“God, please kill my estranged daughter-in-law.”
A “grandparent alienation” Facebook page posted this image in support of a grandmother who was estranged from her grandchildren:
The prayer is, “God, please kill my daughter-in-law so I can see my granddaughters again.”
Let’s go through all the different levels of wrong.
First, the grandmother thought that dropping by the house of 4- and 5-year-old granddaughters she hadn’t been allowed to contact in at least a year was going to end in anything but tears.
Second, she did it on a holiday. It didn’t matter to her that she was spoiling other people’s holiday, it was all about making the holiday special for herself.
Third, she wished death on her daughter-in-law. Not a frustrated “Arrgh, just die!” wish that really means “go away and stop being a pain,” but an actual, thought-through desire for her daughter-in-law to die so she could see her granddaughters.
Fourth, she wrote it down. In a prayer. She actually asked God to kill her daughter-in-law.
Fifth, immediately after wishing death upon her daughter-in-law, she addressed a message to her granddaughters. Her mind is so compartmentalized that it doesn’t occur to her that if the girls see the second part of the message, they’ll see the first part, too, and the entire message means, “I want your mommy to die so you and I can see each other.” It doesn’t occur to her that the little girls love their mother After all, the grandmother doesn’t love the mother. She doesn’t feel that losing her daughter-in-law would mean losing the person at the center of her world, the person she relies on for safety, warmth, and love. Why would her granddaughters feel any differently? And why would they think badly of the woman who wanted them half-orphaned?
Fifth, the grandmother shared her message with the world, openly and without shame. She expected other people to think it was perfectly understandable and acceptable that she’d want her daughter-in-law to die.
Sixth, she wasn’t wrong. Another estranged grandparent turned her words into a meme and shared them on another page as a show of support. The other grandparent deletes any critical comments, because it’s hurtful and insulting to suggest that maybe “Kimberly K.” shouldn’t be publicly asking God to kill her daughter-in-law.
I can already hear the objections: “She said it out of desperation. You can’t understand what it’s like until you’ve been estranged from the grandchildren you love.”
That’s not love.
Love means putting the other person’s well-being ahead of your own. It means being able to see the world from their perspective. It means having empathy for them.
Deciding that solely because a child’s parent doesn’t give you what you want, that parent deserves to lose their life… That’s not love. That’s gross selfishness. Assuming that a child would rather have occasional visits from you than the love of their mother… That’s not empathy. That’s monstrous self-centeredness.
Reading this “prayer” and thinking nothing but, “Oh, the poor grandmother, she’s in such pain”?
The thought of people who already have such thoughts of their own. The thought of monsters.
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Holy hell…I’m glad my grandmother hasn’t been stupid enough to say something like that about my Dad. I mean, I know people really hate their in-laws, but good Lord this is obnoxious. This is the exact reason why if you’re gonna cut your kids off from the grandparent, do it on all mediums, including digital.
In which she proved why she is estranged. Amazing.
I read something implying that grandparents can sue for visitation because the grandchildren are in daycare. Is there any truth to this? Have grandparents actually tried to sue parents for putting their kids in daycare?
Grandparent rights are very limited in the US. Absent certain narrow circumstances (usually death of a parent), grandparents generally do not have rights to visitation. Putting a child in daycare would not typically be a legitimate basis for awarding grandparent visitation. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that a grandparent won’t try. Anyone can file in court for just about anything, and even if the case is knocked out in the early stages, it sucks to get dragged into court. Unstable people often use litigation as a means of harassment.
What Magpie said. I vaguely remember a case in which a father sued for custody of his child because the mother—a college student—had the child in daycare, and the father said he could provide better care. During the case, it came out that the father’s idea of “better care” was to hand the child over to his own parents—because the father was a college student, too. I don’t remember what happened, but the coverage of the case was deeply unimpressed that the father wanted to take the child from a mother who was busting her ass to raise the child herself, so the father could give the child to someone else to raise.
In any case, that was a parental custody case with incidental involvement of the grandparents. U.S. courts accept daycare as a legitimate parental choice, so grandparents would have no ground for claiming the parents were somehow unfit for choosing daycare. Some divorced parents have agreements in which any time the child spends away from one parent or school (like daycare or a babysitter) has to be offered to the other parent, and a grandparent could use such language to demand time with the child, but AFAIK the courts would interpret the agreement to allow only parents, not grandparents, to claim the child’s time.
The case was Ireland v. Smith, and it was finally decided in favor of joint custody. The mother, Jennifer Ireland, who had been an honors student with a scholarship, ended up dropping out and moving closer to the father to avoid further custody battles. That was in 1996. Nowadays, things would go a bit differently, especially with the domestic violence claim she had made against the father.
It’s a shame that the best interests of the child didn’t win out in that case. Surely being raised by a dedicated set of parents would have been preferable to being put in a day care all day.
It’s not a shame at all. It is a shame that an abusive man tried to use the court system to continue his abuse of a partner who’d been able to leave him … and, sadly, seemed to succeed.
The best interests of the child may well have been being in day care, and not just because the “dedicated parents” in question were the parents of an abusive partner. People love to knock daycare, but it has many benefits, especially for only children.