Please, tell me how much of a terrible son I am.
Posted by
Mop🧹 (aka rburriel)
Jun 6 '24, 19:35
|
I’ve been planning a trip to Europe for me with my 3 kids for 18 months now. It was going to be last summer but plans for my kids got away from us as they started scheduling summer camps and jobs and stuff and I hadn’t yet committed to anything last Spring, so I just decided to postpone for a year. We’re going for 3 weeks. The budget has quickly ballooned out of control and is now well into the 5-figures. I’ve cashed out numerous retirement funds. It is done.
My Mom and Dad are elderly (they live far away and I see them maybe once/year). Just weeks ago, they sold their house which they clearly could no longer manage and moved into an apartment with some assisted living services. This was my 90+ year old dad finally putting his foot down and making it happen. My Mom has memory issues and just wants what is familiar and comfortable for her. By all reasonable expectations, they should have sold the house a decade ago. But now that they’ve moved, my Mom is very uncomfortable. She doesn’t like it there. So they’ve tasked my brother to plan for them a trip to Spain and Germany to visit family. A trip that will include my brother and his son (my nephew) and - so they claim - me. For this to work for my brother and his son, it would have to be late July/early August. Setting aside that I’m already taking 3 weeks away from work (when I rarely take *any* vacation at all), this would be either EXACTLY DURING or RIGHT BEFORE I’m taking my kids to Europe.
To be clear, there is NO OPTION for “taking a couple of days out of my planned trip and going to hang with my parents instead”. I’ve got “3 days in London” and “3 days in Paris”, etc. Which destination do I sacrifice? This trip with my kids is well organized and fully booked. “Hanging with my parents” while in Europe would require me to cancel several bookings, at considerable cost, then incur additional costs to travel to some other place, so I can sit around in some hotel room or apartment (my parents aren’t mobile, so it’s not like we’d be “seeing the sights”).
The best possible scenario would be for me to travel to Europe to see my parents, then come home, then travel to Europe with my kids. It’d probably be about 5 weeks of vacation time, which I’m sure I have banked, but I was also counting on cashing out some vacation time at the end of the year to pay for some of these expenses.
Bottom line is that if the trip to Europe for my parents actually happens, it’ll be without me. I’m a terrible son. I’m also a 51-year-old adult who shouldn’t be expected to drop everything for his mother. But his mother is elderly and frail and these opportunities won’t present themselves again. But traveling to Europe with my kids won’t happen again, either. This sucks.
|
Responses:
|
