agonyaunt | (no subject)

(no subject)

Dear Annie: My grandchildren are not allowed to receive gifts from me. I crocheted a scarf, and it was tossed in a dumpster. I bought earrings, and the post was broken. You get the picture. So, I have been putting money in the bank instead. Problem solved? No!

Now when a passbook indicates that my grandchild has $7,000 in the bank, there is a sarcastic comment that it won't even be enough to buy a book in college. I ignore the statements because I know where they come from, and there is no reason for me to upset my son. Problem solved? No.

Now, I understand that the problem is that he feels ignored in my company. It's not that we don't speak to one another. We do. I think that the attention-getting tactics are frustrating for my son because they no longer warrant a reaction from me. They're predicable after so many years. Why bother addressing such behavior? It only reenforces it. -- Hurt Grandma

Dear Hurt: You keep addressing the problem behavior because it is just that -- a problem behavior. Without tackling it head-on, it will continue to be a problem. Being so rude, dismissive and ungrateful as your son sounds can't make him feel good about himself. The way he is speaking to you, or how he treats your gifts, is unacceptable. If he can't stop making rude comments about your gifts, then you might stop your generosity. But if you do that, the ones who would be hurt are your grandchildren.

Try to have a serious and noncritical conversation with your son, and make sure that your attention is focused solely on him. He might open up. If he remains cold and hostile, then encourage him to seek professional help or offer to go to family counseling. If he refuses to go, seek therapy yourself as a way to sort out what's really going on between you and your son.

https://www.arcamax.com/healthandspirit/lifeadvice/dearannie/s-2480543

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There is a reason LW is not allowed to give gifts to the grandkids. That reason is probably not "Son is looking for attention".

But let's imagine that this does, in fact, sum up the problem. The follow-up question here is "Why is he looking for attention? Did LW ignore him as a child?"

I read it as the LW acknowledging that she is seeking attention.

...I read it as the LW assuming her (adult) son was behaving badly as attention-seeking behavior, and she used to fight him over it but now that (she thinks) she's sussed out his ulterior motive she's able to pretend it doesn't matter, which (she thinks) is frustrating him because he wants her to yell?

And of course she's clearly the most reliable of narrators.

Sorry, doble post

Edited (Double post) 2021-02-24 06:08 (UTC)

Son has on his favor that he's not writing to an advise column to vent family issues, but jerk sons and daughters do exist, and every generation is not better than the last by default. Sadly. That said, LW doesn't say how old son and grandchildren are, and it is possible that son is running interference so LW gets the hint and keep LW's potentially abusive antics away from the grandchildren. Or he could be just a sarcastic jerk.

jerk sons and daughters do exist, and every generation is not better than the last by default. Sadly.

That certainly is true, but at the very least I think that if LW isn't willing to come up with a better answer than "He wants attention" I'm doubtful that they're an innocent victim in all this.

yeah, the thing about Missing Reasons posts is that the missing reasons can often go both ways. It's possible this son is just a complete asshole. But if so, that's also missing. If the source of the estrangement is "I don't know what happened, but at some point my son just turned into a complete mf, i'm so ashamed about raising him this way, he is rude to his colleagues and his neighbors and his wife," and that is also missing from the letter.

no matter what, Annie is 100% wrong. When she answers "because it is just that, a problem behavior" that is the opposite of the truth. It is a problematic symptom. Is it a symptom of the fact that the son is an utter ass, and the LW needs to find some way to keep a relationship with their grandchildren that doesn't exacerbate issues or risk harming the grandchildren? Is it a symptom of the fact that the LW doesn't want to admit to the things they did that made the son angry, which means the things that they do to maintain a relationship with their grandchildren have to be completely different? Is it a symptom of both of them being terrible? I'm not in general a huge fan of the more therapeutic model of "you always need to know what's gone wrong in order to address the current problems" but in this case it's true.

The LW doesn't get into their own motivations here, either. Do they just want to maintain a relationship with their grandchildren? Do they want to fix the problem with their child? Do they want to win a battle and feel smart? Do they want to cause minimal harm to the grandchildren?

your sun doesn't like you. May he's a jerk, maybe you are; either way you'll almost certainly both be better off giving up on trying to have a relationship with someone who doesn't like you. And your grandchildren will cope, lots of children have no grandparents and do fine.

How much money does son have that he’s too proud to accept $7500?

Edited 2021-02-24 11:01 (UTC)

Alternately, how unacceptable are the strings associated with the money?

Indeed!

Alternately, how unacceptable are the strings associated with the money?

This was my thought also.

That was my thought, too.

It doesn't actually say he didn't accept the money, just that he didn't respond exactly the way LW wanted. (Also if it's a passbook to a bank account that's still in Grandma's name he may not have the option of turning it down because it's not actually a gift.)

If it came with a comment of "there you are, I've paid for college", the quoted remark may not even have been intended as sarcastic...

Edited 2021-02-26 13:50 (UTC)

Ooh, yes, that last bit would definitely explain the answer.

It feels like there's a whole lot of backstory missing here. If nothing else, the relationship between grandma and her son looks like a toxic mess.

I'm looking for the missing context.

I'm still looking for the missing question!

*checks for page 2 of the letter*

The passive voice in this letter is a screaming claxon of dysfunction and, in fact, why the son may "feel" ignored, perhaps because he is. When your mother verbally erases your agency in decisions you are making in a letter to an advice columnist about how she doesn't like the decisions you are making, yeah, maybe there is some actual ignoring going on even when your mother thinks what she is doing is "paying attention" to you.

Seriously, the entire grammatical structure of this letter either erases the son entirely ("it was tossed in the dumpster," "it was broken", "there is a sarcastic comment") or reduces him to, literally, the object of his mother's behavior ("no reason for me to upset my son") except for the part where "...he feels ignored in my company," [emphasis mine] and the rest of the paragraph goes on to explain why he's wrong to feel that way. Well, gosh, maybe he "feels ignored in [your] company" because you are literally using the English language in such a way as to ignore him and his own agency as a human being in a letter to an advice columnist in which you are apparently trying to ask how to improve your relationship with, if not him, his children.

Edited (Ugh, contagious sentence structure problems are UGH) 2021-02-25 09:40 (UTC)

Thank you for diagnosing the mechanics; I couldn't make any sense of this letter beyond vague insinuations to even find the question being asked, just a feeling that the 7k is spurned bait.

Thank you so much! And, frankly, the LW's erasure/ignoring of the son was so pervasive, I even caught myself doing it and had to edit the comment. My original sentence read, "When your mother verbally erases your agency in decisions you are making in a letter to an advice columnist about how she doesn't like the decisions you are making, yeah, maybe there is some actual ignoring going on even when you think what you are doing is "paying attention" to him." I had literally switched in the middle of the sentence from talking to the son to talking to the mother. Even when I was critiquing her for making everything about her, I got sucked in to making everything about her.

Well analyzed!

Thanks so much! As I said to

feldman above, the LW's erasure of her son's agency was so pervasive that in my own comment about how she is erasing her son's perspective and agency from the narrative, I initially switched midsentence from addressing him to addressing her and had to edit it just so that my post would make grammatical sense, never mind conveying meaningful and coherent information to a reader. I can only imagine how bad this distortion is in the actual interactions between LW and son.

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