The Story Your Friends Don't Want to Hear

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You get the call you've always dreaded. You go pick up the grandkids and you tell yourself that it's just temporary until your kids get their life together.

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But years later, you're still raising the grandchildren.

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Your friends have stopped calling because they don't want to hear the screaming kids in the background. It doesn't matter how much you do to keep the peace. Your partner's drinks keep getting stiffer and stiffer. Stay tuned for episode nine, the story your friends don't want to hear.

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Welcome to grandparents raising grandchildren nurturing through adversity in this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of grandparents raising grandchildren as we navigate the complexities of legal, financial, and emotional support. I invite you to join us on a journey of exploring thoughts, feelings, and beliefs surrounding this growing segment of our society. Drawing from real stories and expert advice, we will explore the nuances of child rearing for children who have experienced trauma, and offer valuable resources to guide you through the intricate journey of kinship care.

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We'll discuss how we can change the course of history by rewriting our grandchildren's future, all within a supportive community that understands the unique joys and struggles. This podcast was made especially for you.

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Welcome to a community where your voice is heard, your experiences are valued, and your journey is honored.

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I love my children and all seven of my grandchildren, but no one could have possibly prepared me for what life would be like raising two traumatized children at any time in life, much less this time in my life.

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We've sacrificed being the loving grandparent that spoils their grandchild with gifts and welcomes them for a sleepover in order to be the tough love, exhausted parent that never gets a break, all while coping with the trauma that's going on. In our relationships with our partners, our families, our friends, and our children, we take on incredible challenges just to keep the peace. On the outside, our lives may seem fairly normal, but that's because we learn to get very good at taking things one day at a time.

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On the inside, we're just barely holding on. All of our stories are tragic, and there's always one worse than yours. This is the story your friends don't want to hear. Today I have with me Cathy Shostrom. Kathy is the mother of five children, 15 grandkids and two great grandkids. She raised two of her grandchildren. Kathy, you began raising your two grandchildren. In your mid forties, I think around 44, 45? Yep. And your husband was a few years older than that. He's five years older than I am.

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So he was close to 50. How did you step into that role? We were always close anyway, just because we loved the grandkids. They were our first two, but we knew that the mother and her living boyfriend at the time were really having issues, and things just didn't look right. The kids would really be so upset about having to go home when they had to go home after they'd stayed a day or two with us, they just didn't want to go back in the house, so we just kind of kept an eye on things. And one day, the boyfriend decided he'd had enough, and so he was going to leave. The mother decided that she probably just couldn't handle the kids herself, but she always really liked sympathy, so it was her way of, look at me, I can't do this. She called me. I'm so sad. I have to give the kids away. And she sent the kids over to their dad in Seattle. He had his own issues, so they didn't really have a bond at all with their dad, and he was remarried, so I couldn't believe she had sent the kids away. We didn't even know they were going until they were on their way out the door.

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I would talk to the kids a lot, and they would be upset and really having a miserable time over there and crying.

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And it turned out there was a step brother there that was older than them that was really picking on him. And we didn't realize at the time was sexually abusing at least the boy, our grandson, our granddaughter, doesn't know if he ever did with her, if she's blocked it out or whatever. She has a lot of PTSD. So, anyway, my daughter was still here with the third child she had, but she ended up getting busted for drugs. And that third child went to her dad here, which was the boy and the friend that she lived with for a long time. So during this time, she was in jail. And finally the dad called us and said, you know, the kids just don't have a bond with me. They're miserable. They want to go back there. They want to be with you. And I been on the phone with them when the stepbrother would be picking on them, and as he's picking on them, they're crying on the phone, and he's telling them, whispering, you better not cry.

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You better not get upset. Mom's sleeping, and you know how much trouble you're gonna get in if you wake her up. So they had to just take it, and it just was breaking my heart. So one day, the dad said they wanna be with you. They just, you know, I could just tell it was so bad, and my husband could, too. So he said, we have to go get them. They were over in Tacoma, and we just. We just knew we had to do that. It was just getting worse and worse with the phone calls we were getting and listening to this kid in the background. And he knew I could hear him, but he knew the kids were too afraid to call out or cry too much. So anyway, we went over and got the kids, and the youngest was willingly gave them up. He said, they want to be with you. It's not that I don't want them, but they're miserable.

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I don't know what's going on here. He had no idea he'd been through foster homes. He was raised a bunch of foster homes, and he was sexually abused in foster homes, too, and told, I don't care what you do by the foster dad that he was with, as long as you go to school so that I can get my check. And so he didn't really know how to be a family or really be a parent. He was a good guy and he wanted to be part of a family. When my daughter and him were married, I thought since he didn't know how to be a family, he wasn't really raised by one, that he might never want to come over and not want her to come over, but instead it was opposite of that. Anytime she was going to come over to our house, he goes, wait for me. Wait till I get home. I want to go. He so bad wanted to be part of a family, but he was now, at that time, on his third marriage. And like I said, the boy was just abusing him so bad, we could tell and was just breaking our hearts. So when Doug called and said, they're so miserable and they don't have a bond with me, and this breaks my heart that they're like this. It hurt him that how it was, too. So we were willing to go get them because we thought my daughter would get out of jail and say, these are my kids.

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I want my kids back. And, you know, we would have said, go to parenting classes first, and, you know, we'll work into it. So we thought we might as well go ahead and get them started in school here so they would be ready and set up when she got out. So we went over to Seattle, picked up the kids, and she ended up not coming to get them. Somebody bailed her out, and she was supposed to go back to court and didn't.

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So a couple months later ended up back in jail longer. When she got out, she still didn't come to get him, which I was sure she would come fight me for the kids. She just came over one day and said, I'm going to show you how much I love my kids, and you're going to keep them because they'll be better off with you. And I'm like, what the heck? That's not what we were thinking.

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We thought you would be a mom. So that's how we ended up having them all the time. Cameron was going into first grade. We got her in August, just before first grade started for her, and then Tristan was going into third grade when we got them. So we went over and got them.

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We thought it was probably gonna be short term, and that was it.

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There was some back and forth there with Cameron and her mom, but we ended up with them till they. And they went out on their own. But to this day, they're 2024 and 27, and they both still, whenever there's big emergency, they need somebody to talk to. We're the ones they call, even though they do have a relationship with their mom and their dad will always be their parents.

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Yeah, they call them mom and dad, but they know we're the ones that they can count on. So we still have a really close relationship with them. They're both ones, out of all our kids right now, that have children of their own. So Tristan has a little boy, and Cameron has a little girl, and they're four and six.

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What would you say were some of the most challenging obstacles that you overcame during that time period? How long did you have the grandchildren? We had them a lot before they went, but once we went and got them, we hadn't Tristan until he was 18. He went from third grade to. He didn't actually graduate from high school. And then Cameron, she wanted to be with her mom so bad that she felt like it was keeping her away from her mom, and because her mom would tell her that she wanted her, but she wanted to tell the kids what the kids wanted to hear. But your grandma won't let me, which wasn't true, because she didn't want them, because she wanted to do what she wanted to do and sound like the good person, because she was doing right by the kids by letting them stay with us while she was still out using.

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So Cameron just fought me all the time on it, but she was the one that would come home and do her homework and cared about that and do the things that she needed to do. So I felt like she was going to be okay. She was just really mad about the situation. Tristan really had issues almost from day one. I was back and forth to school.

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He was so hard on himself, such a perfectionist.

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He had really nice handwriting, and he would be doing his spelling test, and he'd be writing his letters, and he didn't feel he wrote it down good enough because he knew he could write better than that. So he'd erase it, and the teacher would be going on to the next word, and he gets so upset that he wanted her to wait so he could write it down neater. Then he would do things and he'd get in trouble. And Tristan, they kept calling me. I got called from the grade school all the time, saying, he's just having such a hard time. He's a good kid. He's a sweet boy. He has such a hard time. And finally, at the fourth grade, at Christmas time, when they were going to have their two week break, they called me, and they were really nice. They were doing everything they could to help. And they finally said, after the break is over, don't bring him back. They said, you're gonna have to find something else for him, because he's a good kid, and this is just making him worse. All the issues, it's bringing his self esteem down more and more and more, and it's getting harder and harder for him. It's just hurting him too much to be here, and he's not getting anything out of it. So that was hard. So what did you do about that?

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Well, there's a school in town called crossroads. They suggested putting him in there. It was for kids like him who need a little bit more. The kids were more into their learning age groups, not age group. He went there, and that seemed to help a lot. He was able to function better there. That helped him. But, you know, they started putting him on some different meds. They thought early he was probably bipolar. And so when Cameron kept bothering me a lot about going back to her moms, for a while, I thought her mom was better. It's not that I chose Tristan over Cameron, but I thought, well, you know, she's the one who's just getting so out of hand because she's so angry that I won't let her go to her mom's. Chris really wanted her at that time, not both, but we decided to go ahead and try it because it was getting so hard. The two fought all the time. There was always competition. It made it really hard for my husband and I, for our marriage, because it was just too much. So I finally let her go because I thought, if I'm going to let one of them go, I know darn good and well that my daughter would never do the counseling, do the school time with Tristan, and make sure he had the meds. And if things weren't working, she wouldn't call the doctor and follow up. She wouldn't follow up and do any of it. So I thought, Cameron, she's doing her schoolwork, she comes home, it matters to her to get her homework done.

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So I thought, that is the easier one to go ahead then. And she's the one who just demands all the time to go. So I let her go. Now, to this day, there's times she gets upset because I didn't fight for her. And I said, you made it so hard. You wanted to go so bad. Well, you could have fought harder to not let me go. I don't know if it was like a year, and the school called me and said that she was cutting herself. And I was shocked to hear that. And I said, but she's with her mom. They said, yeah, we know, but that's why we're calling you and not her.

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So I said, okay. So I called up my daughter and I said, that's it. I'm coming to pick her up. We're taking her back. And of course Chris cried, but she let me. There was no battle there.

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In the meantime, I was getting called Tristan. Now, he had gone through crossroads, and he was in the high school glacier. And the people I worked there were really good. They were really good at helping him. He had an IEP, which you need to get right away. But I was getting calls almost daily of some little thing. And fortunately, we had our own business, so I was able to take the calls, leave work anytime I needed to, or I would have been fired, like, a long time ago for how many times I had to take phone calls or leave, but just wanted to stay on top of it and help that kid. In the meantime, we got Cameron back, and she ended up her dad, got divorced and remarried another gal. But this gal was pretty nice. We'd met her, they come over to visit the kids, so she wanted to go live with her dad for a while. So she did that for a little while, and then we had just had Tristan, but then she came back and stayed with her mom again, and they would have terrible fights because her mom was still using. And eventually they started using together, and that was always just a mess camera to get mad and slug and put a hole in a wall. She was just an angry, angry girl. We finally had to get Tristan. He just couldn't do the high school. He would do stupid things just to try to have friends.

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I think it might be the bipolar very. They're very adrenaline junkies and just do stupid things. He's not a bad kid, but it got a little out of control with him, and we started getting a little worried about him. He was getting to be a big kid, and my husband told me he couldn't do something. He got mad and kind of rammed into him and shoved him up against the truck, and that was it. It got bad enough that time. We ended up calling the police because we just weren't sure what was going to happen. Of course, we got the lecture from the police that I have a son, too, and, you know, I don't call the police when they're being naughty. I handle it. I'm the parent. He wasn't very supportive at all, so he did that, and my husband told him to just get out of here.

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And he took these great big rocks, and we're throwing them all over the driveway.

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So we didn't always get support when we needed it because, oh, you're the parents. You don't just call the cops because your kids being bad. And, you know, he had no idea, and he didn't want to hear it either.

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Cameron did come back to live with us a couple different times. I got her into rehab in Idaho falls once. She was there for a while, and I had to take her down there, and I went down there four different times to Idaho falls to have meetings with them and to just spend time with her. She didn't graduate from high school, but she did go back and get her ged. She set that up all herself, which she was always afraid to do those things, but it meant a lot to her, so she made the phone calls and took care of it. I was really proud of her for doing that.

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Then she got using a whole lot more. She came and she lived with us.

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She was doing things like sneaking out and all kinds of stuff, and found out how much she was using. She wanted to go back with her mom because they could use together. And finally one day, she was with a guy that he was going slow, but he got mad at her. So we pushed her out of the car while it was moving, and she called her mom to come get her. And her mom was messed up, and she realized that at that point, she thought, I don't want to be like this when I'm my mom's. Age and be where she's at. So she called me up and said, I'm ready to go get help. So we took a lot of work, and it was expensive, but we got her into Rimrock down in Billings, and she was down there for a while, and she wasn't down there very long, and she was begging to come home. And we're like, nope.

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So she, she finished it all, and I ended up going down to Billings a few times and visiting her. I did all the things the parents would do. So now they're both doing good. You know, they're always going to struggle.

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But Tristan is raising a son. He's got him at least three days a week and gets him to school sometimes four days a week. But they're just like best buddies.

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Tristan's kind of a big kid, so that's great for Harley. They are out riding bikes all the time, playing and fishing, and they just, that's just what they like to do. Tristan, with all his issues, is being way more the parent that his parents ever were to him. So I'm really proud to see that he's able to do that, which he always says, if you guys wouldn't have had me, I wouldn't be doing this. I wouldn't know what I want to be like.

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So you see how much you put into it has really helped. And Cameron, she has a decent relationship with her mom. They fight, they argue a lot, but she still has so much anger at her mom for doing the things that she did and choosing that over her kids. Camera got out of Rimrock and she got pregnant maybe three months out, but fortunately, she'd been clean for a really long time while she was in there, and she has not used since. She's a really good mom, other than she has her own issues. And when she gets upset, she can really fall apart, and she can lay a pretty good guilt trip on her daughter sometimes. The daughter's only four. She won't listen to me.

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She'll call me. She won't listen to me. She won't do what I tell her to do. And look at her. She'll show me her phone. But she adores that little girl, and Cameron's married now, and he just loves the heck out of little girl.

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Do you think it's necessary for you as a grandmother, to restrict the, the grandchildren's exposure to the parents? I'd say it's a tough one because the kids are getting a little older and had a mind of their own and saw how they saw things or what they wanted to see and what their mom wanted to tell them. If she could have been consistent and came when she said she was going to come and came by herself, when she would come visit, the kids called. When she said she was going to call, then I see that as a positive thing.

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But she didn't. She would say, I'm going to come get you next week, and never show up. And they'd wait and wait and wait, and then they'd be angry.

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For a couple of weeks. I kept wanting their mom to spend some time hoping that would help them. It was just a really tough spot. I didn't want to hurt the kids. I wasn't so worried about the mom anymore. It's been so many years of this stuff. I was so over it. You just get a hard heart after a while, you know? I mean, I just had to. I'm like, you do you. I'll take care of your kids.

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I can't worry about you anymore. I just couldn't. But the kids would be so excited. Their mom would somehow get ahold of them or stop by school or something or see them somewhere and tell them they were going to do something. They were so excited that I would tell them, I don't think it's a great idea right now, and they'd be so upset and so angry. Of course, she was always telling them it was our fault that. That their mom wasn't around, which wasn't true. So had I realized how inconsistent she was gonna be, we just probably should have just stopped it altogether until certain parameters were met. But we were so busy dealing with these kids that I just couldn't go there. One of the problems, I think, that we run up against when we take on raising grandchildren is not only that we're managing family trauma, but the complicated intergenerational relationships that happen because of this. Yeah, I think so. It was hard because when we would let her have them for a little bit, she didn't want to have the kids, but she would let them all know that was because she can't afford them. And if I would help her, she'd be able to do this and that and putting all that stuff on me. So when the kids came back, they were so angry at me for the longest time. It just messed them up. How did you feel that you did with controlling your anger and your emotions towards your kids over what they were doing to their grinch? I would be polite when she was around, but I know I could be just kind of cold. I mean, I didn't feel like the warm fuzzy. I wasn't mean, you know, they'd say, it's mom's birthday. Will you please let her come up here and we'll make her dinner. She'd show up two, 3 hours late.

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It just happened all the time. So I couldn't help but be upset. But I'm not a yeller screamer. I don't call names. I'm just not that person. So I would, you know. Dinner was at six

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00 and then you brought two kids with you too, that you're paying attention to and laughing with. But the kids were just so happy she was there. They just couldn't understand why are you mad at mom? They knew I was not happy. I tried really hard because I wanted to make it okay for the kids, but it just was always hard.

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I know we have challenges in our marital relationships. How did your husband handle everything?

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Well, he said we should go get them. Which I was glad that he felt that way. But the hardest thing for him was we talked about it the other day. He said it was more just. They're fighting and arguing.

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We'd have long days at work. We started a business. We were supposed to build a new building. I didn't have time for that anymore. So property sat there for a while before we could build. And once we started, I couldn't be that involved because I was always having to go to school.

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So it was just stressful getting this business going. And then we'd come home and the two kids. And as to this day, the one cannot let the other one have the last word. It doesn't matter how mad. And I finally just. And I'm not a yellow buddy, I'll just stop it. And they still couldn't. I couldn't get one of them to stop. There'd just be so much anger between those two kids. We'd come walking in the door and they'd be standing at the top of the stairs, both yelling about what the other one was doing. And we're just walking up the stairs. And this would go on. You just couldn't get them stopped. And you'd have to separate them. And they'd be yelling in through the bedroom wall. So that was the hardest thing for him. He said we'd just be tired and we'd come home and there was just so much stress at the anger that those two.

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The way they fought, it just wouldn't stop. How did you cope with stress? He started pouring his drinks longer and bigger and going downstairs and turn on the tv and trying to not deal with it. And I would fix dinner and do homework and do baths and do dishes and visit with the kids and do whatever I needed to do. I took on even more just trying to keep peace, to keep my husband not feeling the stress as much. So I took on more and more and more of it and more of the stress and then trying to appease him a little bit. And he's a good guy. I just wanted to. I'm a peacekeeper, I guess. I just really tried hard to keep handling as much of it as I could myself. And, you know, he got to where your mixer was the part, the other part should be, and just kept getting more and more, and so then we would really struggle. What did you do for yourself? There wasn't time to do anything for myself. As long as I could see that he wasn't mad about it, he wasn't struggling. I felt better. That didn't always work very well. I really didn't have time to do anything myself because with their mental things, too, it was full time. It was just all the time. Plus, we were starting a business. What did you do about friends and social relationships?

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We didn't get to have a whole lot of those because we had kids now.

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A lot of people didn't want to do things. It was, one of my son's birthdays is New Year's Day, and a friend of ours, her. Her birthday was New Year's Day, but she's 30 years older than my son. We wanted to do a New Year's Eve party because it was my son's 30th and her 60th. But the other people we invited that were friends of our friend couple. Nobody else came. And my friend told me later, she said, you know, a lot of people said they didn't really want to. They didn't want to go where there's kids. They're old enough. They don't have. Have kids anymore. They don't want to do that. So I wouldn't say we lost friends. We lost our social life. They still would be polite and how are you and stuff, but they didn't want to hear any about it. They didn't want to hear about it. They didn't understand. It's amazing how many people would tell us, we would never do that. We've raised our kids, and they can raise our own kids. We're not doing it. And I'm like, well, you don't know that until you're in that position how you do it. And they said, oh, no, we would never.

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Now the grandkids are how old?

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24 and 27.

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How long has it been since you've been without the grandchildren?

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Tristan? Since he was probably a little over 18. We eventually put him in a place in Wyoming. He came back on his 18th birthday in March, and by that summer, he was going out, not coming home. I don't feel like we're still all the way done, you know? I mean, we still will always be there. There's always something. We're always the one they call Cameron. She's been back and forth. She had her baby, and then she was still back here for a few more months. Last time Cameron lived here was five years ago.

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Yeah. You just got to hang in there. It's. It's just hard.

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Back then, you didn't have anybody else to talk to about it. Nobody really understood.

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The most we heard was, I would never do that. There wasn't a whole lot of support. I remember telling people, I don't know anybody else who's raising their grandkids. I wish there was a group for it. It sure helped us just to hear that this was normal, that we're going through something normal, that these are the feelings that you have, the issues you have. We didn't have that then, so there were a few times that probably each one of us were ready to walk, but we didn't. But it was.

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It was tough. There were times. It's just we probably couldn't stand each other a few times. Do you feel like going through all of that together has bonded you? I don't know about going through that. The fact that we made it, it still took us a while to get through the trauma that and. And how he handled it as far as the extra drinking and the issues. So that took a while to get through that. Some of the habits that had developed. You think it takes a while to recover from the trauma yourselves, right? Yes. It's still not really over because we still get calls from the kids or they still are upset. Tristan's not married. He just can't figure out how to do things, and he gets upset with himself. We finally bought a mobile home so he'd have a place to live, but he was supposed to pay rent. He can't always pay the rent. He's months behind now, but he's a good dad, and he goes and gets him.

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He's very dependable with him. Tristan can always count on his dad, and we're just so happy to see that and that Tristan is working through these things. If you hadn't done all of this. I can imagine it would be quite a different scene right now.

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You two wouldn't have gone through all this stress, but you'd have to live with what happened to your children if you hadn't intervened. I couldn't do it. I felt like. We both felt like even though neither one of us wanted to start all over again, I wasn't dying to have kids again. I loved having kids. I always wanted to have lots of kids. But at this stage, we were in our life, starting a new business. Being closer to 50, I wasn't wanting to start over, and he definitely wasn't. But we just felt like we've just been so blessed and we were able to. And we just felt how selfish of us to just say no. Put them in foster care, we're not doing it. And we loved the kids, and we didn't want that for the kids. We didn't want them passed around.

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When my kids were little, I had a total of 14 foster kids altogether. And some of those kids had really been passed around a lot. When I got them, the first thing I did is I got a physical, I got their eyes checked, I got their teeth checked, I got any work done, everything I could do for them that I knew their parents wasn't going to go do. I could see how many of the other foster parents that a lot of these kids had been through before didn't do any of that stuff. They didn't care. They just wanted to check. I heard some of the horror stories. This one group of a family of four kids that I had, they had said that where they were before, they always had to go to bed early because the parents always said, we need to spend special time with our kids. And then they'd sit out in the other room and watch a movie and have dessert because they wanted their kids to still feel special. And I just couldn't do that to the kids. Neither one of us wanted our kids to go through that.

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I'd seen what it was like listening to these kids that I had. When my kids were younger, we didn't want that for them, so we loved them enough to not want to do that. I feel like we've been blessed enough to be able to do it. We also knew it wasn't going to be easy.

00:31:10.162 --> 00:32:08.894
One of the hardest things in the beginning was when I was younger, I babysat. My friends babysat. We earned some money so we could go do some things. Well, I knew that we were going to need babysitters because we had this business. So I needed to be at work, and there were all kinds of girls in the neighborhood that were high school age. None of them wanted to babysit because they said, we don't need to. Our parents give us money when we need it. They had no interest in earning their own money, so they weren't about to babysit. So I had to hire people through the shop to pay them extra, give them benefits to go to my house and babysit. I mean, that was so hard, trying to figure out what to do with the kids every night after school. Wow. So that was really tough. I just couldn't believe that, really. All these parents just give their kids anything they need and they don't ever have to work for anything. I couldn't find anybody to help me. There was nobody out there to help.

00:32:09.594 --> 00:32:57.114
That was a very tough part. We just felt like we'd been blessed enough that how could we not do this? We were able, and I just. What we felt what we should do, we both felt we should. It's just. It was hard, and we're not sorry, but it was very hard. So, in hindsight, what advice would you give someone just starting out in the role that you all took on? You just know it's not going to be easy. If you can get a group now that they're a group like this, there's things out there to listen to. There's so many more people doing it. Get together with somebody so that you can at least talk about things. It would have helped so much. It probably would have helped my husband more. I think women are so much more nurturing. I think the husbands just don't get it.

00:32:59.013 --> 00:33:02.220
If they could hear some of this, of how hard it is and how much.

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A lot of times the wives do take on because they want to keep their husband happy, too. So they overdo, which causes a lot of stress. But I think it would just be helpful to hear that a lot of this is normal, I think, just to know it's worthwhile if you look ahead and how much kids might still have issues like ours do. But I know Tristan would be in prison, probably. He just would get his feelings so hurt that he just wanted to fight. And he just, to this day, still can't keep his mouth shut sometimes, which they kept telling me, even in the fifth grade, you're going to get so beat up when you get in high school because you can't keep your mouth shut. And. And he still has a hard time doing that. He probably would have done something really bad just out of being hurt that he'd probably be in huge, huge trouble. Cameron would probably.

00:33:52.473 --> 00:35:08.244
I don't even know if she'd be alive still. I mean, she was using some heavy stuff. Her and her mom were shooting up together with heroin and meth. And Cameron's very open and she'll tell me all that stuff and more than I want to hear, but I don't know what kind of position she would be in. They knew that they could always count on us. We did what we said, even if we were upset, we were always there. I always told him every night when I tucked them in, if they'd had a bad day or got in trouble, I had to go get them from school or whatever. I always said, you know, I always love you. And they would always say, you always say that, grandma. I know. Just, you can let them know you always love them. They might be angry, they might think that you don't care. They might say all that stuff, but they know you do. I found that because they know that we're the ones that are consistent and that they can count on, we're probably the ones that are going to have it taken out on us because they know it's more the safe place. They might be extra sweet to their mom, whatever, because they so badly want her approval, but they're going to show their anger to us. They just know it's because we're safe. So you can't take everything for what they say. It's very worthwhile. Yeah.

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In the end, yeah.

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Your review of the show not only helps others discover these valuable resources, but also raises awareness of the unique challenges faced by grandparents in similar situations. Your one sentence review can make a significant impact in spreading awareness and support for the mental, physical, and spiritual well being of grandparents raising grandchildren. Thank you for being a part of our community and for helping us amplify the voices of those in need. Get ready for an enlightening episode next week as we welcome author, speaker, activist, and public theologian Brian McLaren to our podcast. Join us for a thought provoking discussion on the intersection of faith and the journey of grandparents raising grandchildren.

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Brian will share insights from his latest book, exploring how faith offers transformation and resilience in the face of life's challenges.

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Don't miss this engaging conversation on finding hope and purpose in uncertain times. Tune in for episode ten, life after wisdom and courage for a world falling apart.