This reader wrote in looking for some advice.
It’s always the same for mothers of grown up boys.
After being number one for 20 or 30 years, we are suddenly cast into second, third or forth position.
Do you realise that when you marry our sons? How you take them from us?
I’ve actually accepted it now that both my boys are married.
I knew there would be a time when they turned more to their wife’s family than me.
You hear it all the time as a mother of boys you see…the old adage: “A son is a son until he finds him a wife, a daughter’s a daughter for the rest of your life.”
It is a little heartbreaking at first I admit, but you cope, you move through the pain and learn acceptance.
When it becomes difficult is when your grandchildren come along.
I have two wonderful grandkids aged three and five.
The times that I see them are some of the most delightful of my life.
What is grating is that the already fraught relationship I had with my daughter-in-law has stretched to breaking point now that I have gone from simple mother-in-law to Grandma.
I have a place in their lives, a role, and she simply doesn’t seem to understand what value I can give.
I understand that the first person she will turn to for advice is her own mother, and I am sure that I did that too so I empathise.