I have a 32 yr old daughter that gave birth to her first baby, a girl, this morning. Our relationship has been over the years, apparently strained, ( I must have been in denial or completely blind to the problems)...
I never say the right thing, do the right thing, and when she came back home (not to live at home but to the area where all family lives) after deciding to get a divorce, 3 rs ago, she met a new man, they knew each other 6 mo, got engaged, he went into debt ( $7500) to get her the engagement ring she always hoped for. They moved in, and she became pregnant 7 no later. He wanted to get married, but they didn't get married.
To say the pregnant came as a surprise is an understatement,as everyone was very surprised as my daughter made it clear that she really didn't want kids. This may have been the reason her 1st marriage broke up.

After heated conversations regarding her imature actions ( driving someone home at 4:30am on very bad icy roads while 8 mo preg)... she told me to stay out of her life, and was told I am not allowe that the hosp or allowed ever to see that baby or her again...

Obviously, there is so much more to this, but, never in my imagination, did I ever see myself having such a hurtful relationship with her, to the point of, neverless, her having a baby of which I can never see.

Today is 1 of the painful days of my life, and in my 50's. I don't know what happened to her to make her so spiteful, hurtful, and hateful. I cannot accept not seeing my grandchild, as I am awonderful gramma to 2 other grandchildren of whom I adore...

Any ideas here?? Im open for suggestions...

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Originally Posted by marwal

I have a 32 yr old daughter that gave birth to her first baby, a girl, this morning. Our relationship has been over the years, apparently strained, ( i must have been in denial or completly blind to the problems)....
i never say the right thing, do the right thing, and when she came back home (not to live at home but to the area where all family lives) after deciding to get a divorce, 3 rs ago, she met a new man, they knew each other 6 mo, got engaged, he went into debt ( $7500) to get her the engagement ring she always hoped for. They moved in, and she became pregnant 7 no later. He wanted to get married, but they didnt get married.
To say the preg came as a surprise is an understatement,as everyone was very surprised as my daughter made it clear that she really didnt want kids. This may have been the reason her 1st marriage broke up.

After heated conversations regarding her imature actions ( driving someone home at 4:30am on very bad icy roads while 8 mo preg) .....she told me to stay out of her life, and was told I am not allowe dat the hosp or allowed ever to see that baby or her again...

Obviously, there is so much more to this, but, never in my imagination, did I ever see myself having such a hurtful relationship with her, to the point of, neverless, her having a baby of which I can never see.

Today is 1 of the painful days of my life, and in my 50's. I dont know what happened to her to make her so spiteful, hurtful, and hateful. I cannot accept not seeing my grandchild, as I am awonderful gramma to 2 otehr grandchildren of whom I adore...

Any ideas here???? Im open for suggestions...

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I am sorry to hear this , and I know how it can hurt...
I think that she has resentment for you, or like she grew up feeling you've been nagging her always. And that she feels you notice her every fault... it can be too that you make her realize her mistakes and she hates it...
Although, I really feel, she has harbored ill feelings towards you... how was your relationship as she was growing up? Especially during her teenage years?

I am sorry, but first it appears a lot of people have been trying to tell her how to run her life, she is grown, although maybe someone should, as a adult she has the right to tell everyone even parents to mind their own business. While yes driving on ice roads and pregnant is silly, it is her choice and trying to run her life is only going to separate you.

It is hard but as a parent of a adult, you smile and are there when they want to come to you, but you havve to stop telling them what to do, stop tellng them they are wrong, they have the right to do the most stupdi thing,

And she may not have wanted to get pregnant, but she did want to have sex, and even the best birth control is never 100 percent and a error in one can make it much higher percent of possiblitiy

So you have to stop preaching to her, you have to not have heated converstatoins about imature actions,

You may have to step back and let her make her own mistakes, love her and visit but stop trying to be a parent of a child, but a parent who is there when thechild needs them.

Telling her you were wrong and telling her you were sorry, for being bossy in her life may go along way to getting started in a new level of relatonships.

This is just my take on reading two paragraphs and taking a lot of assumptions.

Well I can't tell you exactly what you did or didn't do that she doesn't like.

But I can give you a little of my story, I'm 30 and I haven't spoken to my parents in over a year. Before that it was a probably a year or two as well. The only thing that brought us together was my sisters wedding.

Long story short my father is a pathelogical liar and someone who was always a good person that didn't have his last name, making sure to call us names and put us down so that he could feel better. If you were to ask anybody on the outside I'm sure they would be surprised and in fact some were when I really started to open up about it. The name calling stopped when at 16 years of age and now bigger then he was I walked up to him and dared him to say one more thing to me. He backed down and never again called me anything. But the lying, and emotional and mental games continued.

The final straw came when he lied to me about something after I spent 6 months telling him the exact opposite and he F-ed me over one last time. When I confronted him about it he actually claimed to my face that he had no idea what I was talking about. I decided that day his abuse did not warrant my time anymore. I had let it go 27 or 28 years and I was not getting anything from the relationship other then pain and truth be told you can only play the "but I'm your parent" card so many times before it gets overplayed.

Now after I walked away from my parents, he tried to turn my sister against me, then lie to her about me, then actually use her as bait to see me to keep the peace. Never once has the tool actually said anything to her about apologizing. No, in his word it's about lying and using more people including his other children after one has already walked away to get something.

What does all this have to do with you? Well, I don't know your daughters story. I have no idea why she doesn't want to be around you. But I can tell you that I didn't just wake up one day and say, "Hey I'm going to be an a**hole kid, and walk away from my family." It didn't work that way. It was years and years of verbal, emotional, and mental abuse followed up with lies. Then it was lies to cover the lies. As I stated my dad didn't even admit the truth to my own sister, and acted like he didn't know what was wrong with me. Well that's BS and I've got to really press you if you want a relationship with your daughter, it didn't fall apart over night and it can't be fixed overnight. But if you want something you, and I'm speaking from the adult child's point of view here, you damn well better step up and admit to yourself what you've done wrong because saying "I don't know why she doesn't like me" in my experience has been an absolute lie and unless you can face that problem or series of them you will never have a relationship with her.

So it's up to you, not your daughter, but you. If you want something step up and admit where you made the mistakes, tell her you are working to understand how they might have impacted her and see if that can open the doors. But I can tell you that if my dad showed up and said, "I don't know why your mad at me" I'd slam the door in his face. That's a cop out for years, not a one time thing, but years of problems that stacked themselves on top of one another. The choice is yours and it's in your hands, not hers.