Ranting about a boomer...

My grandma has been an absolute nightmare since I had my daughter. For context I am her first grandkid that has had a child. Prior to giving birth she was someone I trusted and thought that she would have my back/respect my boundaries no matter what. However, since giving birth I am now questioning everything I thought I knew about the last decade of our relationship. She has been estranged from my dad for 12yrs, due to family drama, my dad never stopped me having a relationship with her, when I was 18 my dad kicked me out and her and my grandpa gave me so much support. My relationship with my dad was noon existent for a few years but over the last four years we've been working to improve. With the birth of my daughter my relationship with my dad has never been better, but my relationship with my grandma has gotten worse. She was mad about my boundaries surrounding the birth and postpartum period and thought they shouldn't apply to her. When I told her they did she told me I ruined her experience of becoming a great grandma. 5 months later she has cut off contact then restarted contact. She has had several emotional outbursts which she has taken out on me and at this point I don't know how to have a relationship with her that I had before and I don't think it's possible. But how am I supposed to institute boundaries when I've never had them with her? Also as most boomers she has absolutely terrible parenting advice about how responding to your child is somehow spoiling them. Long story short I'm wondering if the years that I spent having a bad relationship with my dad was somehow encouraged by her because it seems like the better my relationship with him becomes the worse it becomes with her. Sorry for the long rant I feel like I have no one to talk to about this but my husband and he doesn't understand.

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The issue isn’t directly with you it’s to do with boundaries and how they don’t apply to her try having a conversation about why you have and set those boundaries and then hopefully she’ll see where your coming from

@Cheyanne so I did try to have that conversation with her pre-birth as well as post. And the same thing that came out of her mouth of those shouldn't apply to her because I'm her first grandchild and she's my grandma. She has a very entitled mentality of where she stands and how we should treat her as the quote unquote matriarch of the family

Boundaries are never gonna make happy people ready to violate them... that's very sad. Since my baby is born I cut off several boomers of my family for the exact same reasons. They are terrible at parenting and yet believe they can tell me how to parent my baby and trespass our boundaries. I don't need this type of people in my life or in my baby's life. Even seriously considering cut off my dad.

@Aurélie yeah absolutely I think I'm at the point now where I don't think I'm going to verbalize what boundaries I have with her I think they're just going to be unspoken. And I'm just going to have to have an invisible line that I don't allow her to cross anymore. But the parenting advice from boomers is absolutely wild. I was on the phone with my grandma on the car ride home and little girl was scream crying because she pooped her pants and I told my grandma I'm going to pull over so I can do a diaper change and she's like" well you shouldn't do that because then you're making your baby the boss and then she's just going to take advantage of you." Like what?

Ahahaah. Wtf with that. My dad told me yesterday after having kissed him IN THE FACE when he knows he can't that my baby manipulates me because he was fussing looking at me for a hug. I just hugged my baby... what's wrong with this generation.

Maybe it’s time to have conversations with dad about why he truly kicked you out and how that correlates to the parenting he received. I think it would be healing to kind of connect dots and also set those boundaries that have never been established. We only learn our true boundaries and standards as we go so don’t feel bad about not establishing any sooner. I encourage you to truly get some understanding of your family history for your healing. This healing is going to start with asking a lot of questions about your fathers childhood and what his experience was vs his expectations and how he has dealt with a lot of the unresolved issues he has with his family. Now I know, everything is layered and nuanced so I in fact don’t know what that would truly entail…. I do believe that it’s a step in the right direction for you. I want to applaud your father for not getting in the way of your relationship with your grandmother and really allowing you to get your own experience of her.

@Elo I appreciate your input on this, however when my dad and I reconcile a few years ago we laid it all out on the table and really came to an understanding of what happened and how our relationship dynamics needed to be for it to work. As I said before we are closer than ever now. I think I'm just looking back at time lost because I'm wondering how much my relationship with him was manipulated by my grandma during our initial fight that led to the fall out. And it took her sticking the metaphorical knife in my back for me to really evaluate our relationship and boundaries. Because before I had blind trust/love for her. I still love her but I no longer trust her and that sucks

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