To think the less you do the less you cope?

[Breezyyi]

Maybe I’m being unkind. But I am at my wits end with my sister. She’s a few years older in her early thirties . We both have one child and she is pregnant with her second. Her first now 3.5 has been in nursery every day, she collects at 3pm and then takes her to my parents for her dinner. She does one bedtime a week and parter does all others as she feels she can’t as she is 26 weeks pregnant. She doesn’t work and hasn’t since first was born.

In contrast, my husband works away a lot. I work full time. I obviously have to do everything for dd. All get ups, nursery runs, dinners, bedtimes etc. my parents would step in if I needed but my sibling seems to need it so much more than I tend to just do my own thing!

AIBU to think this isn’t the fact she can’t cope but more that she’s used to not coping and has made things harder for herself by not getting on with it? I don’t know… I realise I am being judgemental but the mind boggles as to how you can do so little parenting, not work and need huge support.

I have had no one to catch me for a decade of lone parenting. I am the least resilient person I know. Everything tips me over the edge as I never get a break. Permanently weepy and awake at night.

I used to have support and was much more capable.

Coping with difficult situations of course builds resilience. There may be other ways to build it but actually having to crack on is fundamental

It can also lead to people not coping and falling apart. Everyone has different limits. Your post sounds like you feel she should pull herself together and get on with things because you have. She’s not you. It’s not a moral failing to seek and accept help.

No.
Resilience is not having a safety net to catch you upon failure.

Resilience is the ability to continue in the face of difficulty or failure, with some Grace.

Most of my life is lived with no safety net.

OP you Dsis is either incompetent or lazy.

Ignore her and yes your loving right.
one day your sisters children will need their Mother to step up and she won’t be able too.

My own Mum is lazy and had my Nan help her loads.
My Mum just refuses to step up and raise me when I was younger. I just suffered neglect and raised myself.

My Mum now in her 80’s cries as I don’t help her. There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s just lazy.

I do feel like someone's capacity can shrink when they don't have as much to do .

Your capacity for 'everything' is almost like a muscle that needs regular exercise.

I feel like it has happened to me, and it isn't intentional .

None of us here know her. She might feel awful with her pregnancy. Her mental health might be shot. If that's the case, why would anyone not accept the help on offer to them?

There will always be people who take the piss out of people's willingness to help, but we, on here, have no way of knowing to what extent this is the case.

OP doesn’t want her sis to fail, she doesn’t understand why her sis can’t cope.

OP your sis is lazy.

I think that the less some people have to think about, the more they make little things become big things. I agree with you OP.

I have a friend who did work FT but in a very flexible job. She had a full time nanny, a weekend nanny (so her husband and her could go shopping and to the gym), a cleaner and a housekeeper. And someone who would come and deliver home cooked food once a week.
I am all for outsourcing housework but the kids spent long hours in day care and/or with the nanny when as academics (same University as me) they both had relatively flexible jobs.
Then the pandemic struck and they fell apart. Having never had their kids with them particularly on the weekend they went a bit MAGA for a while, and it was all because they literally couldn’t cope with their own kids.
(with the caveat that WFH while homeschooling kids was shit for everyone) but they were so unused to doing bedtime or having the kids on weekend mornings.
I found the relentless moaning about how hard their life was quite annoying.

Not only the younger generation.

I've a family member that done exactly the same from the day their DC were born, definitely due to them having a 'can't be arsed if I can get someone else to do it for me, why not' attitude.
Now in their mid 60's yet still the same.

Help out when needed by all means but it's not helping your DSis to cope long term.

My sister is the one that’s always needed support
dh’s sister is the one that’s always needed support
which means us and ours are completely neglected, our children barely know their grandparents.
meanwhile the other grandchildren go on holidays, sleep over are on complete standby for school runs.

I always think the reason I am so independent is because I have to be. It also means I ask nothing of them,

1. because they are so tired so don’t want to take the piss
2. because I just get knocked back as they are needed elsewhere

I think I have fallen into this camp. My sister has had everyone running around after her her entire life, since childhood, and she’s just as happy as I am, who’s been the one to do everything myself😊

I felt I couldn't cope initially 😅 I didn't have a choice though. So I guess you cope with more as you adjust to bigger volumes of work load/responsibility and routines..

The longer you juggle and do it the more sturdy you come..like a gym 😂 you start weak and after a year your lifting double the weights.

YANBU. When my partner does the heavy lifting for a few days and then goes away, I find it SO much harder getting back into the routine of doing it. It is easier if you do it everyday on your own because you get used to it. When DH Goes away and I’m on my own, after a few days it’s fine, but takes a while to get used to doing it alone for sure.

I completely agree with you OP. And I very much respect people like you and also single working parents who have to cope somehow on their own.

We don't have any family support as they live abroad, we both work full time and have an almost 3yo. So it's tough, especially when the toddler is sick and we still have to work our hours (often through the night in such situations). But we just don't have a choice.

I've noticed that some people are just wired in a very entitled/comfortable or outright lazy/path of least resistance kid of way so they'll do the minimum they have to and then "delegate" (aka dump) the rest to others. My only advice for dealing with such people is very firm boundaries. Unless life makes them change, they won't change out of their own volition.

Trauma does the opposite though - it makes the brain more sensitive to stress and adversity. So challenges are fine as long as the person has a healthy support network - otherwise the reverse is true.

I looked after my toddler myself at home throughout my whole second pregnancy and did all the bedtimes. Looking back it was very hard and I should have asked for more help. Everyone is different and have different levels of coping. Maybe she has a condition you don't know about. We need to be careful when judging people as we often don't know the full picture

I totally agree. I have noticed the parents that do the least often struggle the most. They don't seem able to cope with anymore than very basic parenting. In my experience it's normally grandparents enabling it by taking more and more of a parenting role in there grandkids life rather than stepping back and letting there adult children raise the kids thru chose to have.

Has she always been stressed and overwhelmed with things or is this new with parenthood? I'm wondering if she has PND.

I don't necessarily disagree.. i know having a supportive family growing up has given me strength, but i didn't become resilient through leaning on them, i became resilient through learning to cope without them.

It's good to have them to fall back on, and know there is a safety net, but having become disabled while raising a disabled child and coping with an abusive marriage without having to fall back on them is what made me resilient.

It would have been very easy to let everyone else step up, but then how would i ever have learned what i can/can't do if everyone else was doing it for me?

The key distinction here is what the support network ‘looks like’, if they seek to rescue or enable a person it is destabilizing and disempowering.

If the support is enabling, and allows the person to step into new spaces of vulnerability, it supports resilience.

Resilience is considered to be an unhelpful concept now (which I have mixed feelings about), the criticism is that it makes the individual responsible for their struggles in coping rather than the situation that they are in.

I think your gym example illustrates it perfectly.

The more you do, the more you can do.

The less you do, you lose the ability to cope with even the smallest of things.

Those of you who think she's not harming anyone... Have you questioned at who's expense her time to herself comes?

I have a friend who's sister had twins and has barely looked after them. It's total laziness, nothing else. Her parents are completely fed up with the burden being placed on them but don't feel able to say no completely (they have pushed back).

Accepting offers of help given willingly, absolutely fine.

Shirking your responsibilities onto others, not fine.

And OP I totally get why you're at your wits end. I would feel exactly the same. Especially when your parents are the ones giving all the help that you don't want to ask them for in case it's a burden.

Excellent post!

We're not talking about trauma but every day jobs and challenging.

Not always. Living and growing up during a war, can and often does mess people up badly, for life, as were a lot of my family, who lived through, experienced and saw some horrific events, during WW2, and many of them were children. That generation, was taught not to talk about feelings, about what they went through during the war, about the very real trauma they had experienced. But instead, they were told to “just get on with it”. Sadly, so many mental health problems were caused by this, and the fall out from this. Also a lot of alcoholism, and other addictions etc. I guess we all find ways to try and cope the best we can.