Dear Prudie,
I am an only child with a well-off mother who divorced my father and remarried when I was an adult. My husband and I have two elementary school age kids. My mother has never lived terribly close to us, but recently she decided to relocate to a tony retirement community on the opposite side of the country. Her solution to seeing the grandkids is to have weekly Skype sessions with them. On my end, this goes badly. I have to threaten and cajole my kids to engage through a screen with someone they understand loves them, but who they don’t really have much of a relationship with. I’ve been doing it dutifully for more than three years, but it is starting to wear on me, and, frankly, I feel as though if it were important to her to have a relationship with my kids she could have chosen to live closer to us. We live in a highly desirable part of the country for retirement, but this is not where Mom or her partner want to be. So what is my obligation to her? Can I tell Mom that one of the consequences of choosing golf over grandkids is that she can’t then expect them to choose her over coloring?