AITA for refusing to babysit my grandkids because I’m “too lazy”?

I am in my 70s, and my husband and I are reasonably healthy for our ages. However, I get tired more easily than when I was younger. My husband has some mobility issues stemming from an accident he had about eight years ago.<br><br>Our daughter (40s) has two kids, a boy (14) and girl (10). We are seeing them a lot less frequently than we used to because, post-pandemic, they started expecting us to babysit the kids every other weekend. It would be one thing if they were “date night”babysitting, but they often leave us with the kids for two nights, sometimes three, and they usually run errands or do chores while they’re away.<br><br>Until this year, we would never complain about spending time with the grandkids. My granddaughter was dainty and well-behaved. She still is, but my grandson hit puberty this year and has become very hard to manage. He has developed a novelty interest in pranks that are destructive, like putting clear tape over a doorway. This is not only destructive and a pain in the ass to get rid of, but has also been dangerous because my husband tore a tendon in his hand trying to get it out of his hair.<br><br>Other pranks he pulls include pushing the doorknob to our master suite to the other side of the door (we have none of our other doors set up this way) so that we have a hard time figuring out whether to push or pull the door to get in or out. He also switched out all of our shampoo and conditioner bottles.<br><br>To deal with the pranks, we set boundaries and consequences. He gets time-outs every time he pranks us, and we have told him that we will not purchase anything for him if he continues to destroy our belongings. Despite this, we have been spending almost the entire visit dealing with his pranks. We have given up on having any alone time during these visits, because any time alone is spent cleaning up his messes or following him around and ensuring he doesn’t pull a prank.<br><br>Last week, our daughter asked us to come babysit for three nights because they were going to be out of town for their anniversary. I told her we’d be happy to come visit, but we weren’t going to babysit. This set off an argument that revealed we’d both been on the same exact page. And by that I mean my husband was on one page, our daughter was on another, and I was on a third page. <br><br>My husband was under the impression that I’d always been saying no to these requests. I had, but only because I’d assumed that she knew I was saying no because babysitting was bringing too much stress and worry into our lives. Our daughter believed that I was saying no because I was lazy and didn’t want to babysit. Our daughter has been framing these visits as being an obligation to her, “babysit *my* children because you are *their* grandparents.”<br><br>This was when things got heated. I’m not lazy, I told her. I simply didn’t want to be tasked with the responsibility of potentially injuring my husband. That meant no babysitting, which meant she shouldn’t rely on us to babysit, even if she sees us as being “the grandparents.”<br><br>She called me selfish and lazy for not doing this and for putting her out by making these changes so “last minute.” In return, I reminded her that we were always last minute to her. She gave us no notice when she decided to “call us out” on our alleged laziness. I reminded her that we were always an afterthought; she always came to us when every other avenue had been exhausted. She didn’t invite us to anything. She didn’t ask us anything about our lives. She didn’t even ask about our health. For her to suggest that we owed her family our time or effort, or that we were in dereliction for some imaginary obligation, pissed me off.<br><br>She called me cruel. I told her I was done, that I was tired of her seeing us as her parents’ cash cow. I told her we want nothing to do with her or her family for the foreseeable future.<br><br>My husband is fretting about this. He’s saying that I went too far and that I should apologize. I don’t want to apologize because I feel that she owes us one. AITAH?