agonyaunt | (no subject)

(no subject)

Dear Annie: I have been married for 32 years to my husband, who has three children from his prior marriage. The children are now in their mid-30s to early 40s.

We were all a big happy family until about four years ago. The middle child called to tell us that we were both bad parents. I asked her to tell us why she felt that way. She said she would call us back to explain, but that never happened.

We would have liked to have communicated about whatever she was holding onto to move past this issue. Her dad could not get her to communicate the problem. We are so confused as to what she is thinking or feeling. We do not do any illegal drugs or drink alcohol; we brought these children up in church. We gave them a loving, fun home while they grew up. Their mother was very vindictive and untruthful to them about their father. Regardless, we would counteract this with being open and honest about our life with them.

No matter what we do, the two oldest daughters and our grandchildren refuse to have anything to do with us. The youngest son does call his dad about two times a year, but he has an issue with me. None of them will talk to us, no matter what we do. Cards we have mailed saying we love you, let's get through this together without any judgment, result in no response.

We have asked our daughter-in-law, a social worker, to try to get the ball rolling on our behalf, but she doesn't want to get in the middle. We have also offered counseling that we would pay for to overcome the problem(s). -- Confused in Michigan

Dear Confused in Michigan: That is confusing indeed. Good on you for being willing to take the steps necessary to work through these problems -- but are you sure that neither you nor your husband have any clue as to why all three children have an issue with you? Is it possible their "vindictive" mother is influencing their opinions? I would encourage both you and your husband to try to talk to each of his kids one-on-one. Without a little more information, it's hard to know what you're even trying to fix.

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I have a couple of guesses as to what's going on here, but the biggest thing is that when people make it abundantly clear that they don't want to talk to you, the only way to convince them to reopen communications is to respect those wishes and stop harassing them.

I'm suuuuuuure LW has no idea. Absolutely sure.

I think that LW is very, very invested in the narrative that they were a "happy family" and that they were "good parents" and that the kids have "no reason" to be unhappy. I suspect this is why the middle kid made an overture and then dropped it forever - she realized that LW was a brick wall of willful incomprehension, and gave up.

LW says "no matter what they do" they're shut out, but everything LW mentions trying is still in the framework of "go to counseling with us to be told that your reasons are silly and we're fine" and "let's not have any judgement (of us and our bad parenting), just remember that we love each other!" which is incredibly disingenuous and self-absorbed. LW does not care about what pain they may have caused. LW does not care if their church was messed up in ways that hit the kids hard and was waved away (only one possibility but a strong one! LW thinks "raised in a church" automatically means "raised well" 😬). LW cares about preserving their own self-image at any expense to their kids. I don't blame the kids for walking away.

If I were going to give LW actual advice, it would be to STOP bugging the kids with "but whyyyyyyyyy" harassment, and go to therapy separately (and maybe as a couple?) to try to dig into what's underneath this desperate clinging to the narrative that everything's FINE, the kids are just irrational. Figure out your own shit, LW. You're lying to yourself and you're the one who has to stop that.

If it’s just one kid out of multiple kids, then maybe it’s a “kid issue” (though in many cases it’s still a parent issue, often because one kid is marginalized and the parents poorly handled, for example, a coming-out). But with each subsequent kid involved in going no-contact, the chances of it being a kid issue go down astronomically.

Even if one parent poisons the well, while that often works while children are young, generally by their 30s and 40s offspring come to their own conclusions about people. You usually can’t lead a middle-aged person by the nose the way you can with an eight-year-old, when it comes to family members that they’re having regular independent contact with. They have enough information to form their own opinions. And we’re supposed to believe all the offspring are so easily duped that their mother can still control them decades later?

So yeah. LW’s deeply invested in believing there’s no way she and her husband are the problem, but I am certain to my bones that she and her husband are the problem.

There's a lot of "we" and a couple of mentions of "her dad" and "his dad" and the LW never says anything about "I" or "me."

That suggests that the LW is carefully ignoring/not talking about the possibility that the problem is mostly something either she or her husband did, and the other was a bad parent for not protecting the children from it. The whole thing is weirdly enmeshed, including that they asked their daughter-in-law to get involved, not as support for her spouse but in her profession as a social worker.

Their mother was very vindictive and untruthful to them about their father.

What did their mother say, and was it actually the truth that eventually led the kids to go no-contact with LW and husband?

Oh that's such bad advice. Just because LW hasn't told the advice columnist the reason doesn't mean she doesn't have a good idea of what it is, especially since it's all three siblings avoiding their dad and step-parent.

This letter is so full of missing reasons that it's swiss cheese.

Not just missing reasons -- though boy howdy -- but missing cut-offs. Three paragraphs with one of the kids cutting them off, and then suddenly it's all of them? That escalated quickly!

The whole thing about the mother having been vindictive and lying about their father reminds me, oddly, of my neighbors. They had a fight on their back deck, and I couldn't make out everything, but to this day I'm astonished that the guy exclaimed, offended, "I'm not having an affair! We're in a relationship!" (And when she asked why she should stay married to him, his answer was basically that she couldn't afford the mortgage alone. Real peach of a guy.)

"[L]et's get through this together without any judgment" -- boy, sure is generous of these parents to offer not to be judged!

I would not be surprised at all if the offered counseling is specifically church counseling, and I would not be at all surprised if the "church upbringing" is a big part of why all three kids have gone low-or-no contact.

I think on rereading that it was one kid who made the call but LW didn't mean to imply that only one kid objected.

The escalation was very quick! Two kids going no contact and one going low contact, all within four years? Middle child's final straw was reached in 2019 if the letter's timeline is accurate.

The people I know who are actually good parents don't usually bring up their substance use status as evidence. Because "did you or did you not have one to two glasses of wine or weed gummies last April hmmmmm?????" is not actually what determines whether they are good parents. And usually the parents who are bringing that up as their proof that they are great parents are ticking boxes rather than being good parents.

I'm Just Saying. "We didn't get high and beat them" doesn't make you stepmother of the year, that's a very minimal bar.

Oh wait, she didn't say she didn't beat them. She just said she didn't get high. Welp.

Funnily enough! My parents (from whom I am estranged) always brought up "But we didn't do drugs or alcohol!" as a defense for why they were great parents and we all had a great childhood. (They did also bring up "We didn't beat you," which, low bar, but fair.)

To my continuing bafflement, "Your father always came home at night and wasn't running around with women" was *also* brought up as a reason why I shouldn't criticize my parents. The moment my mother said that, I kind of stared at her in disbelief, thinking, "That may be an argument for him being a good husband, but how on earth is it an argument that I had a good childhood? He could have had sex with all the women in the world, and his sex life would not have affected young me in the slightest.")

Somehow, "conforms to social norms enough to be called 'upstanding'" has been conflated with "good at the skill known as parenting" by a number of parents.

Also, the moment I got to "whatever she was holding onto" at the start of the second paragraph, I knew where this letter was going, because WOW is that familiar language.

LW "been married for 32 years to my husband, who has three children from his prior marriage. The children are now in their mid-30s to early 40s."

So the kids were anywhere from 3 to 12 years old when they got married?

Sounds like LW and husband just kept telling children as to how the children should behave, instead of finding out how the children felt about the adults making such big changes in their lives. Or ever acknowledging any anger from the kids as worth apologizing for, instead it's the mother who is "vindictive".

Smart 12 year olds can certainly make up their own minds, and all kids have a right to be heard and acknowledged in their own feelings.

Sounds like a lot of conditional deafness went into all the missing reasons and cut-offs not being acknowledged.

The slow roll of revelations here, that none of their kids, or perhaps all but one, are no-contact, is a masterpiece of narration Hollywood could learn from.

We would have liked to have communicated about whatever she was holding onto to move past this issue.

...as opposed to understanding, apologizing, and trying to rectify?

we brought these children up in church.

Loooool

No matter what we do, the two oldest daughters and our grandchildren refuse to have anything to do with us.

I love the magic jump from "middle kid isn't happy" to "actually all of them plus their offspring hate us/me".

I also wonder about the circumstances of the divorce and remarriage. Is the "vindictive and untruthful" stuff something like "he had an affair"?

The core problem might be that the children's mother poisoned them against their father and LW, but there is nowhere near enough information in this letter to know.

Aside from everything else, having a family member intervene as a semi-professional communications agent is a Bad Idea.

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