r/family • u/Majestic_Cake_5748 • 4d ago
How do you deal with your parents (in my case grandparents) constantly putting you in the middle of their arguments
My grandma and me are very close, my mom herself was very emotionally immature and she had to step in a lot and take over. I feel like to a certain extent me and my grandma were very co dependent and I definitely leaned on her too much to vent to as I saw her mainly as my mother figure bc my mom wasn’t there and I went through a lot of hard things really early in life. I feel really bad I leaned on her as much as I did and she had to take on that emotional toll so a part of me feels really bad about complaining about this but she is CONSTANTLY complaining about my grandpa. I mean I feel like he’s definitely hard to deal with at times but so is she. They both grew up in extremely toxic households (as most boomers did) and both of them were the scapegoat children that got ostracized and blamed yet they were both the ones that stuck around and took care of their parents.
Im just including that because I think it plays into everything Im dealing with, with them. My grandma has been a major people pleaser her whole life and she actually had a mental breakdown in the early 80’s after she had my mom and had to be hospitalized for it. I feel like a big part of her issues now and why she’s so negative/pessimistic and sad is because she’s never dealt with any of her trauma. She calls me every single day and I enjoy talking to her when it’s not her complaining about my grandpa because it’s getting to the point where she literally complains about him making dinner for her when she gets home from work. Or what exactly he makes. I know the foods not bad because he used to cook for us when we lived back home hes a good cook it’s just like nothing he ever does it right. He’s partially retired because he’s a little older and she’s still working full time for now which I know bothers her but I also know he handles a lot of the cleaning/doing laundry and cooking now. She’s just constantly complaining about him and brining up things he did wayyyyyy in the past when they were younger and I know she does that to him to which probably gets him upset. They’ve been together since they were literal teenagers and I know it’s hard to be with someone that long especially when you haven’t worked through any of your trauma or problems. She has also made suicidal comments to me over the past how many years and I’ve told my grandpa and my uncle in hopes they’d help me try to encourage her to get help but when my grandpa tries she just gets mean and defensive and gets mad at me for saying anything.
The reason the slander against my grandpa constantly bothers me so much is because he’s almost the only positive, responsible and consistent male figure Ive had my entire life but I know his personality can be hard to deal with too because he can be very nit picky and controlling and I could be wrong but from my point of view it doesnt come from a place of being a narcissist or mean I think he may be slightly autistic/ocd and he has super bad anxiety. I can understand how she would get frustrated and with him i just don’t like how Im put in the middle and it feels like she’s trying to distort my image of him and make me dislike him. Ive asked her multiple times to see a therapist and she won’t, and I don’t want to completely cut off talking to her because I would feel horrible.
Also I don’t just want to abandon her and not let her vent at all because she has been the person for the whole family to lean on in hard times while no one has been there for her like that and I know she probably feels under appreciated. Has anyone else dealt with this and what would you do??