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My best friend is PR by way of NY & her family is so divided & petty it's not funny. When her daughter was little, her mom would watch her after school. While there however, her daughter wasn't allowed to eat anything that my friend didn't bring over that morning (anything left overnight would become property of the house and thus not available to her daughter). If my friend forgot or was running late, her daughter would have to sit quietly at the table during dinner time and watch everyone else eat. Even if they had left overs that were being thrown away my friend's step-father refused to allow her to eat anything from "his house".
Before you think that the grandmother babysitting her granddaughter was their way of helping out and they couldn't afford to feed her, my friend was paying her mom $200 a week for after-school babysitting and offered to reimburse them for her daughter's portion of the dinners but her step-father refused. His counter was that my friend could pay for the entire family's meal or she could provide her daughter with a separate meal daily.
A different friend/neighbor had an uncle who had a very successful business in town but when we were little there were many times that he had to eat dinner at my house because his family couldn't afford to buy food that week. When we were in middle school his family lost their house and had to move to a shelter for a few months. My mom let my friend and his brother stay with us while his parents looked for another place. Eventually another family member, not the uncle, stepped up and let them stay with his family but they lived with us for several months.
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