Dear Prudence,
My husband and I have been happily married for almost 50 years. We have four children and gave them the most stable, loving, idyllic childhood imaginable. I had my career but worked from home to more fully devote myself to them and our household. We were always happy and we’re still close, but none of them seem to want to pass that happiness on to a new generation.
My 46-year-old son is a devastatingly handsome man with a brilliant career, but I wasn’t at all surprised when he recently revealed he had a vasectomy in his 20s; otherwise, he would have left behind a string of illegitimate pregnancies. He has never been married, simply trades his much younger girlfriends in every few years like cars. My 44-year-old daughter also has a fantastic career but has never been interested in marriage or children. My 42-year-old daughter claimed she wanted a family, but only ever picked terrible, glamorous but unfaithful men; the last one just left her after stringing her along until her biological clock ran out. My 38-year-old son is gay and completely uninterested in settling down, much less having a family. I love each of them with all my heart. But my heart breaks with the knowledge that I will almost certainly never have a grandchild.
In contrast, take my younger half-sister. She’s been married and divorced three times and has had countless shorter-term relationships. The legal father of her only daughter demanded a paternity test, abandoned their then 6-year-old daughter when she turned out not to be biologically his, and when ordered to pay child support anyway, moved overseas to avoid it. She then proceeded to drag my niece through hell, forcing her to swap homes and father figures almost yearly, to live with an older stepbrother who assaulted her, and a religious fanatic who beat both of them. And guess what? My niece married a wonderful, well-off young man at 26, and now at 28 is expecting her first child. My sister, despite having saved nowhere near enough to support herself, is planning to retire early and move in with her to help care for the baby. And they say they want three to five children!
I haven’t said anything about my feelings to anyone but my husband, and I don’t plan to. But emotionally I’m struggling to accept how my sister can be forgiven for being a barely adequate mother, setting a dreadful example of marriage, and still become a grandmother, while we can do everything right, give our children the world, and not receive the same reward. Do you have any advice to help me reconcile this in my mind?
—Silently Struggling