How Much Effort

Maggie

How much effort do you put into family members coming to activities with your kids and meeting up with them?

I'm struggling a bit with my mom right now and I'm not sure if I really should be. She moved to the city we live in last summer, so she's been her almost a year. Right after she got here she dehydrated really badly because we live in a desert, she ended up collapsing at a park with me and my son, took her another 2 days to go to the hospital, where she was for 3 days. She also didn't keep a normal schedule when she moved and was basically up until 2am and then sleeping past noon, because she didn't have a job and was struggling to find one.

Every time we plan to get together she avoids us coming to her house and prefers to meet somewhere else or she comes to her house. I've mentioned we are happy to come over to her more than once but she always suggests somewhere else.

We picked her up once to go somewhere together and she wasn't answering her phone or texts, or her doorbell. Turns out she was sleeping and it was like 1pm when we showed up at her house. We waited while she showered and got ready after knocking on her bedroom window and scaring her awake accidentally.

She was supposed to come babysit our son once and had called me at 2am the night prior (I was asleep so I didn't answer), didn't leave a message, and then couldn't get ahold of her. Had to get my husband's aunt to come watch our son last minute because i had a fertility doctor appointment that couldn't be moved. Turns out she had been arrested that night for hitting a traffic cone with her car drunk. She called when she was released at 2pm.

Since then she tries to come to our sons soccer practices every weekend but shows up half an hour late when practice is already over, consistently.

Yesterday we were going to a museum and she was supposed to text me when she was heading to our house. She never texted so I assumed she had something else come up and I didn't proactively call her. She ended up texting me half an hour before we were leaving the museum. I didn't see her message or her phone call because I had put my phone away. She called later that night upset that we had gone without her. I'm not sure I did anything wrong.