I would greatly appreciate the wise counsel of you lovely gransnet members, on this distressing family situation myself and DH find ourselves in. Some background is necessary, and for this reason I’ll apologise now for the length of the post.
We have two DS. DS1 is in his early 40s and married to a lovely woman of a similar age. They are child-free out of choice.
DS2 is mid 30’s and has 2 DC with his fiancée. Again, a lovely girl, the vast majority of the time. We are very fond of her, she’s a wonderful mum, although we feel she does have a little growing up to do. She’s a fair bit younger than DS - in her mid 20’s. We see the grandchildren multiple times a week and help out a lot, which we are only too happy to do.
Our DS are, in the nicest way, possible, chalk and cheese. DS1 is a very calm, laid back chap, DS2 has always been in the middle of some drama or other and can be argumentative. He gave us many sleepless nights when he was growing up . They rarely talk, have little in common. It’s been this way since they were children It’s not that they don’t get on as such, they just have little to talk to each other about whenever they do speak. And sadly, the family situation I’m about to explain is only serving to push them further apart.
For some unfathomable reason, which we cannot quite understand, our youngest DS’s fiancé detests our elder DS’s wife.
Myself and DH, and other family members feel that this stems from jealousy. Eldest DS and his wife both have good careers and therefore a good standard of living, own house, holidays and the like.
Whereas our younger DS, although a hard worker, it’s in a lower paid job, and I definitely struggle, with him, having to fully support his fiancée and the two DC.
At elder DS’s wedding a few years back, we over, heard some nasty comments made by younger son’s fiancé, about the wedding,, whereas we knew deep down, this is the sort of wedding she would have wanted, so we feel the jealousy started there.
We have noticed that eldest sons wife has always tried her best to be hospitable towards her, despite the tension.
DH and I have tried to stay out of this whole situation because it is between the two girls . Sadly, things have escalated recently. This coincides with our eldest son having not long moved house to a larger property and also his wife having a new car. (I will add, they are not bragging people, very humble and deserve everything they have as they both work hard!)
Unfortunately, we now seem to find ourselves drawn into this, as younger son’s fiance is making some extremely untrue and very cruel remarks - telling elder son’s wife that we hate her. This is absolutely not the case, we love both of the girls very much.
Elder son’s wife seem to have reached the end of her tether recently, and, although a very emotionally mature lady, she phoned us up last week in tears, due to these unkind remarks about her on social media.
She feels that we should be doing something to step in at this point, because the comments have now involved us, and these untrue claims.
However, DH and myself do not want to get involved. If we do, we know exactly what will happen - youngest son and his fiancée will stop us seeing our grandchildren. I can both be immature at times, and this is a threat that has been made to us before. So we do find ourselves placating them a lot of the time.
However, at the same time, we hate the fact that the fiancée is making up a complete lot of rubbish about us. We do not hate our older sons wife, she is part of the family. We feel that all this unnecessary hatred stems from jealousy, from the things our eldest son and his wife have, which the younger ones don’t.
DH had a very long and frank discussion with elder son’s wife and told her honestly that we cannot speak to the younger son and his partner about this because we know what will happen - and we cannot bear to lose contact with our grandchildren. We had longed for grandchildren for years, they are the lights of our lives and we can not imagine our world without them around. Our daughter in law was very upset by this and feels that we should be stepping in and defending ourselves and pointing out that this is unacceptable.
We resent the fact we are being dragged into this, and the lies that are being told!
But at the same time, we know the consequences of speaking up to our youngest son. Are we right to stay out put this, for the sake of not losing contact with our grandkids, or should we speak up?
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