Why Mark’s mother treated our children this way was immediately clear to me – she disliked me as a daughter-in-law in the first place. I did not please her in every way. For some reason she thought that I was from a “different” family, that I was poor because my parents worked in a factory and my mother-in-law’s husband was a theater director. But my parents have always lived well, even though they each worked two jobs. We had a two-bedroom apartment, a balcony, and trips to the seaside. My husband’s family was more lazy and conservative, and could only boast of old Soviet-style repairs and a library of identical books. Here my mother-in-law and grandchildren seemed not hers, not native, undesirable.
But why my parents, who had always wished me the best and couldn’t wait to have grandchildren, finally refused to babysit the twins was beyond me. At first, my in-laws helped me a lot. As babies, my brothers often stayed with my mom, but when they got older and started to get a little naughty and chatty, my mom flatly refused to take them in. I was already working at the time, my husband was also bringing money into the family, and no one was going to quit.
We both resented our relatives for not wanting to help, but I resented my mother a lot more. Okay, my mother-in-law, she was understandable from the beginning, but how could my mother leave me like that, knowing that I was already torn between home and work?
We did not want to give the children in the nursery at three years old, so we decided to hire a nanny. But she didn’t last long either. We had to hire another one. And this did not last longer than two weeks.
Every parent thinks their child is golden, so I thought it was everyone around that was bad, not my kids. Until I had to take them to kindergarten. And then all the teachers started saying that the boys were uncontrollable, rude, cruel. They don’t know how to communicate with other children, they only fight with each other.
They advised us to take the children to a psychologist, and after such direct remarks I started to pay attention to the fact that the children didn’t listen. I had never paid attention to this before, since we saw each other less often because of work, but now I understand why parents are reluctant to sit with their grandchildren. That said, it’s not that we spoiled them too much or never punished them for all sorts of schoolwork, it’s just that we missed it somewhere, and now we’re trying to get them back on track before school starts. Maybe, in time, the grandmothers themselves will want to take the twins in when they notice a change in their behavior.
