I've got a friend who's really having a tough go of it. Her father is ill and undergoing a rather rough treatment. The hospital that is doing his treatments is like 2 hours from his house. A month ago, he came up with the brillant idea of inviting himself to bunk at my friends house for a few days after being at the hospital since her house is exactly halfway between the hospital and his residence.

Now she is really feeling like the scum on the bottom of your shoe because she's tried to do this for a few weekends and its just making the problems that are already in the house worse. She can feel the tension building. That her son and husband resent her father(who treated them badly in the past) invading their privacy and acting entitled in the process. Besides the total lack of privacy, her father not doing his best at being an unintrusive or (God-forbid)gracious guest, her family is already trying to find their equilibrium again, after a family crisis with the oldest teen and she is trying to get a marriage that had moments of being on shaky ground to more solid footing.

My friend has very bad memories of the way she and her two brothers were basically left to fend for themselves after their father won custody of them. It was basically a revenge move by their father against the mother for daring to leave them in the first place. Basically both parents were pretty messed up and had no business bring kids into the world when they were doing too well to begin with. My friend feels in the middle because her brothers have such bad memories of their youth that even tho their father is in a bad way with several medical conditions they refuse to talk to him for the way they grew up was so painful. Being the only daughter my friend wants to help her dad ( a narcisist) but not to the detriment of her own family. Even mentioning a third phone line for him wuld be nice. My friend is fairly well off (due to her husband's work ethic) and picked her as the obvious choice sine he burned so many bridges in the past..

I admire her for putting her family first but I'm also trying to help her resolve her feelings of wanting to help this man who had treated them all so badly when young. He basically was only worried about himself then and signs of being the same way shine thru when he's not watching his behavior...

So it really is a lesson when I tell and show my kids the old addage of treat others the way you want to be treated....In your time of true need, the people you treated well will be there for you and the ones that you didn't treat well, may find this hard to do. :2cents: