Dear Prudence,
For the parental guilt trip files: My mom is slow, and tired, and crabby. A normal amount for 80ish. My brother and I are middle aged, and hitting a phase in life where the kids are launched, or nearly, and there’s time and money to spare. We’ve started traveling together, with our spouses. I like his wife, he likes my husband, we all share interests, and we make a good traveling foursome.
Each time we’ve taken a trip together, my mom has posted pictures we sent her on her own Facebook, with a comment about how jealous she is that her kids are doing cool stuff and how she wasn’t invited. We resolved to stop sending her pictures, but if she knows we’re traveling, she begs for them. So we complied, with requests not to post publicly. She “forgot” and did it anyway. So we didn’t tell her about the next trip, and then she took pictures from our social media after the fact and did the same damn thing. “My kids went to the Grand Canyon! How I would have loved to see it again before I die…” Or, “I asked if there was room for me on the kids’ trip to London, but it “didn’t work out this time” and then all her elderly friends commented about how they too are “left behind” by the younger generation.
Her hurt seems enough that I’ve started to question the situation! On the one hand, this is the perfect time for us to do this; our knees won’t hold out forever for the kind of active travel we currently enjoy. And traveling with mom is a non-starter, since she needs multiple naps a day and takes a half-hour to traverse a city block. We do visit them a couple times a year, and on the rare occasion they visit us in our cities, we make every accommodation (paying for parking downtown or taking cabs, instead of herding everyone on the subway, for example) and slow our lives waaaaay down to make it nice for them. I thought we were doing OK in terms of including them and still living our own lives. But she’s making me wonder if our sibling trips are objectively exclusionary and hurtful?