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Prudie Flashback: I Don't Want to Raise My Step-Granddaughter Anymore
Dear Prudence:
My husband and I have been happily married for three years. We each have grown children from our first marriages. His daughter had a baby as a teenager, and my husband and his first wife raised “Maggie” until she was 5 years old. After Maggie’s father was discharged from the military, he and his wife raised her. Last summer, he was convicted of a crime and incarcerated. His wife divorced him and was unable to care for Maggie, so she came to live with us. She is a 16-year-old high-school sophomore, very pretty and well-behaved; she is involved in sports and sees a therapist weekly. My husband has been appointed her legal guardian until she turns 18. He and I work full time and have had to give up kayaking and travel for family dinners and sports practice. I’m feeling a huge sense of loss about my wonderful life with my husband. I know this sounds selfish, but I raised my kids, and I was looking forward to our gradual retirement and relaxing of responsibilities. Maggie's mother is now married, has small children, and lives across the country. We have taken Maggie to visit, and it’s gone well. I would like Maggie to go live with her mother, who loves the idea, because she’s been wracked with guilt for abandoning her. She and her husband are struggling financially, but my husband and I could help. My husband is a kind man, and he is afraid to let his granddaughter go again. Maggie would prefer to live with us in comfort than with her birth mother and her family. What should we do?
—Wicked Step-Grandmother
Dear Wicked,
Let’s say Maggie was a dog. You wouldn’t advocate re-homing her yet again, because it would be too traumatic. You are rightly feeling wicked because you know making Maggie live with a group of struggling virtual strangers will be disastrous. It's good to facilitate a relationship between Maggie and her mother, but you don’t send a high school sophomore to start over at a new school with a new family. Let’s be blunt about your self-interest. Maggie is 16 and, despite everything she’s been through, on the right track. If she continues along this path, in two years she will be heading off to college. But if you want your husband to withdraw the love, support, and stability she has with you two, then you will vastly increase the chances that this girl falls apart. In that case, you will have an undone teenager living in your basement for the foreseeable future. Sure, you’d like your life to look like a Cialis commercial (presumably without the need for Cialis). But instead, for the next couple of years, it’ll be more like a Playtex Sport tampon advertisement. (And I don’t understand why the three of you can’t do some traveling and kayaking together.) You married a decent man who’s now the legal guardian of his granddaughter. Honor that obligation and the fact that he took it on. It’s likely you will benefit from having chosen someone who doesn’t flinch when circumstances get tough. Surely by this point in your life, you know how fleeting two years will be. I also have a 16-year-old high-school sophomore, and my husband and I are feeling acutely how swiftly the time will pass before our daughter is off.
—Prudie
My husband and I have been happily married for three years. We each have grown children from our first marriages. His daughter had a baby as a teenager, and my husband and his first wife raised “Maggie” until she was 5 years old. After Maggie’s father was discharged from the military, he and his wife raised her. Last summer, he was convicted of a crime and incarcerated. His wife divorced him and was unable to care for Maggie, so she came to live with us. She is a 16-year-old high-school sophomore, very pretty and well-behaved; she is involved in sports and sees a therapist weekly. My husband has been appointed her legal guardian until she turns 18. He and I work full time and have had to give up kayaking and travel for family dinners and sports practice. I’m feeling a huge sense of loss about my wonderful life with my husband. I know this sounds selfish, but I raised my kids, and I was looking forward to our gradual retirement and relaxing of responsibilities. Maggie's mother is now married, has small children, and lives across the country. We have taken Maggie to visit, and it’s gone well. I would like Maggie to go live with her mother, who loves the idea, because she’s been wracked with guilt for abandoning her. She and her husband are struggling financially, but my husband and I could help. My husband is a kind man, and he is afraid to let his granddaughter go again. Maggie would prefer to live with us in comfort than with her birth mother and her family. What should we do?
—Wicked Step-Grandmother
Dear Wicked,
Let’s say Maggie was a dog. You wouldn’t advocate re-homing her yet again, because it would be too traumatic. You are rightly feeling wicked because you know making Maggie live with a group of struggling virtual strangers will be disastrous. It's good to facilitate a relationship between Maggie and her mother, but you don’t send a high school sophomore to start over at a new school with a new family. Let’s be blunt about your self-interest. Maggie is 16 and, despite everything she’s been through, on the right track. If she continues along this path, in two years she will be heading off to college. But if you want your husband to withdraw the love, support, and stability she has with you two, then you will vastly increase the chances that this girl falls apart. In that case, you will have an undone teenager living in your basement for the foreseeable future. Sure, you’d like your life to look like a Cialis commercial (presumably without the need for Cialis). But instead, for the next couple of years, it’ll be more like a Playtex Sport tampon advertisement. (And I don’t understand why the three of you can’t do some traveling and kayaking together.) You married a decent man who’s now the legal guardian of his granddaughter. Honor that obligation and the fact that he took it on. It’s likely you will benefit from having chosen someone who doesn’t flinch when circumstances get tough. Surely by this point in your life, you know how fleeting two years will be. I also have a 16-year-old high-school sophomore, and my husband and I are feeling acutely how swiftly the time will pass before our daughter is off.
—Prudie
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*stares at LW some more*
*STARES*
*finds words*
Obvs I can only speak for myself, but I would be just as horrified if this were a step-grandfather writing in about his wife's grandkid.
And in fact part of the horror is honestly that not only does the 16 year old not want to uproot and totally throw her life into chaos again (it's already happened twice!), but this is a child that her husband raised for the first five years of her life to start with, who he then gave up to someone who apparently just went to prison, and who she explicitly frames as being "afraid to let his granddaughter go again." (Strongly implying that the man is struggling with Upset from having lost custody of the child in the first place, and I think one can readily see why.)
So her utter thoughtlessness here is not just towards the child, to my eye, but almost even more towards her husband? This really isn't his granddaughter the way that word is connotated for most people, he raised her as a baby - she's much closer to being another daughter. And the LW wants him to send his daughter to go live in an unstable situation that she doesn't want to be in, because it's messing up her recreation.
I just.
ETA: I mean, because it probably DOESN'T go without saying, in our culture: if this were about, specifically, LW not wanting to be the one to drive to sports practice, or to make the family dinners, if it were about LW being handed a bunch more WORK that she'd never signed up for whether outright or just because Gender Crap Happens, that kind of thing? That's absolutely fair enough. If LW does not want to go to sports practice, LW should totally have the right to go play bridge or go for a hike with friends, or something like that, instead. She should totally have the right to opt out of specifically herself parenting another teenager that she didn't sign up for.
I do think it's a bit cold, but being a bit cold is not actually a moral failure, and I would feel it absolutely fair if that seemed to be LW's problem.
However, what LW seems to want is for her husband to stop caring for his granddaughter who, and I do think this part is important, he'd initially raised from baby-hood to five years to begin with, and to send her somewhere she doesn't want to go, in a way likely to disrupt her life in unfortunate ways after it's undoubtedly already been disrupted, and certainly make huge emotional demands of her (as the teenage half-sibling of her mother's new kids and step-daughter to the new husband presumably Maggie doesn't know and also hasn't been around for more than a year given the timeline, which . . . would concern me, if I were the grandfather, given the history), when he is already distressed at the idea of "letting her go" again.
THAT'S where I'm just staring at her in horror.
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but. Um. The kid's 16. Worst comes to worst LW has to deal with her for 2 years. If this situation is accurately described in the letter, I think she should suck it up. Honestly, I can't really imagine what besides criminal activity wwould warrant wanting to be rid of someone who will leave so soon anyway.
I'm not sure how I feel about the "She'll live in your basement FOREVER" threat, but in general I agree with the columnist's advice.
*goes off to see if I change my mind in a day or two*
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But there are two things that make me frown:
1. Maggie is 16. Not only is, as Prudie say, she very nearly adulthood, but she's at a time that can be very fraught, particularly for girls wanting to make friends in a new place. And Maggie has already had a lot of upheaval, even recently. No time is really good for a child to have their world shaken up, but given that (again) the LW is not being asked for decades of actively parenting, I really think sending Maggie away is a bad idea.
2. The real red flag for me, though, was this sentence: "Maggie would prefer to live with us in comfort than with her birth mother and her family." Not, "she wants to stay with her friends." Not "she wants to graduate from her high school." She wants to stay in comfort. Now, the kindest interpretation of that is that the mother has a crowded house, and Maggie would have to share a bedroom. Not the world's worst fate, and one she'll probably have to accept if she does go away to college, but still. And beyond the idea that there could be worse (not dire, but worst) interpretations of that, the fact that it's the motive the LW ascribes to Maggie makes me, well, less kindly. It annoys me. I probably could just have said that instead of writing a novella.
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But I have no sympathy at all for the choice she would like to make. In her place, I'd grumble quietly inside my own head, sure -- and possibly whine a little in private with my spouse -- but I'd do the right thing and welcome and accept this teenager into my home, and do it graciously. It's TWO YEARS, not a lifetime. You do the right thing. You do what needs to be done, and be kind while you're at it.
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My objections are entirely to her apparent total lack of also considering the position her husband's in (let alone the child - even just her husband) and the fact that she's actually even considering attempting this choice/trying to find a way that it might be okay.
/excessive clarification.
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I've admittedly also had a week of various real-life stuff of similar "what the fuck is even wrong with you" (ranging from the AWFUL behaviour of a narcissist parent of a friend thru to staring at the adult children of a family-friend who is literally dying of cancer/the sole-caregiver to her-husband-their-father who suffers from a bad traumatic brain injury who are just totally absentee* and a couple other things in between), so I'm also a little sensitized!
But even taking a step back from the emotional reaction, I still find this a concerning failure of her ability to consider her spouse's emotional needs. (And absolutely would feel this just as hard were the genders reversed - if anything I might be less sympathetic to a man because I wouldn't have the back-of-brain part remembering that even without it mentioned she might be having a bunch of Assumed Labour being dumped on her, if it was in fact him, rather than her).
And then the concern for the health and well-being of the teenager, vs the minimal nature of the disruption and the fact that the LW herself calls the girl well-behaved ( . . . and pretty, it bothers me that LW felt the need to say that at all, it doesn't feel relevant, but I can't derive any information from it) . . . I just end up back at Staring At Her.
Humans, man. :|
*and while I'm absolutely sensitive to all of the reasons this could be the case that are justified in terms of the parents having screwed up in earlier years, these . . . really don't apply here.
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Something that a couple people pointed out and that I want to poke at as well is that line about "family dinners and sports practice": if LW's getting roped into extra emotional labor all unwilling, that's a thing she needs to take up with Hubby about how to manage that. (Likewise, if it's a thing where they're not EVER just doing anything as a couple and Hubby is making everything about the three of them rather than the two of them, that needs to be discussed, too.) (I'm honestly getting a vibe, for no real reason that I can nail down, that the actual problem is that Hubby is obsessing over his granddaughter--- not, I hasten to add, in any pervy sense, but that, given that he did raise her when she was little and she's gone through a lot of upheaval, he's monofocused on Doing Stuff for and with Maggie--- possibly to an extent that even Maggie herself doesn't want, because, SIXTEEN. And it's easier for LW to treat Maggie's entire presence as the problem, since she doesn't have a bond with the kid, than to treat her husband's behavior as the problem and have the hard talks with him.)
Also, something no one else has mentioned--- but if LW and Hubby want to go kayaking or go on brief trips, I would think that a "well-behaved" 16-year-old is in fact mature/responsible enough to stay home by herself, or have a sleepover/weekend-over at one or more friends' houses? Unless there's, like, something in the guardianship arrangements that precludes it or some other issue with Maggie not being left alone or with friends (kid has had a rough time and may indeed feel the need for more of Grandpa's time and attention than many-if-not-most teenagers even want from a primary caregiver), or there are money issues? I mean, even in non-blended families I can imagine a lot of teens jumping at the chance to get to do their own thing with their own friends instead of being "dragged" along on "family bonding tiemz".
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I got the strong sense - especially from the signoff - that LW *knows* that what she wants is not fair to Maggie, and is not seriously considering trying to implement her plan, that she's basically asking-without-asking for Prudie to give her the pep talk to Do The Right Thing that will get her through this. I got the strong feeling she's just having a whine that she knows is self-indulgent because she needs to get it out of her system before buckling down and consigning herself to a crappy few years.
I dunno, I'd be pretty pissed off in LW's shoes, I really would. But I tend to be pretty allergic to the notion of family obligations in general. (The fact that yeah, LW's husband is vastly keener than she is is a good reason to go through it it anyway, of course.)
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