I Never Thought I’d Be Writing This But My Wife Linda And I Are Completely Desperate And We Need….
I never thought I’d be writing this, but my wife Linda and I are completely desperate, and we need to know if we’re actually the monsters our daughter claims we are. Because from where we’re sitting, we did what any reasonable parents would do.
But apparently that makes us the worst people on earth, according to Emily and everyone she’s told this story to.
Let me start from the beginning so you can understand our side, because nobody seems to want to hear our perspective. They just immediately jump to Emily’s defense like we deliberately set out to ruin her life, when that’s absolutely not what happened at all.
Our son Marcus is 28 now, and he’s always been the kind of kid who just lights up every room he walks into. You know, that type of person with charisma and charm that draws people to him like a magnet. He could walk into a room full of strangers and walk out with three new friends and a job lead.
And we always knew he was destined for great things because of his incredible personality and natural drive for success.
Marcus went to a good state school, got his business degree, and landed a solid sales job at a reputable company in the city. And he was doing really well, or at least he was until this whole situation exploded.
And now, honestly, everything is a complete disaster.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Marcus has always had expensive taste, which we never thought was a problem because it showed he had high standards and ambition, unlike people who just settle for mediocrity and generic lives without any real aspirations for greatness.
Our daughter Emily is 26, and she’s always been the complete opposite of Marcus. Quiet, studious, serious, always had her nose buried in some massive textbook while Marcus was out networking and making connections that would help him climb the corporate ladder.
Emily got accepted to medical school three years ago. And yes, we were proud, sure, but we also knew it was going to cost a fortune. Medical school isn’t like undergrad, where you can cobble together scholarships and part-time work and make it through if you’re determined enough. Medical school is a machine, and it runs on money.
And we’d already invested so much money into Marcus’s education and his apartment deposit and his car and his wardrobe and everything else he needed to launch his career successfully.
That’s the part Emily never wants to acknowledge. She talks like Marcus just floated through life on a golden balloon while she got nothing. That’s not true. We worked. We sacrificed. We took out loans ourselves at times. We cut vacations. We delayed home renovations. We did what parents do.
We told Emily from day one that she’d need to take out loans for medical school because we simply didn’t have unlimited funds after everything we’d done for Marcus.
And she seemed fine with that at the time. Or at least she didn’t complain about it to our faces.
Everything was going smoothly until about 18 months ago, when Marcus came to us with what seemed like an incredible opportunity that we absolutely could not pass up, as parents who wanted the best for their son.
He explained that his company was promoting people based partly on image and first impressions, and all the top performers were driving luxury vehicles to client meetings. He said he was losing major deals because he was showing up in his beat-up old Honda Civic that we’d helped him buy when he graduated college five years earlier.
Marcus said if he could get a proper luxury car, something German and impressive like a BMW or Mercedes, then he’d be able to close bigger deals and move up in the company faster and eventually make enough money to pay us back for every penny we’d ever invested in his success over the years.
He’d found the perfect vehicle, a gorgeous BMW 7 Series fully loaded with every premium option you can imagine. And it was only $85,000, which when you really think about it is actually quite reasonable for a car that was going to be a direct investment in his career trajectory and future earning potential.
The problem was Marcus had accumulated some credit card debt from furnishing his apartment and building his professional wardrobe. So, his credit score wasn’t great and he couldn’t get approved for a car loan with decent interest rates that wouldn’t eat him alive financially.
He needed us to either co-sign the loan or preferably just buy the car outright and let him make monthly payments directly to us, which would be better for everyone involved and keep everything in the family.
Linda and I sat down and really analyzed our financial situation. And the brutal reality was we didn’t have $85,000 just sitting around collecting dust in our savings account because we’d already spent so much helping Marcus establish himself and we were still paying off some major home repairs and our own car payments and other obligations.
But then Linda had what seemed like an absolutely brilliant idea at the time, and I swear we thought this was the perfect solution that would work for everyone.
Emily was already in her second year of medical school and she’d taken out about $60,000 in student loans and she was obviously going to need to take out significantly more to finish her degree anyway.
So what real difference would it make if she took out a bit more now and just continued with loans for the rest of her education?
We called Emily and laid out the entire situation, explaining how this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Marcus and how it could set him up for incredible success and financial security and how she was going to be a doctor eventually, making fantastic money, so a little extra in student loans really wouldn’t matter in the long run when she’d be able to pay them off easily with her physician salary.
We told her very clearly that we needed her to take one year off from medical school, get a full-time job to support herself, and stop taking out new loans so we could redirect the money we’d been planning to maybe help her with eventually toward Marcus’ car payment because we were going to finance the BMW through the dealership after all.
But we needed to significantly increase our monthly budget to make the payments work.
Emily completely lost her mind on the phone.
She started crying and yelling and saying she’d worked so incredibly hard to get into medical school and how taking a year off could jeopardize her position in the program and how she’d already signed a lease near campus and paid deposits and how being a doctor had been her dream since she was a little girl playing with toy stethoscopes.
We tried our best to explain to her calmly and rationally that sometimes in life we have to make sacrifices for family and that Marcus’ opportunity was extremely time-sensitive because the promotion cycle at his company was happening within the next few months and he needed the car immediately to make the right impression on senior partners and the high-value clients he was meeting with regularly.
She refused, absolutely refused. Said we were completely insane. Said we’d always favored Marcus over her and this was just more proof. Said we were choosing a car over her medical education and brought up all this ancient history from their childhood about birthday parties and Christmas presents and how Marcus always got more expensive gifts.
We told her she was being incredibly dramatic and selfish and that we weren’t asking her to drop out permanently, just to take one measly year off to help her brother during a crucial period in his career development and that she could easily go back to medical school after that year when Marcus was more established and could maybe even help her out financially.
Emily said she absolutely was not taking a year off and she wasn’t going to let us ruin her education for Marcus’ luxury car and that if we went through with buying him that car instead of supporting her, then she’d know exactly where she stood in this family and she’d never forget it.
We told her she was being manipulative and giving us an unfair ultimatum, which wasn’t right because we were her parents doing our best to help both our children even though resources were limited and we had to make difficult choices.
We went ahead and bought Marcus the car anyway because we felt we couldn’t let this opportunity slip away and it would have been terrible parenting to hold him back from success just because Emily was being stubborn about taking one year off from school.
We figured Emily would eventually cool down and see that we’d made the right decision for the family as a whole, even if it required some temporary sacrifice and flexibility from her.
Marcus got the BMW and he was absolutely thrilled. Sent us dozens of pictures of it, all shiny and perfect, in his apartment parking lot, and he promised he’d make us so proud and justify every penny of our investment in his future.
For the first few months, everything seemed great. Marcus was constantly posting pictures of the car on social media, talking about client meetings and fancy dinners.
And Emily had gone completely silent, which we just assumed meant she was getting over her tantrum and focusing on her studies.
Then about six months later, we found out through Marcus that Emily had actually dropped out of medical school, entirely. Not just taken a year off, but completely withdrawn from the program.
We were absolutely shocked and immediately called her demanding to know what she was thinking, throwing away her entire future like this after we’d specifically told her she only needed to take one year off, not quit completely.
That’s when Emily told us something that made our blood run cold.
She said she dropped out because she couldn’t afford to continue without our help and without the financial aid she’d been counting on. That she’d been working two minimum wage jobs just to pay her rent and buy food. And she couldn’t possibly do that and handle medical school at the same time.
And that she’d actually gotten married six months ago to her boyfriend Derek, and we weren’t invited to the wedding because she knew we’d just make everything about Marcus somehow.
We were devastated that we’d missed our only daughter’s wedding, but Emily said coldly that she didn’t want us there after what we’d done and that she and Derek were moving across the country for his job and she needed to completely restart her life now that medical school wasn’t an option anymore thanks to us.
We tried desperately to explain that we never told her to drop out completely and that she’d completely misunderstood what we were asking her to do, but she just laughed this awful bitter laugh and said she understood perfectly clear that Marcus would always come first and she was done competing for scraps of our attention and resources.
That was two years ago and we barely heard from Emily, just occasional polite but distant text messages on holidays.
And then six months ago, we got a text with a picture of a baby, our grandson.
Emily said she’d had a son named Julian.
And he was three months old in the picture. And she was just letting us know he existed, but we shouldn’t expect to be part of his life at all.
We were absolutely heartbroken that we’d missed the entire pregnancy and birth and first three months of our grandchild’s life. And we immediately started calling and texting non-stop begging to meet Julian and be involved as his grandparents like we had every right to be.
Emily finally agreed to one video call and that’s when we saw that she and Derek had this gorgeous house.
And Emily was working as some kind of medical consultant for a tech company making apparently fantastic money even without finishing medical school. And she looked happy and healthy and successful.
And we were so relieved she’d landed on her feet despite dropping out because of her own choices that we definitely didn’t force on her.
During the video call, we asked when we could come visit to meet Julian in person.
And Emily just said never in this cold voice that she’d only told us about him because Derek thought we had a right to know we had a grandchild, but she had zero intention of letting us be part of his life after we’d made it crystal clear that Marcus was the only child who mattered to us.
We tried to argue that wasn’t true at all and that we loved both our children equally and we’d made the best decisions we could with limited resources, but Emily cut us off and said that we’d chosen to buy Marcus a luxury car over supporting her medical education.
And that choice told her absolutely everything she needed to know about our priorities and values as parents.
We brought up how successful she’d become anyway.
And Emily’s face went completely hard. And she said her success was despite us not because of us and that she’d had to completely rebuild her entire life and all her dreams after we destroyed them for Marcus’ vanity purchase.
She said Derek had supported her through the worst depression of her entire life after she dropped out and that his family had embraced her and helped her find a new career path and that they were Julian’s real grandparents because they’d actually been there for her when she desperately needed family support.
We told her she was being unnecessarily cruel and punishing us forever for one mistake and that we deserved a chance to know our grandson and be part of his life.
But Emily said we’d had our chance to be good parents and we’d blown it spectacularly and now we had to live with the consequences of our choices just like she’d had to live with the consequences of ours.
She said if we wanted to be grandparents so badly, we should wait for Marcus to have kids someday.
And she hung up before we could respond.
We reached out to Marcus hoping he’d talk to his sister on our behalf.
But that’s when we discovered that Marcus and Emily haven’t spoken at all since right after we bought him the car because apparently she sent him a long brutal message about how he was complicit in destroying her dreams and he never once stood up for her and he was just as selfish as we were.
Marcus says he doesn’t understand why Emily is so angry because he didn’t force us to buy him the car.
We offered to help him.
And it’s not his fault Emily couldn’t handle medical school and dropped out instead of just taking a year off like we very reasonably suggested.
Here’s the really frustrating part that makes this whole situation even worse.
Marcus ended up trading in the BMW after only about 18 months because he said it was way too expensive to maintain and the insurance was absolutely killing him financially and he actually got demoted at his company for poor performance that had nothing whatsoever to do with what car he was driving.
Eventually he left that job entirely and now he’s working for a different company making roughly the same salary he was making before we bought him that stupid car.
So the whole investment didn’t even pay off the way we thought it would, and we essentially destroyed our relationship with our daughter for absolutely nothing.
We’ve tried everything possible to reach Emily. We’ve sent letters and emails and gifts for Julian that all get returned unopened.
We’ve tried reaching out to Derek, who just politely tells us he supports his wife’s decision, and we need to respect her boundaries.
We even looked into grandparents’ rights laws, but apparently the laws in their state don’t favor us at all since we never had any kind of relationship with Julian to begin with.
Linda is completely devastated and cries almost every single night looking at the one picture we have of our grandson.
And I’m angry that Emily is being so stubborn and unforgiving over something that happened years ago that we can’t change now, no matter how much we might want to.
Marcus thinks Emily is being overdramatic and holding an unreasonable grudge and that she should just get over it already because we’re family and family is supposed to forgive each other.
But I’m starting to genuinely wonder if we really did mess up as badly as Emily claims we did.
Some of our friends have been brutally honest and less than supportive when we’ve told them this story.
A few have actually said they’d have done the exact same thing Emily did if they were in her position and that we clearly favored Marcus and destroyed Emily’s dreams for a car that didn’t even matter in the end.
But here’s the thing.
We didn’t see it as choosing Marcus over Emily at the time. We saw it as helping the child who had an immediate time sensitive opportunity while the other child had more flexibility in her timeline because medical schools have deferred enrollment and leave of absence policies.
And we genuinely thought Emily could just take a year off and go back without any major consequences.
We didn’t understand that dropping out entirely would be the result and we certainly didn’t force her to do that. She made that choice herself when she decided she couldn’t handle working full-time and medical school simultaneously.
Also, Emily acts like we never did anything for her ever, but we paid for her entire undergraduate education and we helped her move into her apartment for medical school.
We were planning to help her more once Marcus was established, but she didn’t give us a chance to follow through on that plan.
And yes, maybe Marcus got slightly more expensive Christmas presents sometimes, but that’s because he asked for specific things while Emily always said she didn’t need anything and was happy with books and practical items.
So how are we supposed to know she was keeping score of the dollar amounts?
We just want one chance to explain everything to Emily face to face and to meet our grandson and be part of his life growing up, but she won’t even give us that opportunity.
And it feels incredibly unfair that we’re being punished forever for what we see as one questionable decision made with genuinely good intentions for everyone involved.
Marcus thinks we should just show up at their house unannounced and force Emily to talk to us in person, but Linda worries that would just make everything worse and push her even further away from us permanently.
We’ve been married for 35 years and we’ve never claimed to be perfect parents, but we always tried our absolute best. And we never intended to hurt Emily or make her feel less important than Marcus.
But apparently that’s exactly what we did, according to her and according to most people we’ve told this story to, which is really confusing because from our perspective, we were just trying to help both our kids in different ways at different times based on what they needed when they needed it most.
So I guess what I’m desperately asking here is, are we really the terrible parents Emily makes us out to be for buying Marcus a car instead of helping her through medical school?
Or is she overreacting and being vindictive by keeping us away from our grandson over something that happened years ago that we can’t undo now no matter what we do?
And if we really are in the wrong here, which more and more people keep telling us we are, what can we possibly do to fix this?
Because it feels like nothing we say or do will ever be enough for Emily to forgive us and let us back into her life and meet Julian before he grows up not knowing us at all and thinking we’re just strangers.
We’re getting older and we don’t know how many years we have left and we don’t want to die without knowing our grandchild and without reconciling with our daughter.
But we also have no idea how to make that happen when she’s completely shut us out of her life and refuses to even hear our side of the story or give us a real chance to apologize properly for whatever we did wrong.
Marcus is actually getting frustrated with us now because he thinks we’re being too apologetic and that Emily is the one who should apologize to us for being so cold and unforgiving.
But honestly, at this point, I don’t even care who apologizes first.
I just want my daughter back and I want to meet my grandson before it’s too late and before he’s old enough to ask why he’s never met his grandparents from his mother’s side and Emily has to explain that we chose a car over her future and that’s why we’re not in his life.
The worst part is that every time we try to explain our side to people, they immediately take Emily’s side and say we’re delusional and that we clearly favored Marcus his entire life and that buying him an $85,000 luxury car while forcing Emily to drop out of medical school was absolutely insane and that we deserve exactly what we’re getting now.
But we didn’t force her to drop out. We asked her to take a year off. There’s a huge difference.
And we thought she understood that.
And we never imagined she’d completely withdraw from the program and give up on her dreams entirely.
We thought she’d be angry for a few months and then realize we were right and go back to school and everything would be fine.
But instead, she dropped out and got married and moved away and had a baby and built this whole new successful life without us in it.
And now she’s bought a beautiful house and has this perfect little family and we’re not part of any of it.
Linda keeps saying we should have just told Marcus no about the car and that we should have prioritized Emily’s education over his luxury vehicle, but what’s done is done.
We can’t go back in time and change our decision now no matter how much we might want to and no matter how many people tell us we were wrong.
We made a choice and we have to live with it.
But does that mean we should be completely cut off from our grandchild forever?
Is that really fair punishment for one bad decision made with good intentions years ago when we were just trying to help both our children in the ways we thought were best at the time, even if we got it wrong?
I honestly don’t know what else to do or say or try because Emily has made it clear she wants nothing to do with us and that our relationship is over and that we’ll never meet Julian and that’s just how it’s going to be for the rest of our lives.
And it’s killing us.
It’s absolutely destroying us to know we have a grandson out there who we’ll never get to hold or play with or watch grow up.
And it’s all because of one decision about a car that didn’t even end up mattering for Marcus’s career at all.
And that’s what keeps me up at night.
Not just the regret, but the sick feeling that maybe, just maybe, we told ourselves a story for so long that we stopped hearing how it sounded to anyone else.
Because when I replay that phone call with Emily in my head, I can hear her crying. I can hear her begging us to understand. I can hear her trying to explain that medical school isn’t something you pause like a Netflix show.
And I can also hear my own voice, calm and firm, telling her what she “needed” to do, like I had any right to dictate the shape of her life.
Linda keeps insisting we were trying to be practical.
But what’s practical about asking your daughter to step off the one road she fought to get on, just so your son can pull up to a meeting in a nicer car?
I’m not saying that to be dramatic.
I’m saying it because I can’t stop thinking about the way Emily used to look at us when she was a kid.
Marcus was the kind of child who demanded the room. He didn’t even have to try. He’d walk into the kitchen and start talking, and Linda would turn toward him like a sunflower toward light.
Emily didn’t demand anything. She’d sit at the table and read, and she’d look up sometimes like she wanted to speak, but then she’d go quiet again if Marcus started telling a story.
Linda says that’s just personality.
But I’ve started wondering if it became her personality because it was safer to be quiet.
When Emily was in high school, she’d come home with her backpack heavy enough to bend her shoulders and go straight to her room. She’d study for hours. I’d peek in, see her scribbling notes, and I’d feel proud in a distant way, like you feel proud of a machine that runs smoothly.
But Marcus would bring home a friend, crank music, laugh in the living room, and Linda would make snacks like she was hosting a party.
I’d tell myself it was fine because Emily didn’t want attention, because she didn’t ask for it.
Now I’m starting to wonder if she stopped asking because she learned early that asking didn’t change anything.
Emily says we kept score in dollars.
We say she kept score in resentment.
But maybe the problem is we only recognized her value when it was loud enough to interrupt our lives.
The day Emily got accepted into medical school, she called us with a voice that sounded like she was shaking, like she couldn’t believe it was real.
“Mom,” she said, “Dad. I got in.”
Linda cried. I remember that. I remember hugging Emily and telling her we were proud.
But I also remember what I said next.
I said, “Okay. We need to talk about costs.”
I said it like we were negotiating a car lease.
Maybe that was the moment she realized even her biggest dream came with an invoice in our minds.
And then, when Marcus asked for a BMW, we treated it like an emergency.
I keep telling myself Marcus’s job was time-sensitive.
But Emily’s dream was time-sensitive too. Medical school isn’t forgiving. Programs don’t hold your place because your parents decided your brother needed an image upgrade.
We thought a leave of absence was simple.
Emily said it wasn’t.
We didn’t listen.
And then, when she dropped out, we got angry at her like she’d committed a crime against us.
We called her.
We demanded explanations.
We said she was throwing away her future.
But we never said the one thing that might have mattered.
We never said, “We were wrong.”
We never said, “We panicked, and we made a bad call.”
We said, “You misunderstood.”
We said, “You’re being dramatic.”
We said, “You’re selfish.”
Linda keeps insisting that Emily had options.
Work more. Borrow more. Tough it out.
As if exhaustion isn’t a brick wall.
As if studying medicine while working two jobs is something you can will yourself through.
We didn’t live that life.
Emily did.
And she paid for it with her dream.
The worst part is Marcus doesn’t even feel guilty.
He feels cheated.
He feels like Emily “overreacted,” like she’s punishing him for something he didn’t do.
But Marcus did do something.
He took the car.
He posed with it.
He soaked up the attention.
He let us believe it was worth it.
And when Emily disappeared from our lives, he didn’t go after her. He didn’t call her. He didn’t show up at her apartment. He didn’t ask, “Are you okay?”
He just shrugged and said, “She’ll get over it.”
Now Marcus wants us to show up at her house unannounced.
He wants us to force a conversation.
Because Marcus has never understood boundaries. He’s never had to.
Linda is terrified of that idea.
She says if we show up, Emily will call the police, and then we’ll become the kind of story she tells at dinner parties.
The delusional parents who can’t accept no.
And the truth is, Linda’s right.
But then Linda cries at night and says, “I just wanted to hold him. Just once.”
She stares at Julian’s picture until her eyes swell.
I stare too, even though I pretend I don’t.
Because that photo did something to me.
It made this whole thing real.
It made our consequences have a face.
A tiny, serious face with a tuft of dark hair, wrapped in a blanket.
Emily’s eyes in his eyes.
And the thought that he might grow up never knowing we exist feels like a punishment that’s too large for one mistake.
But then I remember Emily’s voice on that phone call.
I remember her saying, “You picked a car.”
And I wonder if, to her, it wasn’t one mistake.
It was the final proof of a lifetime.
We told ourselves we were helping Marcus “reach his potential.”
But maybe we were just addicted to the feeling of Marcus needing us.
Emily didn’t need us in the same way.
Emily needed support that didn’t make us feel heroic.
She needed steady, quiet commitment.
She needed us to say, “We believe in you.”
And then actually back it up.
We didn’t.
So now we’re here, writing this, asking strangers if we’re monsters.
And I hate that I’m even asking, because the fact that we have to ask might be the answer.
Because a good parent wouldn’t frame this as, “Are we monsters?”
A good parent would frame it as, “How do we take responsibility without making it about us again?”
We’ve tried apologies.
But our apologies probably sounded like explanations.
We’ve tried gifts.
But gifts are what we always used when we didn’t know how to be emotionally present.
We’ve tried reaching out to Derek.
But Derek is polite, and that politeness feels like a wall.
“We support Emily’s decision.”
“Please respect her boundaries.”
He says it like he’s reading from a script.
And maybe he is.
Because Emily wrote the script.
Because Emily finally has control of her life, and she’s not handing it back to the people who treated it like a flexible budget line.
Linda once suggested we offer to pay Emily back.
Pay her loans.
Pay what she lost.
We looked into it.
Then we realized we don’t even know what she owes anymore.
And even if we wrote a check, would that fix what we broke?
Or would it just prove Emily’s point that we only understand love as money?
Sometimes I think about the wedding.
How she got married without us.
How she chose a day that should have been sacred and kept it from us.
I used to be furious about that.
Now I feel something else.
Shame.
Because she didn’t exclude us to be cruel.
She excluded us because she didn’t feel safe.
She didn’t want her joy contaminated by our priorities.
And maybe she was right.
Because if we’d been there, would we have asked about Marcus?
Would we have made a comment?
Would we have smiled too wide and tried to reclaim her like she was property?
I don’t know.
And that scares me.
Marcus says Emily should apologize.
Marcus says she’s cruel.
Marcus says she’s holding a grudge.
But Marcus isn’t the one who worked two jobs while studying anatomy.
Marcus isn’t the one who dropped out and rebuilt a new career in the rubble.
Marcus isn’t the one who carried the depression Emily described.
Marcus’s life barely changed.
Emily’s life had to be rebuilt from scratch.
And we were the ones who lit the match.
So what do we do?
If we show up at her house, we might lose her forever.
If we do nothing, we lose her anyway.
And we keep circling this thought, like a dog chewing a sore tooth.
We are getting older.
We don’t want to die without seeing our grandson.
We don’t want Julian to grow up hearing a story where his grandparents chose a car over his mother’s dream.
We don’t want that to be our legacy.
But we also don’t get to pick the legacy.
Emily does.
Because she’s the one who lived through it.
And the more I think about it, the more I realize the question isn’t whether Emily is overreacting.
The question is whether we’re still refusing to understand that she doesn’t owe us forgiveness.
Not because she’s vindictive.
Because she finally learned how to protect herself.
We taught her that lesson without meaning to.
And now we’re living in the quiet, empty house of that lesson, staring at a single photo, wondering how to undo something that can’t be undone.
So, I’ll ask again, even though I’m ashamed to.
Are we really the terrible parents Emily makes us out to be?
And if we are, what can we possibly do now that doesn’t just make it worse?
Because it feels like nothing we say will ever be enough.
And it feels like the clock is ticking.
And I’m terrified that one day, years from now, Julian will be old enough to understand what happened.
And Emily will tell him the truth in one simple sentence.
“They chose a car.”
And he’ll nod, and accept that, and we’ll become a cautionary tale.
Not parents.
Not grandparents.
Just an example of what happens when you confuse love with investment.