My daughter is thirty nine and she has a six yr old son. She has been divorced twice; I believe both divorces were linked to her or their substance abuse.
Her younger sister is fine. But we had problems with her beginnning in kindergarten. She was smoking pot at fifteen and had had several abortions by age twenty five. She seemed to have a love hate relationship with her father who impressed her with his level of intelligence and musical talent but abused her verbally when she made outrageous statements (she still does this) and spanked her well into her teens. I stood by too scared to do anything; for that I am forever sorry. She and her sister watched me huddled, crying and scared, in corners of rooms while their father approached me with clenched teeth and fists. I left him in 1985.
She is now afraid to marry but would do so if a man of Any age agreed to pay her bill so has been living with an alcoholic for 2 years. She has a bizarre lifestyle: six days a week she drives around town, buying thrift store finds to re-sell on Ebay and visiting 3 males who she takes places, like to pawn shops for instance, or she just sits around smoking pot and talking with them. NONE of these men are capable of giving decent advice. None are really employed nor do they seem to have families. She does this while her boyfriend is out working Extremely hard from morning til night. He hates it. He wants her to get a job and help him more. Nags her to death daily about it. But all she does is get depressed or angry; she won't work. She does have a real estate brokers license but doesn't like the way "they" do business! Then daily she whines about wanting a job.
On saturdays she takes her son with her on these "visits" and all the thrift stores in town know them by their first names. Her son is very advanced both in schoolwork and mentally. He seems fine to us but we fear the end result. At night her boyfriend gets home and usually starts in on beer drinking. She goes upstairs to bed very early and tries to tune him out.
Or works on ebay.
I think it's important to add a couple of things: first, they are living in a two story log home my husband (not her dad)built for them to build and then sell. People told my H that they'd not sell it; and they were right. They live there rent free now, for two years. They are not "keeping it up" really, but her boyfriend does a lot of very nice carpentry work on it on the inside. He won't lay the floors for some reason, though. This bothers my husband. He bought the flooring and it just sits in boxes! The second thing is that I do feel taken advantage of in the way that I've paid a couple thousand dollars for my grandson's dental work when he was four and I buy him clothes and pay for my daughter's extractions. I cannot just sit by and let them become toothless. I can't do it and sleep at night. She is teaching my grandson, I assume, that the way to handle stress is to smoke a joint or take a few xanax. She is just an unhappy mess and I don't know what to do about her.
She has bizarre ideas with which I do not agree such as feeling that her son is under too much strain having to go to school eight to three five days a week. I think she'd keep him home if it were not illegal to do so. Thank you for reading this far.
Everybody can change their life for the better, if they want to and are willing to work hard. But if they see no reason to do it, it is very hard for someone else to make them change. Take care of your grandson as much as possible, and show him by example another way of living. That way, you might be able to save him at least.