When Jealousy Rears its Ugly Head

Here it is 1:00 on Sunday afternoon. I'm supposed to be down at my parents house celebrating my two girls birthdays. Natalie turns 9 this Tuesday and Kaitlyn turned 6 a week ago this past Friday. So this was the only weekend in the month of April that my parents were available to celebrate with us. We stopped doing family parties a few years ago and since then my parents have picked a weekend where we just do one party at their house for the girls so my parents can celebrate with us. It all seemed to work out nicely until last year.

I thought last year was just the whole mom and dad are mad that Monica is pregnant again thing. So we had gotten into a huge fight at about that time. There were a few failed attempts throughout my pregnancy to repair things until CJ was born. Even after CJ was born there was still lots of tension and anger there on my parents part, although they say I'm the angry one.

So this morning I called up my parents to tell them just what time I'd be coming over today. It's hard for me to get down there with the baby because it's an hour drive and I don't like telling them I'll be down there one time and then have that be the time that CJ needs to eat.

My father answered the phone with a huge attitude right from the beginning. I knew things weren't going to go well for me today. I remained calm and politely told him that we could come down for 1 if that was okay. I got a well whatever works for you Monica we're all here waiting on you sarcastic tone. Ugh, so I said well if this doesn't work for you then we can just do it another time. So thus began the problem. My dad starts bringing up all sorts of stuff and how they asked us 6 weeks ago if they could take Natalie Friday night and then we'd all come down on Saturday to celebrate their birthday. I explained to him that I had mentioned when he brought up this plan 6 weeks ago that there was a good chance that wouldn't be able to happen that way because I thought there was going to be a Fishing Derby on Saturday. Now fast forward to two weeks ago when I tell them again that we can't do it exactly that way, but Sunday was fine. Now the Fishing Derby isn't until next Saturday, but Joe wanted to take the girls fishing yesterday and well he is their dad and does work most weekends when they are home from school so of course he's going to get to spend time with them. And it's not like I wasn't allowing them a chance at all to spend time celebrating the girl's birthdays.

So now I'm beginning to get snide remarks about Joe spending time with the girls and how he sees them everyday and they don't and all of this stuff. What? Are you kidding me? They are actually jealous of the relationship that the girls have with their father! I'm sure they don't see it that way. They groan every time I tell them that Joe had plans with them or we were doing something as a family. So because of their jealousy our plans for today have changed. We sadly are not going over my parents house today to celebrate the girls birthdays and I have no idea when we will. This is all such a shame too because the girls were really looking forward to seeing them. Knowing my parents though they won't be able to let any of this go and they'll continue to make comments in front of the girls trying to turn them against us. This has been what they've been doing for the past year and the exact reason that our time together has been greatly limited. That's the last thing I need is to have the girls completely turned against me by my own parents.