I see my parents about once a month but talk to them over texts/facebook more often than that. Also my mum keeps “accidentally” butt dialling me so we talk then too.
We all live in London and fairly close together at that, so I usually see them every weekend. My mum likes to text me a lot too.
I’m not generally good at keeping in touch with people, even family, but illness and other events in my recent history have definitely brought me closer to my parents. I find I make more of an effort to engage with them and share things, though I still do not frequently instigate the communication.
I’m lucky to have very loving, patient and extremely generous parents. It makes me want to be a better person and a better child to them. I think I’m gonna call my mum now…
mine are divorced and they both live in the same city but i dont live there anymore, i try and go home like, once a monthish but it depends on money cause it takes a whole tank of petrol for me to get there and home. depends on what is going on etc (my mum had cancer last year so i visited way more)
i’ll call my dad at least once every fortnight if not once a week and also he follows me on twitter which is a level of comfort previously unknown by any family member of mine, im hoping he just glazes over most of it tbh and my mum, we’ll talk on the phone once a week and text every few days tbh
for what its worth, i think i have a relatively high level of communication with my parents but i think living quite far from them has given me more room to communicate with them in the ways that i want, i reckon if i lived near them/saw them in person more i wouldn’t call as much in the week etc
I thought I was quite close to my family, until I met my wife. I speak to my folks a couple of times a week, see them once a month or so, but my wife and her family generally (cousins, brothers, the works) are ridiculously tight. She speaks to her mum twice a day and we seen them 2-3 times a week.
Good job I get on with them really!
@case_sensitive Congratulations on the engagement!
My dad died 2 years ago. I was living with him until a year before he died. I thought we were close, but I would occasionally smoke cigarettes and I hid that from him (or did my best). I also never discussed relationships with him. However, in the last year of his life, he opened up about EVERYTHING that he’d done. He talked about his multiple affairs during his first marriage and some personal trauma I didn’t know about.
My mom died about 8 years before my dad. I thought I was close, but didn’t talk about personal stuff at all. The reason I keep mentioning “personal stuff”, like relationships, is because my wife talks to her mom about ALL of that stuff. They text every day and we see both of her parents two or three times a week (we live in the same city, although on opposite sides). Her mom helped her when an engagement fell apart a couple years ago as well as through other difficult times. But still, there are things she doesn’t talk about with her mom that she will talk with me about.
I don’t know if that helped or not. Also, I’m 31 and my wife is 30. I know that shouldn’t matter, but as information, it can’t hurt.
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Twice or at most four times a year, a week or two around Christmas and maybe a week in the summer, and sometimes they come to me. Otherwise I participate in the close-family WhatsApp group (parents, me, my siblings and, annoyingly, their SOs) and send them WApp messages every now and then.
I live about 150km away and I don’t mind at all. We get along alright if I don’t have to stay at my parents’ place for too long. Otherwise I’m okay being far away from them. If I ever end up moving back to The Netherlands and closer to them I doubt I’ll see them much either. We never communicated much and a terrible teenage period probably means it won’t ever become more involved. The idea to constantly be involved with family feels incredibly stifling to me now.
not often, saw them a couple years ago and talk every couple of months over facebook?
a complicated childhood with 3 siblings that “needed more” and me being non-binary with them unwilling to acknowledge makes it difficult as well as mental health issues on both sides
i do love them but distance is better and safer
I used to see them every couple of months once I moved out and got married. I’d speak to them maybe once a month over the phone or text, usually about random stuff or the next time we were going to meet up which would normally be for some holiday or event. It’s not that we were distant or anything, mostly I just made my own decisions and I really only asked their input on things when I needed advice from experience like buying my first car or house or whatnot. That all changed once our son was born, and now I talk to them every week and see them every other week. They’re very involved in his life and he loves them and my in-laws very much so it makes me really happy to see them all together.
In a lot of ways, I feel remarkably lucky in my family life. Both my parents and my in-laws, at least since I’ve known them, have been extremely supportive and kind outside of the general friction and arguments everyone has with their folks. They’ve also managed to be remarkably cool about things that other parents typically aren’t. My very Catholic mom hasn’t said a word about not raising our son religious, they never once questioned us about when we were having kids, didn’t give us grief for living together before getting married, didn’t try to pressure us about getting married, all of those things.
It’s also really great seeing my son together with them. I never knew my grandfather on my father’s side, I met him a few times but he died when I was so young that I have no memory of him at all. My father’s side of the family is split on him with very strong feelings about the kind of man and father he was. I loved my grandmother and my grandparents on my mother’s side were amazing. They all lived far away though, so I rarely got the chance to see them, once a year for my mom’s side and maybe once every five years for my dad’s. It occurred to me one day that my son, before he was even three years old, has probably spent more time with his grandparents than I had in my entire life.
I talk to my parents every 2-4 weeks but my mom DMs me stuff on twitter daily. I see them a couple times a year (they live 1000+ miles away)
