My partner/friend doesn’t want to take care of their parents – should I even love a person like that?!

Let me start this way: No child who has a good relationship with their parent will leave them for dead. The relationship doesn’t have to be GREAT for this, it doesn’t really even have to be GOOD, most people will stick around even if their relationship was merely tolerable. Therefore, if someone is ready and willing to walk away from their parent at the risk of their OWN reputation and other relationships – because they will be JUDGED for doing so – then there are some serious issues that the parent didn’t want to address while they didn’t NEED anything from that child. It is TOO LATE to be begging for love and care only after that love and care is a NECESSITY if they haven’t done that during the time spanning approximately half a century.

It is easy to look at an old frail man or a woman, in the last years of their life and feel sympathy. To feel sorry for them and the absence of their children, but TRUST ME those children left way before that, and the parent didn’t do anything about it or at least didn’t do enough. You can’t now see the failures of this person, the person they were, the abusive, mean, dominant… when they are no longer in the position of strength and power. What you can’t see now, that person’s kids did. That old person didn’t look into themselves, they didn’t change, and they didn’t grow. And now, they’re sitting there, with a checkered blanket over their knees, their shaking wrinkly hands over the blanket, old, frail, and in need of kindness and a loving word…

… and as a daughter of a mother who never had either for me, I laugh.

You reap what you sow, bitch.

Subscribe to get a Daily Message