Yet another estranged parent who can't figure out what they did wrong

[conuly]

Dear Amy: My husband and I have a 50-year-old son who is married with three beautiful children. We all live in the same town.

Four years ago, when I had breast cancer, my daughter-in-law became angry and would not let us see the children.

We have tried everything we can think of to work this out: Letters, phone calls, and offers to seek professional help.

They continue to want to blame us, but neglect to tell us what the problem is!

They have verbally (and by text) said the nastiest things to us.

Do you have any suggestions? Our relationship with our son was fine until this started.

-- Forever Sad

Dear Sad: Given that your narrative contains not a hint of any possible role you might have played in this estrangement, I'm going to assume that your unwillingness to even entertain the possibility of any responsibility might be part of the problem.

I am not urging you to blame yourself for the despicable behavior of others, but if you could search the history of your relationship with an open mind, you might have seen hints of trouble, and ways your actions -- and reactions -- might have contributed to the estrangement.

Obviously, you want to have contact with your grandchildren, but the way to them is through their parents, who want nothing to do with you.

Don't continue to contact them, until you have something new to offer. They see your efforts as pestering and pressure and easy to dismiss.

Definitely take yourselves up on your idea to pursue counseling. Understand that you cannot change the other adults. Work on your own behavior and actions, and explore ways you can come to terms with this very painful situation.

Comments

[conuly]

This letter is a fairly good example of the sort of complaints estranged parents always trot out.

I especially like the little touch that the DIL (but not the son, who appears to be both blameless and without agency) blew all this up when Mom had breast cancer. I mean, I'm sure that it is literally the case that the final breach occurred then, but there is no way that everything prior to that was "fine" from the son's perspective, and they have DEFINITELY told these people what the problem was, probably many times.

Interestingly, unless it was edited out, we don't get any heart-rending comments about how much those children miss Grandma and Grandpa.

[lilysea]

I'm wondering if the MIL and FIL were already boundary-trampling, and then became EVEN MORE boundary-trampling after the cancer diagnosis, because in their minds cancer supercedes/cancels out boundaries.

Basically, that they were already at 90% of the DIL's ability to cope with pre-cancer, and then became 120% or 150% of the DILs ability to cope with post-cancer-diagnosis.

[conuly]

You're wondering, I already believed it. LW and hubby were awful people, then they did something really super bad and DIL and Son said "We don't care if you DO have cancer, we're done."

[kutsuwamushi]

"became angry"

yeah it just ... happened... for no reason ...

[conuly]

And they've sent oh so many texts saying the nastiest things, but never once have they explained what, exactly, MIL did.

[delight]

These letters make my head spin so much because there is ABSOLUTELY no context so how could anyone even begin to respond to it?! Considering how many are printed, I wonder how many they get ...

[delight]

Definitely take yourselves up on your idea to pursue counseling I also appreciated this combination good advice and subtle burn.

[movingfinger]

Did some estranged-vicious-parent forum suggest that members write to advice columns to shame their children and publicize their sad plight? There does seem to be an uptick in these.

[tielan]

Cynical side? It's only going to become more frequent.

An entitled generation are suddenly discovering that their grown children have No More Fucks to give about them in a world with fewer safe spaces. The grown children are hoarding their emotional resources to deal with their lives and children, and the parents have made themselves deadweight demands with no actual beneficial value.

[cereta]

I think there's also just an increased awareness of the behavior, here if nothing else. A couple of people post links, the terms become common, etc etc.

[grammarwoman]

This letter hits close to home - my brother got divorced several years ago, and things got tense with his kids and ex, to the point that when he died of cancer last year, he hadn't seen or heard from his kids (who are now young adults) for at least a year before that. My parents and I have absolutely no idea what went down between them; my folks kept trying to reach out to the kids to re-establish contact to no avail, and one of the kids recently mailed a letter demanding a cutoff to all further attempts.

Nobody was perfect on either side, but I would still like a relationship with my brother's kids, and at the very least to know what the hell was going on.

[melannen]

Yeah, it's a shame when that kind of thing happens - I have a lot of uncles, and a couple of them have estranged kids, and the rest of us never really knew what happened beyond the fact that they cut off their fathers and their families, the end.

I'm not saying my extended family is perfect, but there are a lot of us, and the vast majority of us aren't actively toxic and want to help each other out. It leads to things like one of my cousins was essentially homeless for quite some time before her father's extended family managed to make contact with her and get her supported enough to be back on her feet (while obeying the boundaries she set on it).

(Also, if my uncles really did do something totally unspeakable to their kids or wives, we would kind of like to know before having them spend a lot of time with the nieces and nephews!)

I think there are definitely situations where just cutting entire groups of people out entirely is the only good choice, though. And this letter does kind of reek of that.

[minoanmiss]

My paternal aunts could write a similar comment about me with respect to them and to my parents. I have all but cut my parents off and haven't talked to my paternal family in years. This is largely because my extended family are, as far as I know, all fundamentalist Christians -- if anyone else got fed up with Christianity and left like I did, I don't even know how to find out. So talking to them is just painful because we have such different perspectives on life and their perspective involves a great deal of condemnation of me (I am not and never will be out to them) and many people I love. And because the subject of contention is religion there is no way to compromise or set boundaries -- their viewpoint, which I know because I was taught it my whole childhood, is that Christianity is Right and Good and that anyone who doesn't want to hear about it just needs to hear about it all the more.

No one would call my aunts terrible people -- several of them have done a lot of good in the world. But I've left our common cultural milieu and our foundational philosophies, and I know I can't ask them to accept or even accomodate that.

I'm not saying that or anything else comparable *has* happened in your family with your brother's kids. I'm saying this to illustrate that sometimes inexplicable familial estrangement can have reasons that by their nature can't even be explained.