@Beekissed some people just are not used to quiet.
I spend some days at home and some at our office in town. I talk to myself and my dog and the cats and the chickens and the horses. Not crazy, just thinking.
DD's are all moved out but we have dinners with 2 of them average 4/7 days a week. We raised them to be independent and intelligent so it's like visiting with friends. Family is really important, BUT you all have to love and respect one another. My mother, widow for 25 years, (still alive and bitter as she ever was) never understood this. After she took a fall (her love of hard liquor every night and her 3 pages of medicine made her black out) in 2016 and put herself in the ER, then the hospital, then a rehab (nursing home), then back to the ER, back to the hospital, back to a rehab place until they were going to kick her out, hence my drive to Chicago to get her home, and still she blamed me for putting her in the rehab facility. Btw, when the nursing home wants them to go they will often leave them in hall in a wheelchair. When I questioned the wording of her POA, she decided that my cousin should be her POA. She decided this without telling me that they had gotten together to decide this.
I tried to talk to her atty when she was in the rehab, put she had fired him when he wouldn't do what she wanted. Her financial advisor gave me the number of her brand new atty. Her new atty was really wet behind the ears and sounded uneasy dealing with DH (also atty.) We had a good laugh on that.
For YEARS my mother would visit and recount memories of when she was in charge of me, in charge of my DD's and generally, in charge, and never memories of the outings and visits over 30 years and too many criticisms of my DH and insinuation that she would have preferred MY death instead of my brother (10 years ago) and I had had enough. It could have been warm and fuzzy memories mixed with other recent warm and fuzzy memories...but it was never that way.
My DD's share memories and laugh about things, like when last week I thought I had defrosted the chili I froze for dinner, but it was, in fact, the Beans for the chili that I had frozen. That is what families do, share memories and laugh about foibles.
As far as I know my mother is still alive and is running through her platinum home care plan. I figure that the coroner will call me when she dies.
THAT is NOT how you treat your child, and I learned from her and I treasure my own children. Even though I have a not-so-great SIL--middle DD has a lot to do with it with a rebellious introduction--and we don't really know our grandson, we still make an effort to visit them, and give them many 2nd chances.
I try to think of how to make our relationship better and I believe it is inching closer to what it should be. Here is one example. I always buy a pair of really warm socks for everybody for Christmas. In 2016 my SIL told me that he didn't need any more socks. I could have not given him a pair. Instead I wrapped up 2 pairs for my daughter and told her she could keep them both, since he didn't want them. He surprised me by doing a 180 and told me that he would LOVE a pair and that he has sorry about what he had said the year before.
MY mother would have given him a lecture.
Still.........the house now stays clean when DH and I clean it, so we now have settled the argument about who was messing it up. =b
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