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The comic at the top of the column is particularly apt for so many advice column questions!
Dear Carolyn: My son and I are close, but my brilliant daughter has largely shut me out. She is 30 but, I believe, still nursing resentment over my divorce from her mother when she was 4. We were very close when I had to move out. I also made some very bad choices in those early years after my divorce when my drinking became a problem. Both my daughter and her younger brother have grounds to be angry about my behavior during that time.
Yes, I made mistakes, but I also paid the consequences and turned myself around. I quit drinking 25 years ago and have always been an engaged, supportive and loving parent. Both my parents were AWOL when I was young, as their parents had been, and I was determined to break that chain. And I did.
My daughter has been casually hurtful in the past in ways that seemed deliberate, and I think she may be doing so again. Two of her short stories were recently published in a prestigious literary magazine. She emailed me the stories a few days ago.
Using a pen name, she falsely depicts me as an indifferent, uncaring, completely absent father. I’m not a character in the story, but my absence is a major element. It’s brilliantly done, but it leaves a false impression of me as a deadbeat, and it’s completely unfair.
I’m thrilled and immensely proud of my daughter for getting published (and have told her so), but I’m deeply hurt. I hate to make it all about me, but did she depict me as a disengaged dad intending to be hurtful? What other conclusion is there?
Asking my daughter not to take creative liberties when writing about me is just part of my problem. My bigger problem is how to process my anger in a way that keeps the door open to a healthier relationship down the road. I really don’t know how to talk to my daughter about this.
— Feeling Shafted
Feeling Shafted: Short answer: You don’t. You don’t tell her what to write.
You also don’t assume she’s writing about you. And you don’t assume how she feels about what she writes, or what she intends you to feel.
If you hate to make it all about you, then don’t make it all about you.
You may reasonably infer she is writing about you, and you may understandably feel hurt. That’s not only fine, that’s human.
What you don’t get to do — and still lay claim to being “supportive” — is expect her to fix your feelings for you.
You’re the one who deals with those. Alone or with help, that’s up to you. But you keep the two emotional paths separate: She is on hers, and her art is part of that, 100 percent her business and her prerogative. (This includes her right to be wrong.) You are on yours, and your redemption is part of that. That’s it.
Your praise for her work is the best case you can make.
Speaking of your redemption, the math is funky. If she’s 30 now and was 4 when you divorced her mom, then you miscounted the “years” of either drinking or sobriety.
A quibble, maybe, but it reminds me of players who flash the “who, me?” pose at the refs after obvious fouls. She “paid the consequences” of your actions, too, at a formative age. The best way to prop the door open to her trust is to rid yourself of any trace of defensiveness about your past. You did what you did. She feels what she feels. The only way forward starts there.
Link
Yes, I made mistakes, but I also paid the consequences and turned myself around. I quit drinking 25 years ago and have always been an engaged, supportive and loving parent. Both my parents were AWOL when I was young, as their parents had been, and I was determined to break that chain. And I did.
My daughter has been casually hurtful in the past in ways that seemed deliberate, and I think she may be doing so again. Two of her short stories were recently published in a prestigious literary magazine. She emailed me the stories a few days ago.
Using a pen name, she falsely depicts me as an indifferent, uncaring, completely absent father. I’m not a character in the story, but my absence is a major element. It’s brilliantly done, but it leaves a false impression of me as a deadbeat, and it’s completely unfair.
I’m thrilled and immensely proud of my daughter for getting published (and have told her so), but I’m deeply hurt. I hate to make it all about me, but did she depict me as a disengaged dad intending to be hurtful? What other conclusion is there?
Asking my daughter not to take creative liberties when writing about me is just part of my problem. My bigger problem is how to process my anger in a way that keeps the door open to a healthier relationship down the road. I really don’t know how to talk to my daughter about this.
— Feeling Shafted
Feeling Shafted: Short answer: You don’t. You don’t tell her what to write.
You also don’t assume she’s writing about you. And you don’t assume how she feels about what she writes, or what she intends you to feel.
If you hate to make it all about you, then don’t make it all about you.
You may reasonably infer she is writing about you, and you may understandably feel hurt. That’s not only fine, that’s human.
What you don’t get to do — and still lay claim to being “supportive” — is expect her to fix your feelings for you.
You’re the one who deals with those. Alone or with help, that’s up to you. But you keep the two emotional paths separate: She is on hers, and her art is part of that, 100 percent her business and her prerogative. (This includes her right to be wrong.) You are on yours, and your redemption is part of that. That’s it.
Your praise for her work is the best case you can make.
Speaking of your redemption, the math is funky. If she’s 30 now and was 4 when you divorced her mom, then you miscounted the “years” of either drinking or sobriety.
A quibble, maybe, but it reminds me of players who flash the “who, me?” pose at the refs after obvious fouls. She “paid the consequences” of your actions, too, at a formative age. The best way to prop the door open to her trust is to rid yourself of any trace of defensiveness about your past. You did what you did. She feels what she feels. The only way forward starts there.
Link
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Unless, of course, it hit a nerve because it's definitely about you, in which case get some therapy and stop blaming your daughter for having feelings about you and your terrible parenting.
Also, it did not go unnoticed by me - or, indeed, the commenters at WaPo - that your timeline of events is sketchy as fuck. LW, try harder.
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OR it's an accurate portrayal of how your daughter viewed your parenting or lack thereof - in which case, your daughter is entitled to her feelings about her experiences!
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Hey, LW's daughter:
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” -- Anne Lamott
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Your 'redemption arc' does not oblige her to accept you as the hero of her story - or even of yours.
My dad up and left when I was 13, we properly reconnected at 36, and a dozen years later, our relationship is pretty good. Which is to say: you don't know how it will end, and it's neither your place nor a kindness to your relationship to demand she forgive and forget on your timeline.
Plus what other people have said about her fiction being...idk, fiction...
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I’m recalling an account by Jane Lebak of how she’d complimented one of her writing students on the brilliant use of a fallible narrator: she’d delivered a masterful study of the POV of a vain, overbearing, and self-unaware bigot.
The student, a middle-aged woman, was flabbergasted—-she’d written an autobiographical incident! (Her daughter, taking the same class, privately thanked Lebak later.)
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"[I] have always been an engaged, supportive and loving parent"
and
"I also made some very bad choices in those early years after my divorce when my drinking became a problem. Both my daughter and her younger brother have grounds to be angry about my behavior during that time."
do not add up at all.
Also, "Both my parents were AWOL when I was young, as their parents had been, and I was determined to break that chain. And I did."
contradicts
"my divorce from her mother when she was 4. We were very close when I had to move out."
Sounds like he was definitely AWOL (and having drinking problems!) when his kids were young.
Everything this guy says, he also says the opposite. It keeps going on - I can find several more examples in the mess about the short story. He's completely incoherent and seems to revise his view of reality 10 times a minute. I hope his daughter (who has both "shut him out" and also sent him her published short stories "a few days ago", another contradiction) has a very strong sense of reality and does not allow him to mess with her head - I bet he does this in person, too.
Actually, I hope she gets the hell away from him and makes his selfish inaccurate complaint that she's "shut him out" into the plain truth. Don't give him any openings! (I wonder if he actually is close with the son at all, or if his son has perfected the "sure, whatever you say dad" shield and then goes off and does his own thing. I think LW would consider "agrees with me and doesn't contest anything I say" to be closeness.)
I realize it’s nearly three months after the fact…
Having earned at least one lifelong enemy by mistaking "Please, send me your honest critique" for "Please, send me your honest critique," I always resist if I'm not sure. And there was the one horrifying moment in my creative writing seminar when I critiqued a piece that was SUPPOSED to be fiction and said offhand that the narrator was the perfect example of a conceited bigot who was unaware of her own prejudices, and that really made the story real...and the author's DAUGHTER was laughing hysterically into her hands and I realized, oh CRAP, this was a real-life story, and at that point there was nothing I could say to take it back (nor could I have--the story had appeared up until that very second to be a kind of anti-hero/unreliable narrator type). To her credit, the author herself didn't take offense and merely said I had misunderstood the tone of the story. Later the daughter said to me privately, "She SO MUCH deserved that," and I was still reeling.
Source: https://groups.io/g/BotP/message/25670