agonyaunt | (no subject)

Hi, Carolyn: My husband and I are estranged from his sister. She has been emotionally abusive toward us, and the last straw was her bullying our 10-year-old son. I have her contacts blocked, but his sister keeps finding reasons to contact him. She texted saying she thought their mom was declining cognitively, and to say her daughter missed my husband so they needed to FaceTime. I think this is so manipulative of my sister-in-law, but my husband says he would be a monster for not responding.

I’m not sure how we deal with this. I don’t want to insist my husband have no contact with his sister, but she is not a safe person for us, especially our son, whose needs I think should be paramount here.

— Anonymous

Anonymous: They should, absolutely.

But if your husband can keep his sister away from the rest of you, then you can prioritize your son without asking your husband to feel monstrous.

So the real question is whether your husband’s boundaries are up to the challenge of his sister’s manipulation.

If you doubt that, then that’s your discussion with your husband. In depth, with role-playing and clear limits. Better that than re-litigating the sister’s role every time she texts.

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This is the second letter in the column about the man who wants his wife to mediate for him with his sons all the time. "Functionally a single parent", god, I just noticed that dude's sign-off.

Anyway, I wasn't going to post this but it stuck in my head so here it is.

Carolyn doesn't get into all this with LW, probably because there's no point, but there are two ways to look at this letter.

The first is that everything is as LW says and any reasonable person would agree that SIL is emotionally abusive and unstable and has bullied their ten year old son, and that their ten year old son should definitely be kept away from her.

The second is that it's more complicated than that or even that none of this is true at all, and LW is oversensitive to something and/or actively trying to isolate Husband from his family.

I have no idea which it is! Absolutely none! But what I do know is that while adults have the right to cut off contact with other people for any reason, or no reason at all, nobody has the right to declare their partner estranged from his sister. LW may be estranged from SIL, but Husband clearly isn't. And since Husband appears to be respecting LW's wish that SIL has no contact with LW or Son (another thing LW cannot unilaterally declare so long as Son has two living parents, even if she's wholly in the right to do so) then I don't really see that LW has anything to complain about.

And a third option is that SIL may well have been acting in ways that were harmful to her brother and his family, but sometimes we choose to associate with people that are harmful because to do otherwise would harm others who aren’t at fault (such as his lonely niece or declining mother). Even manipulative people aren’t always lying when reporting on what’s going on with others.

Indeed.

Yeah, my first thought reading the letter was, did cutting off SIL mean that she is now the sole care provider for a declining mother? And if so, that seems worth going into in more detail here.

Yep. Both from the perspective that if SIL is a genuine abuser, it’s not good for GIL (grandma-in-law) to have SIL be the sole one making decisions, and from the perspective that if SIL is actually just abrasive and having interpersonal conflicts with LW, SIL doesn’t deserve to have support around care for an aging relative disappear. It’s a lot of strain to care for a declining family member, and the more that can be spread between grown children, the better.

Edited (left out an important modifier by accident) 2024-04-11 22:00 (UTC)

Yeah. It's possible Mother is fine on her own and SIL is just being manipulative again, but I feel like it's telling that LW doesn't mention in the letter that they would know if Mother was declining or not.

If the LW's husband isn't in sufficient contact with his mother to notice her alleged cognitive decline, maybe he should fix that and stop using his sister as an intermediary. Then he can ignore his sister, who was horrible to his child, for a while at least, and if he doesn't want to ignore her, he can leave his family out of it and not bring home whatever toxicity the sister dishes out.

We do not know what the mother's living or caretaking situation is, so speculation on this is pure speculation.

The sister saying that her daughter needed to Facetime her uncle because she missed him doesn't include enough information. Are they actually close? Is this like holding a teddy up and saying "Teddy says you should eat the green beans! They make you strong!" to get a kid to do something? Is the daughter old enough to open Facetime and start a call and manage the relationship for herself? We don't know.

Edited 2024-04-12 17:46 (UTC)