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Dear Abby: I loaned my sister my daughter, and now she won't give her back
DEAR ABBY: I have a problem with my two younger sisters. Neither one can have children. I have three.
Recently, one of my sisters turned my sweetest daughter against me by telling her I had "abandoned her" when I moved to Ohio with my oldest son and divorced their father. Not true! I left my daughter with my sister so she could experience raising a teenager since she couldn't have a child of her own.
After telling my daughter I had abandoned her, my sister advised her to tell me she never wanted to talk to me again. My heart is broken. My daughter is very sweet and gullible. She has taken her aunt's side and says she wants nothing to do with me. This is driving me crazy. Please tell me what to do. -- HEARTBROKEN IN THE MIDWEST
DEAR HEARTBROKEN: If your daughter is a minor, demand that she return to you immediately. Do it through a lawyer, if necessary, because what your sister is doing is a form of parental alienation. If your daughter is an adult, then ask your other two children to talk to their sister and set her straight.
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Where is the father in all this? What does the other younger sister ("I have a problem with my two younger sisters") have to do with anything? And why in the hell do neither the LW nor Abby seem to believe the teenager should have the slightest bit of agency in her own life?
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Taken at your word, you loaned your daughter to your sister like she was a doll, so that your sister could
play house"experience parenting." Why would you do that? I sincerely hope something was edited out of the letter about how your daughter felt about this (was she glad to stay in her school? Did she, say, not want to leave in her last year of middle/high school?) Please, please tell me you consulted her on the matter.And that is just taking you at your word. I tend to assume LWs are telling the truth unless there are significant reasons not to, but I gotta tell you: your reasoning sounds so odd that I really, really have to wonder if there's something here you're not telling us.
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This is the most bizarre thing I have ever read. I have so many questions. Why did she only take one of her three children with her? Why are the children not with their father? If she only took one child because she wasn't emotionally/physically equipped to raise the other two, especially a teenager who might be difficult to handle or begged to stay behind, I could wrap my hand around that but she doesn't say any of that. It's her sweetest daughter she left behind. Also, if her daughter is upset she abandoned her, it's plausible she didn't want to be left behind. So, why doesn't she just go back to get her if she feels she's left her with an emotionally manipulative relative and/or her daughter is upset at being left? Also, what did the other sister do?! Where's the third kid?
So many questions.
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For the purposes of operating under as much charity as possible: the best interpretation here is that LW is NOT a bright candle, and that she is genuinely communicating the situation badly in the interests of being succinct so that the actual situation is one where the "left the daughter with my sister" was a much more involved, integrated discussion of reasons and factors, and that if you went "wait WHAT?" at the LW in person you would get a flood of "well I mean she didn't want to leave her school/her friends plus finances were in awful shape plus she loves her aunt plus" etc, where the LW is focusing on the "so she could experience raising a teenager" not because it's the primary motivation but because in her view it's the part that makes it clear that she wasn't IMPOSING on her own sister by doing this - that it was something the aunt WANTED/would benefit from.
And then from there said aunt has decided (for whatever reason the aunt may have) to be Horrible, et voila.
Honestly I am raising this possibility MOSTLY because I do actually know a couple of Not That Bright people who do communicate that badly, and whose thoughts jump around in ways that one is left going " . . . okay but why did you think THAT was the most important part to tell me?" and then you get this involved stream of logic that is mostly about the imagined conversation they had with you in their heads which they then appear to have sort of . . . forgotten that they did not have out loud. Or something.
However, I only know a couple of those. So I think this possibility is low, but that it exists.
Otherwise like . . . . bees. So many bees I can't even figure out where all the hives are. Like, clearly the LW is made of bees. Those bees are coming from inside the house. But is the aunt also made of bees, or has the teenager lucked out in the direction of having a lower-bees existence? Or is she just getting more enmeshed in the family beehives?
BEES.
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Oh, my, that is perfect. I think I'm going to have to steal that and use it myself sometimes, if I may.
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g It’s a Captain Awkward thing, so feel free!
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