These reasons aren't missing, and yet....

[conuly]

Dear Annie: My son and I had a falling out a few years ago, right about the time he got engaged and was planning his wedding. I was blamed for not treating his fiancee nicely because I was once impatient at a dress shop. I bent over backward to be nice to her. The straw that broke the camel's back was at Easter, when I finally said something about the fact that his father and I basically were being ignored. That caused us to have a big blowup.

He accused me of not supporting him when he was growing up. He said I favored his sister and didn't spend enough time with him growing up. He said that I did not give money for their wedding and that I was constantly negative. I don't deny the negativity I was giving back when he was growing up; I was a young mother learning as I grew up with my children. I don't deny that I could be pessimistic, but I look at it as being realistic.

Yes, I have said some not-so-nice things to him, and as I look back, I know that I shouldn't have said them.

However, I wasn't even invited to the wedding, but his father was. Talk about a blow to the heart. My husband tried to be the peacemaker and talk to our son. He asked what I would need to do to get a second chance. I apologized for the things I said and did, but nothing seems to be enough.

Eventually, my husband told him that he would not attend the wedding unless I was attending. I was allowed to attend as long as I didn't cause problems, not that I would have, and he refused to have a mother/son dance with me. That really hurt me. Instead, he was dancing with his grandma on his father's side (my mother-in-law). We were included in some of the usual parental wedding things, but that was all. So our son has not spoken with us since then. Even then, it was strained. But the wedding was beautiful, and the celebration was very nice under the circumstances. -- Heartbroken Mom

Dear Heartbroken Mom: Your son has a lot of built-up hurt and resentment about his childhood and is taking it out on you. He is acting out by not including you. The two of you could really benefit from therapy. Before you run to a family therapist, however, start by acknowledging his hurt feelings and telling him that you are sorry. That it was not his fault when he was a little boy and you were not around enough. Tell him that you were trying to survive yourself with two young children and didn't know how to parent. You did the best you could. But emphasize the fact that you love him and that you want to make things better today with him and his new wife.

Forgiveness is a very powerful tool. Forgive yourself for not being as available a mother as he would have liked, and then forgive him for the way he is acting out at you. From there, you can start to open up the dialogue and begin to repair your mother/son relationship. But without self-acknowledgement for what you did wrong, he will continue to nitpick all your behaviors. You are right that it was not about being impatient at a dress shop; it was about him not being tolerant of anything you do because of his old hurt.

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Comments

[conuly]

1. I think we can all agree that the final sentence of this letter was certainly an odd choice, and yet so much in line with so many estrangees.

2. I'll give LW this much credit - unlike a lot of people estranged from their kids, this one does seem to have at least a surface-level grasp of the situation. Son explained it, and though they clearly didn't accept this explanation at all they at least remember enough of the pertinent details.

3. Therapy would be a waste of time and money until and unless LW commits to honesty. Which... they're not there yet, that's for sure.

4. Annie missed the mark.

[laurajv]

Annie usually misses the mark, doesn't she?

[cereta]

Annie has been known to tell people to make nice with abusers, so, yeah, it really doesn't surprise me that when a LW all but says she was a lousy mother, Annie labels it "nitpicking."

[mrissa]

he refused to have a mother/son dance with me

Look, I know people's traditions vary, but...more than half of the weddings I've attended have not had a mother/son dance. I would say solid majority. I've seen some nice ones, one that made me sniffle sentimentally! But I feel like when something is as totally optional as this and the LW is fixating on it, it's a very clear "form over substance" signal.

[ethelmay]

I have actually only ever heard of a father/daughter dance. It's been quite a while since I was at that kind of a wedding, though.

[full_metal_ox]

I suspect that the mother/son dance is a newer Distaff/Spear Counterpart of the father/daughter dance—-possibly because the mother hasn’t been construed as giving the son away in the same sense.

(Disclaimer: the above applies to my own limited experience of U.S. culturally-Christian Anglo-diasporic weddings. The world is a very big place, and people come up with new stuff all the time.)

The important thing is that a mother-son dance would’ve put her at center focus.

[mrissa]

Yes, it's for people who look at the father/daughter dance and say, "But what does the GROOM have" or "why just that?"

Couple's first dance
Father/daughter dance
Mother/son dance
wedding party dance (each bridesmaid dancing with the groomsman who brought them in regardless of how drunk he is or how large his feet are, sorry, still bitter at my cousin's husband's roommate)
and then some people add more formally set dances, the siblings of the bride and groom etc., and their guests start to riot because they've been sitting through four dances that were "look at those people, most of whom are completely untrained and not particularly entertaining, lurching mistily around the dance floor and do not particularly need to sit watching for The Grandparents' Dance etc.

[full_metal_ox]

And then there’s the Anniversary Dance: early in the reception, all the married couples are summoned onto the dance floor. The announcer calls out intervals ("Who's been together more than one year?...Five years?...Ten years?") and so forth; couples gradually drop out as the number increases, and the last couple left dancing, with the longest relationship, are singled out for applause; they then take the newlyweds aside to advise them on the secrets of a lasting union.

[librarygeek]

Instead of throwing the bouquet or a garter in some "guess who gets married next", I used the anniversary dance to give away my (artificial flowers) bouquet to the longest married couple. My great uncle and aunt were still delighted to tell me how they displayed it in their home years later. They also didn't try to give any advice. 😉😏

[full_metal_ox]

What a heartwarming gesture—-and glad to hear that they’re still in the present tense!

(At my brother and sister-in-law’s wedding, I accidentally caught the bouquet and then had to make an ostentatious show of fumbling it, requiring a do-over; it was very much understood that the best man and his fiancée were Next In Line, and the pretense of chance a formality.)

[mrissa]

Oh sure, and there's the Dollar Dance, and in some places any elder siblings of the marrying couple are asked to dance with one foot in a washtub so that people can throw money in for their future wedding, which is extremely gross and a friend of mine had to refuse RATHER FIRMLY because her future SIL was not taking just plain no for an answer....

[full_metal_ox]

I’ve never attended the right sort of wedding to experience this, but in some circles the Big Fat Bollywood Production Number is an option.

[joyeuce]

I've never even heard of a father/daughter dance, and I am so glad it isn't a tradition here - or wasn't when I got married - because with my father, hell no. (We weren't keen on a couple's first dance either, so we had a ceilidh, and the first dance was a square for eight with the bridesmaids, groom's supportes and ushers.)

[melannen]

Forget missing reasons, this one seems to be missing the *question*...?

[pauraque]

I've noticed that's a common theme in a lot of these estranged parent letters. They go on and on about how innocent they are and how horrible their child is, and then the letter just... ends. It could be infelicitous editing for publication, but I don't think so. I think people like this can't even formulate the thought that maybe they should be doing something differently, so it doesn't occur to them that the letter should end with "what should I do?"

[melannen]

Yeah. Some of them have a question, or at least an implied question, that's like "How can I magically make the world conform to my desires?" especially if it's a concrete desire like "see the grandchildren", but this one doesn't even have that - I can't even tell if the son is *actually* not talking to her, or just being "strained" about it.

I suspect it's because what she's looking for is "How do I make my son and DIL grovel at my very feet constantly confessing their love and admiration for me" but she is just barely capable of realizing that putting that in words would make it clear how unreasonable she is, so she doesn't.

[tielan]

The phrase that snagged my attention was: "once impatient at a dress shop".

For some reason, my brain wondered "a bridal dress shop, perhaps, where your DIL-to-be invited you along to help her choose her dress to try to get along with MIL...and whatever you did, it was a deal-breaker?"

[mrissa]

Yeah, I absolutely bet that she displayed her impatience by playing a game on her phone rather than by screaming at the bride, behaving unforgivably to the staff of the shop, or both, that is totally what happened here.

[azurelunatic]

Yuuuuup.

[kiezh]

This one does seem to have actually remembered some of the things her son said! Too bad she still thinks she's the only one allowed to have hurt feelings and automatically invalidates her *son's* hurt feelings (despite the fact that she hurt and neglected him when he was a vulnerable child under her care, and he "hurt" her when she was a grown adult with her own support system).

"Yes, I have said some not-so-nice things" is a classic of the estranged parent style (ducking responsibility via "I'm not a perfect person" derailing, carefully omitting WHAT she said, minimizing language to imply that it's not really a big deal and her son should be over it).

And yeah, there doesn't seem to be any *question* here. What does LW want? What she got, I guess: the advice columnist airing her grievances to the wide world and also joining her in belittling and infantilizing her son. "He is acting out by not including you." Yeah, no. He's trying to draw boundaries to keep his mom's awfulness away from his new wife and the new family unit they are building, which LW would love to invade and make all about her. (How dare he not dance attendance on her at his own wedding! How dare he not make himself available as a negativity sponge when she wants to complain at him!)

It's almost impressive, how she manages to dodge around ever actually acknowledging that she hurt him. Multiple instances of "I was hurt" and "I was blamed" but the closest she manages to come to admitting doing harm is a weak, vague "I know that I shouldn't have said [the not-nice things]." Which doesn't include taking responsibility for hurting him, and is also undermined *immediately* by "However, I wasn't even invited to the wedding ... talk about a blow to the heart" making it very clear where she thinks the real harm is. In her world, she can only be Victim, not Wrongdoer.

[firecat]

My husband tried to be the peacemaker and talk to our son. He asked what I would need to do to get a second chance. I apologized for the things I said and did, but nothing seems to be enough.

Did son tell husband what LW would need to do to get a second chance? And did LW do them? I find it suspicious that those bits of the story were left out. And if son did ask only for apologies, we all know what some apologies look like.

[joyeuce]

Yes, and LW gives off a definite, "I'm sorry, but ..." vibe.

[topaz_eyes]

And if son did ask only for apologies, we all know what some apologies look like.

Let me guess, LW said the "I'm sorry you felt/feel this way" non-apology "apology."

[conuly]

It's entirely possible that Son said "Listen, she used up her second, third, fourth, and fifth chances already. I only gave her one more chance because my Fiancee insisted and then she blew that up too."

[jadelennox]

Yeah if I were the columnist I'd have written "sincerely ask if there's a way you can make amends, and learn to live with it if the answer is no, he's done. Your son doesn't have to fix things with you. If you want to keep a chance of things being better one day, don't force your husband to choose; let him keep a relationship with your son that you don't try to hijack. You may have lost your chance and that sucks, but you have to process this shit in therapy."

[topaz_eyes]

He accused me of not supporting him when he was growing up. He said I favored his sister and didn't spend enough time with him growing up. He said that I did not give money for their wedding and that I was constantly negative. I don't deny the negativity I was giving back when he was growing up; I was a young mother learning as I grew up with my children. I don't deny that I could be pessimistic, but I look at it as being realistic.

I bet LW is still constantly negative, it's just couched under the "I'm just trying to help" disguise.

Young children can't tell the difference between pessimistic and realistic. They take everything at face value. Lots of parents have to do a lot of learning and growing up along with their children, yet they still manage to ensure their kids feel loved, respected, and wanted. It's imho crystal clear how the son felt growing up with LW as a mother. A good advice columnist would lambaste LW for not taking ownership of her mistakes, yet Annie totally missed this paragraph.

[cimorene]

Yeah, this answer is amazingly wrong even for her.

I would not advise the son to move towards more contact, that's for sure. Probably less with the father, too.

[harpers_child]

I'm going to ignore most of this letter to focus on something really unimportant.

What song did you want for the mother/son dance? Was it "Simple Kind of Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd? All three weddings I've been to that had this dance used that song and two of the three marriages ended because the groom's mom couldn't respect boundaries. (The third went no contact.)

If you've been to a wedding that had a mother/son dance, was it to any other song?

[full_metal_ox]

“Simple Kind of Man”: “The Giving Tree” for grownups.

(Speaking of which: what’s betting that said mothers also read their sons “Love You Forever”?

My sister-in-law, who loves that book to pieces and has made a point of reading it to her children and grandchildren, says, “Doesn’t it just give you goosebumps?” Answer: yes, but not for the reasons she has in mind.)

[harpers_child]

You may be onto something.