agonyaunt | (no subject)

(no subject)

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I have a grown daughter in her 20s (“Alison”) who lives on her own with her partner. Alison has beautiful sandy brown hair with natural highlights, but when we saw her a few weeks ago, she’d dyed it bright purple. Her dad doesn’t like it when she dyes her hair; he prefers her natural look, and they’ve had arguments about this, and about her style in general, in the past. When he asked her why she’d done this, she was rude and evasive, offering curt responses like “because I like it” and “because I can.” After a few minutes of this, she said, “Dad, you need to drop this subject, or I’m going to leave.” Her dad was hurt by this, so I gently said, “There’s no need to make threats. Your dad is just concerned about you.” She responded, “There’s nothing to be concerned about. I’ve dyed my hair. If you don’t like it, don’t look at me.” Her dad took this at face value and turned around and went back to the car. Alison started crying. I wanted to stay and try to work it out, but my husband had already made up his mind that we were leaving, so I just hugged her and promised we would call her later and talk this out. She told me not to—she said she’d call us.

It’s now been two weeks, and she hasn’t called. We’ve called and texted her multiple times, but she won’t respond. I can see she’s still active on social media, so I know she’s safe, but I’m quite hurt that she seems to be cutting us out over something like this. I would offer to apologize if I thought she’d get the message, but I’m not sure if she’s even reading messages/listening to our voicemails. My husband thinks she’s being stubborn and will come around eventually. We were looking forward to being able to see more of her now that the weather is getting nicer and vaccines are rolling out, but it seems like she’s chosen her purple hair over a relationship with us (hence the “don’t look at me” comment). I really want to repair the relationship with her, as she’s our only daughter, but I’m at a loss as to where to go from here.

—Don’t Care for Her Hair

Dear DCfHH,

She has not chosen her purple hair over a relationship with you. This dispute is not about purple hair; it’s about respect, boundaries, and accepting that a grown child’s decisions about her body are none of her parents’ business.

Where to go from here is a conversation with your husband about the impropriety and general wrongness of his badgering her about her hair. It doesn’t matter if he prefers her “more natural look.” Her response to his questions wasn’t out of line. She shouldn’t have to justify such a choice to him (or anyone else).

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that if your husband refuses to see it this way—and if you can’t come around to seeing that she’s right and he’s wrong about this—it’s the two of you who are choosing to make her hair color more important than your relationship with her.

Could she be more diplomatic, gentler, more understanding of how hard it is for her dad to accept that she’s grown up and that his opinions about her “style” should be kept to himself? Sure. It would be more mature to calmly say, “I’m sorry you don’t like it, but I love it. Now perhaps we can talk about something else,” than to say, “If you don’t like it, don’t look at me.” But if she’s being treated like a child, it’s no surprise she’s acting a little bit like one.

Once you have convinced your husband (and yourself!) that it’s time to let go of the idea that you have any control—or any say—about such matters, then by all means apologize. By text, by phone, by email, by letter—try ’em all. One of them will get through, I’m sure. But there’s no point in apologizing if you don’t understand what you’re apologizing for, and you don’t plan to handle things differently from now on.

P.S. It’s your husband who’s “just being stubborn.”

https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/03/when-close-friends-are-racist-care-and-feeding.html

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I just want to say, I wish the response had drawn a little more attention to this:

I wanted to stay and try to work it out, but my husband had already made up his mind that we were leaving, so I just hugged her and promised we would call her later and talk this out.

What was LW's husband going to do if she stayed with her daughter and continued talking? Leave without her? There's more than one red flag here, and that's the most telling. (Not, I think, that LW really had any idea of what to say or how to discuss things productively.)

Yeah. LW clearly chose her husband over her daughter in this case.

Honestly I read LW as agreeing with her husband but holding on to a self image as the family peacemaker (read "I refuse to have an opinion and I refuse to acknowledge that means I'm inherently taking sides"). It's statements like "Your dad is just concerned about you" and calling because I can "rude" and "choosing her purple hair over us" that make me think she's on team husband all the way.

Other than when I was working for him and needed to match his vision of "professional grooming", my father's view was always "It's just hair, it will grow back." I dyed my hair dark magenta for a few years, went black, blonde, auburn, purple underlayer - didn't matter. It's just hair. My youngest sister went from hair down her back to a pixie cut - well, that's her decision, and it'll grow back. It sounds like these parents both need to realize that this is such a minor and temporary issue.

The only time my parents ever forced a hairstyle on me was at the end of kindergarten, when my mom got sick of the screaming fights we had when she brush through tangles in my hair. (I was not old enough to reliably do that for myself.) So she cut it all off in a terrible homemade imitation of a pixie cut. I immediately announced I was growing it back out, and she said something to the effect of, "As long as you learn how to take care of it yourself, that's fine. It's your hair."

And I have decided my own hairstyle ever since. Please note that I was FIVE YEARS OLD when we reached that agreement.

I wonder if LW's husband would be such an asshole about a son's hairstyle choices? He seems like he might, but then again, there is a cultural assumption that a woman's hair is not quite entirely her own -- because it is a visible adornment and women are socially pressured to make ourselves attractive to men -- which may be coming into play here.

Anyway, I feel very bad for what LW's daughter probably had to deal with while still living with her parents. I also feel kind of bad for LW, who is married to the control freak in question, may be reliant on him for transportation, and apparently has bought into his view that he has the right to control other people's bodies just because they're his family.

If LW's son dyed his hair purple, you can bet LW's husband would kick up a stink.

Dear LW, it's not your daughter who is choosing her hair over your relationship, it's you and your husband that are doing so. Constantly criticising someone's appearance can have a negative effect on their esteem and self-worth. Especially when it comes from a parent. It's no wonder your daughter is choosing to not respond at the moment.

And your daughter might be offering curt responses when your husband usually speaks to her about this, but that is likely because she is in her 20s, no longer lives at home, and is still being nagged about her hair and choice of style and is probably sick to death of it.

So my advice is to get over it and enjoy the time with your wonderful daughter instead of agonising over something as insignificant as their hair colour which won't last forever.

Also, given that Dad her pulled this before, she likely has been more polite about it in the past, and has learned that it does no good.

Yeah, I think CaF kinda slid past that point there. This wasn't the first time there'd been a confrontation on looks. Probably not the second, either. Probably had been happening for, oh, 15+ years. So, no, she wasn't responding "like a child," she was responding as someone who has been badgered, negged, criticized, and probably more for most of her life and was finally sick to death of it and standing up for herself in the only way her parents would actually hear.

I like this advice. It puts the blame for the stubbornness and arguments on the correct party and it doesn't flinch away from saying that the daughter is clearly in the right. I doubt LW will accept the advice given how LW's husband is depicted and how LW clearly wants to blame her daughter, though.

Good on the daughter for going no contact. She's an adult living with a partner, and doesn't need her parents to decide her personal style for her.

I am reminded of something I've been posting on FB lately (originally seen on tumblr) which was:

Some people use the word 'respect' to mean 'to treat like an authority' while some people use the word 'respect' to mean 'to treat like a human being'. And what this does is that it results in the phrase: "if you don't respect me, I'm not going to respect you", and what they mean is that if you don't treat them like an authority, then they're not going to treat you like a person.

And her dad refused to treat her like a grown person with wishes and a will of her own because she wouldn't treat him as an authority.

This made me think of the same quotation, yep.

Oh, that's excellent. May I borrow it sometime? I won't claim it's mine!

It's not mine, either. First seen on tumblr, but I'm pretty sure that the person who described it would not at all object to greater understanding.

The daughter said "don't call me, I'll call you" but instead of waiting for her to do so they have "called and texted her multiple times" in only two weeks. I wouldn't respond either. Given that, I'm not thrilled at the advice to bombard her with apologies.

Though they did add the caveat that LW shouldn't bother until and unless she knows what she's apologizing for and accepts that sorry, in this case, means she won't do it again - not, I think, that LW will read or understand that part.

Yeah, the "I'd offer to apologize" line read weird to me. Like she doesn't know WHY she should apologize, but she'll apologize to smooth things over, for whatever it is.

"Because I like it" and "because I can" don't sound like rude and evasive responses to me, but the exact truth. I'm not surprised the daughter hasn't called, particularly since she is now being pestered despite asking the parents not to call her. They don't seem to acknowledge that she is an adult with the right to do what she wants with her own body, or that she is entitled to have boundaries.

Exactly what I thought, yeah. She told you why! The reason she dyed her hair purple is because she enjoys having purple hair, it's...what most people would expect the reason to be, right?
I suspect that right there tells us a lot about how much LW and her husband don't view their daughter as a real person. "We don't like purple hair, so obviously she doesn't really like purple hair, so she must have some other reason which she's hiding."
Leads to...
"She must be doing it *because* we don't like it, since everything she does is about us, because she's Our Daughter, not a whole separate human adult with her own preferences."
Leads to...throwing relationship-destroying tantrums about someone else's hair, because you've persuaded yourself your kid's hair is a direct and calculated attack on you.

Her dad was hurt by this, so I gently said, “There’s no need to make threats. Your dad is just concerned about you.”

Concerned about what?

Purple hair makes your head fall off.

I dyed my hair blue for the first time in my 20s, and my mom freaked out when she first saw it--what will X think? What will Y think? I did my best to be patient. It was a big change! I'd never mentioned wanting to dye my hair before! Sometimes change is scary.

. . . if she had still been freaking out every subsequent time, well, I can't say I wouldn't have walked away too. But because she is a reasonable human being, she took a big deep breath and, after those initial five minutes, never mentioned it again. It's not that hard, LW! Just take a breath and move on.

I had an opposite situation. My mother used to "teasingly threaten" (read: not so teasingly) to dye my hair bright pink etc to "get it out of my system when she's young" Which always made me uncomfortable. Once I cut off my mother I suddenly started wanting to have my hair dyed lots of colors bc it was my idea and not a threat. Body autonomy is a very freeing thing. If the parents can't understand that their kid is now an adult with their own desires they need to take several steps back and re-evaluate their roles as parents.

This is fascinating, because the daughter starts out doing a textbook boundary-setting a la Captain Awkward: “Dad, you need to drop this subject, or I’m going to leave.” ... “There’s nothing to be concerned about. I’ve dyed my hair. If you don’t like it, don’t look at me.”

The reactions of the parents hit on something that I wish more advice columnists would get into, because when you try to set boundaries, often this is what you're going to get: the father, like a toddler, refuses to look at her; the mother characterizes "I've said I'm not willing to discuss this; we can talk about something else or we can not talk at all" as "making threats"; the response to "don't call me" is to call her over and over.

Captain Awkward sometimes talks about having a reset, where you set a boundary, things don't go wonderfully well, you leave, and then the next time you were scheduled to see each other you just go ahead and get together as if nothing had happened, giving the other person the opportunity to roll with the new rules but ready to set the same boundary again if you have to. I've done that a few times -- seriously, my in-laws could part saying, "You're out of my will and I never want to see you again!" and just show up for dinner again the next night as if nothing had happened.

I do think it would be good if advice-givers would acknowledge that "here's how you set a boundary" is only the first step, and there is always going to be at least one other step after that.

Well and truly said.

Yes, that's it exactly. The reason the answer is in the right vein but not going far enough is because the writer hasn't (apparently) fully diagnosed the, er, situation and its extremely predictable future progress. Validating the daughter's choices etc is good, but zeroing in on the predictable nature of the parents' temper-tantrum response and how out of proportion it is would be even more helpful. This response is scaled for if the parents had just said some rude boundary-pushing stuff, not flipped out and left and then ALSO bombarded her with messages after she EXPLICITLY told them not to.

Edited 2021-03-19 14:19 (UTC)

I am willing to bet that the "if you don't like it, don't look at me" comment was the culmination of a lifetime of dealing with this kind of hypercontrolling crap. (Why yes, my parents were the same way.) I don't blame the daughter for being fed up and cutting off contact. I suspect the best way to get through to her--if her parents really want to do that--is for the parents to dye THEIR hair purple and show up at her doorstep.

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