in place.
That took a long time because the guilt was very difficult to get past. If I hadn't had the opportunity to really explore it and look at the situation differently, I honestly think I would probably still be doing it now.
Please note wrote this situation on chatgpt and asked it to rewrite it. So if it screams out chatgpt that's why.