I am despairing today. I welcome brutally honest opinions here.
I’m a single parent. I took dc 3 to a large park/play area/walk today and met my niece (4), my parents and my sibling’s in laws. So there was me and two sets of grandparents.
My dc’s dad is involved but for context his parents have died so for DC it is nice he has my sibling’s in laws to be ‘grandparents’ too. My dc refers to them as granny and grandpa as they refer the same to my parents.
Anyway… we (me and my parents) arrive first and went to grab and drink. While sitting and chatting and waiting for nephew and nephew’s grandparents, my mum tries to hug dc. Dc is having none of it and won’t sit on her knee and keeps moving away. I should be clear here that my mum adores dc and both my parents are good to us and they are always buying presents and wanting to see us. But, dc 3 can sometimes be like this, just didn’t want to move off the chair and didn’t want a hug right then. When he’s done this to me I just say oh ok maybe later then? And he’ll either say yes later or just ignore me and carry on with what he’s doing. I was starting to get a bit irritated with mum as she was making an unhappy face and saying please, I want to hug you and dc was getting more annoyed. I said to her just leave him alone a bit he doesn’t like it and he’s said no so just leave it now, he will come to you if you just leave him a bit. I don’t know exactly what tone I said it in, perhaps I was offhand. I just wanted dc to be able to chill and bit and drink his drink. She responded sort of shocked as if she wasn’t doing anything wrong and she just wanted to hug him.
So… then nephew and nephew grandparents arrive. Again for context they’ve met my family a lot and we were all together for Christmas for example. Dc is excited to see his other ‘grandparents’ and immediately runs over and is holding their hands and so on. Obviously this is because they are more of a novelty as they don’t see them as much as my parents.
What happens after that is my mum seems to descend into a huge mood. Very sulky, barely speaking to anyone. chatting when she has to be not really engaging. Kept going off to the toilet for long periods of time. I asked what was wrong, she said nothing but continued to be very off and cold.
Nephew’s grandparents are very energetic (slightly older than my parents by a couple of years). They are very involved with nephew and both are hands on, they’ll basically be a huge help when they are around, you don’t really have to ask anything they just help with ordering food, getting the kids to eat, getting coats on… my parents do help but it’s often if they are in the right frame of mind or aren’t feeling too tired ie you can’t rely on the help if that makes sense. As my mum was being so withdrawn and as they are quite full on, the kids were running and playing with them rather than my mum, it was a perfect storm (so to speak!).
Eventually we get to the cars and say goodbye to them and it all comes out…im awful for telling my mum to back off a bit because it’s made my DC go off her (!!!), i was very cruel, dc isn’t interested in my mum because i said what I said in front of him. My mum was visibly upset so she obviously genuinely feels hurt, however she didn’t really say goodbye to ds properly like she is usually does and instead got in the car (dad came round to the window to say bye to him like usual).
I since messaged her and said it was really unpleasant to behave like that and I hadn’t meant to do anything to put Ds off her, in fact it was the opposite, I was trying to tell her how to best make him want to come to her. She’s now not speaking and neither is my dad by the looks of it either. They’re usually always on their phones in the evening and they’ve not even read my messages. I feel exhausted by it all. Welcome honest opinions on this. I don’t want to hurt my mum but it’s not the first time something like this has happened where I get silent treatment. Sorry for the essay.