Bad Grandma Thinks ‘Your Parents Die And You Come Live With Me’ Is A Great Bedtime Story
Crazy grandparent stories are an endless source of amusement when they’re not happening to you. The world is full of grandparents who want their grandchildren to call them “Mama” (though I prefer the grandparents who want to be called “Cinnamon”) and who want to climb through the windows of their grown sons’ bedrooms with ladders to rock them to sleep like the mom in I’ll Love You Forever. And then there are grandparents who write crazy fanfic wherein their child and his spouse die in a terrible accident and read it to the baby as a happy fairy tale.
This week a woman wrote in to Dear Prudence because her mother has taken to writing bizarro fanfic for her granddaughter in which the child’s parents both die and the granddaughter and grandmother get to live together forever.
“My husband, our three young children, and I recently went on a vacation with my in-laws. We provided the accommodations. My mother-in-law tries to act more like our children’s mother than a grandmother. She loves her grandchildren, but she is very interfering, judgmental, and disrespectful to me and my husband. On this recent visit she brought a children’s book for our 5-year-old daughter that was missing the last two pages. The book was about a girl who visits her grandmother for the summer every year; my MIL wrote an ending with my daughter that said the girl’s parents died and she got to live with her grandmother forever. It was written like a happy ending! When we confronted her (away from the children) that it was inappropriate, she blamed our 5-year-old saying it was all her idea.”
Man, that’s fucked up. And she spun that as a happy ending and read it to the granddaughter!
Look, lady. Your granddaughter loves you and probably loves staying with you, but she does not love you so much that she would take the death of both her parents as a lucky break. And as much as I am sure you love your grandkids, I bet you’d get tired of parenting real quick if you had to take over the actual parenting and not the grandparenting.
Prudence is on the money with her advice, which is that the woman’s son needs to say, “Mom, that is fucked up. We are not going on vacation with you if you are going to write our children fanfic about us dying in a terrible accident.”
Hopefully grandma will find another way to flex her literary muscles. Maybe she should try erotica. I bet she’d hit the next 50 Shades of Grey, and then the family could take a vacation to their own private island.
