Plan B Forum

Dear All Three

With last evening's crop of whinges and tidings of more rotten news for which you seem to treat your mother like a cess-pit, I feel it is time to come off my perch.

It is obvious that none of you has the faintest notion of the bitter disappointment each of you has in your own way dished out to us. We are seeing the miserable death throes of the fourth of your collective marriages at the same time we see the advent of a fifth.

We are constantly regaled with chapter and verse of the happy, successful lives of the families of our friends and relatives and being asked of news of our own children and grandchildren. I wonder if you realise how we feel — we have nothing to say which reflects any credit on you or us. We don't ask for your sympathy or understanding — Mum and I have been used to taking our own misfortunes on the chin, and making our own effort to bash our little paths through life without being a burden to others. Having done our best — probably misguidedly — to provide for our children, we naturally hoped to see them in turn take up their own banners and provide happy and stable homes for their own children.

Fulfilling careers based on your educations would have helped — but as yet none of you is what I would confidently term properly self-supporting. Which of you, with or without a spouse, can support your families, finance your home and provide a pension for your old age? Each of you is well able to earn a comfortable living and provide for your children, yet each of you has contrived to avoid even moderate achievement. Far from your children being able to rely on your provision, they are faced with needing to survive their introduction to life with you as parents.

So we witness the introduction to this life of six beautiful children — soon to be seven — none of whose parents have had the maturity and sound judgment to make a reasonable fist at making essential threshold decisions. None of these decisions were made with any pretence to ask for our advice.

In each case we have been expected to acquiesce with mostly hasty, but always in our view, badly judged decisions. None of you has done yourself, or given to us, the basic courtesy to ask us what we think while there was still time finally to think things through. The predictable result has been a decade of deep unhappiness over the fates of our grandchildren. If it wasn't for them, Mum and I would not be too concerned, as each of you consciously, and with eyes wide open, crashes from one cock-up to the next. It makes us weak that so many of these events are copulation-driven, and then helplessly to see these lovely little people being so woefully let down by you, their parents.

I can now tell you that I for one, and I sense Mum feels the same, have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children's underachievement and domestic ineptitudes. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don't want to see your mother burdened any more with your miserable woes — it's not as if any of the advice she strives to give you has ever been listened to with good grace — far less acted upon. So I ask you to spare her further unhappiness. If you think I have been unfair in what I have said, by all means try to persuade me to change my mind. But you won't do it by simply whingeing and saying you don't like it. You'll have to come up with meaty reasons to demolish my points and build a case for yourself. If that isn't possible, or you simply can't be bothered, then I rest my case.

I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

Dad

Sue U wrote:Here's the thing: As a parent, it's not about your "disappointment" or your bragging rights or your expectations or your demands. It's about giving your kids the support they need to be themselves and to navigate the world independently in search of what makes them happy with their lives. And it has to start from Day One. As adults, they are not obligated to do what you tell them or even to listen to your advice. They will make their own mistakes (if that's what they are) and have their own experiences. They're entitled to: it's their lives to live. If you choose to sit in judgment measuring against what you would have done (more likely, what you wish you would have done), you will always be disappointed, because your children are not you.

Sean wrote:Prince Philip?

After the publication of his father's heartfelt tirade - a no-punches-pulled salvo accusing his public school-educated children of failing in their careers and marriages - Mr Crews's son Fred, 35, replied: "sorry, but you made me."
Speaking as he prepared for his shift at a taxi office, Fred, bare-chested and sporting a stomach tattoo, said his father could no longer treat him "like a sailor in his command".

And he added his father had done "enough of that in my formative years to ensure that I do not have the confidence to succeed in life now". He accused Mr Crews of acting like his own father before him, and insisted he would not speak to him again without an apology.

The family feud burst into the public domain when Nick Crews published the email at the request of daughter Emily Crews-Montes, 40 - one of his targets - who now lives in France and works as a translator for a publisher. She is the only one of the siblings still speaking to her parents.

Yesterday Nick Crews told The Mail on Sunday he had "nothing to apologise for" and that many friends facing similar challenges had emailed him messages of support.

Earlier, Fred, clearly furious that the row had gone public – through an article in yesterday's Daily Mail – said: "I'm not going to dignify him with a full response.

"He knows what the score is. I've spoken to my Mum and I responded to his email. I likened him to his own father and left it at that. He said what he wanted to say but there are other things he shouldn't have said. He said he didn't want any of us to contact him again until we had some good news. Well, if he wants us to talk to him now, then he shouldn't have written that. That's what needs to be apologised for."

Speaking from the Plymouth terraced house where he is living with his sister Alice, Fred insisted his father had only himself to blame. "He compared us to his friends' children and said what an embarrassment we were and how he can't boast about us," he said. "Well, I'm sorry, but you made me. That also needs to be apologised for."

But perhaps something of his father's sense of duty has rubbed off on Fred after all, as he insisted he was unable to stay and provide a full interview as he could not let his employer down. "My father made me who I am today and I think he did a good job," he said. "I do not leech off him, my mother or society - except for a brief stint on Job Seekers' Allowance - nor am I a criminal of any sort. I try to keep to the values I have been brought up with."

Nearby, at the family's detached, six-bedroomed house in a Plymouth suburb, an unrepentant Nick Crews made a robust defence of the decision to set out his frustrations in the email, sent earlier this year. And his wife Sarah made clear she backed every word.

"Absolutely, it needed saying," she insisted. "An email was the right way to go because they absolutely took notice of something there in black and white."

Mr Crews said: "What I was saying to my children was that if they got their ducks in a row, their children would be getting a better start. As a father and a grandfather, don't you have a duty to do that? I think you do. I don't like living with the repercussions of this and it makes you very sad that your children hate you. But life is hard.

"There are people in society who desperately need financial support and for that support to be sucked up by people, my children, who could do better is not acceptable to me.

"My message to other parents who feel as I do is that you have a social responsibility to say your piece. I can remember my father saying things to me that I didn't like to hear. Friends have emailed me to say, 'I've had to write a letter like that and it's not nice.' They have been very supportive.

"If you had one child like this you'd think, 'Do I say anything?' But I've had three out of three and you wonder whether you're an appalling father with defective genes. It's not just one of them that's had a failed marriage – it's three out of three."

This letter was written by a former nuclear submarine captain Nick Crews, 67 to his three children.

Guinevere wrote:More like Dave, if he had kids.

TPFKA@W wrote:

Sean wrote:Prince Philip?

He had 4 kids.

Sue U wrote:Here's the thing: As a parent, it's not about your "disappointment" or your bragging rights or your expectations or your demands. It's about giving your kids the support they need to be themselves and to navigate the world independently in search of what makes them happy with their lives. And it has to start from Day One. As adults, they are not obligated to do what you tell them or even to listen to your advice. They will make their own mistakes (if that's what they are) and have their own experiences. They're entitled to: it's their lives to live. If you choose to sit in judgment measuring against what you would have done (more likely, what you wish you would have done), you will always be disappointed, because your children are not you.

The father who sent an excoriating email to his three children, bitterly complaining that they wallowed in their own mistakes has said he was 'relieved' that he had sent the withering message.

Retired nuclear submarine captain Nick Crews, 67, made headlines after he sent an email blasting his offspring for their 'copulation-driven' mistakes.

And the unrepentant father has gone further to say that he would be disappointed if his children ever needed benefits after they were privately educated at the expense of Mr Crews and his wife Sarah, 67.

He told the Daily Telegraph that although he regrets the email becoming public, he felt a 'sense of relief' for being true to himself.

Mr Crews says that his daughter Emily, a business interpreter, son Fred, who works in a taxi office, and another daughter who works in a sailing shop, have not lived up to their potential.

He said he was frustrated that they should have fulfilled their capabilities.

'It upsets me that they occupy basic-wage positions instead of working at the upper periphery of their capability.

'I would be mortified if they were to need 0 either immediately or in later life - state benefits.

'I long to see them take responsibility for their actions.'