Did Abby even read this letter?

[conuly]

DEAR ABBY: We adopted our daughter, "Opal," at the age of 2. She is 6 now. Opal lived with us off and on as a newborn, but by age 1, she lived permanently with us. We live in a small community, so everyone knows everyone. Opal lived with her biological mom prior to adoption.

We tried to allow interaction between them with certain rules in place. However, Opal was recently permitted to spend two hours with her biological mother at a party for a sibling. Opal asked to come back home, so she was dropped off. I later found out her bio mom told her she gave birth to her so SHE is her REAL mother.

We never hid the adoption from Opal. We speak about it in a way that isn't negative or hurtful. Since this happened, Opal has reverted to being clingy and wakes up with that conversation on her mind. How do I address this with her bio mom and with our daughter? -- REALLY MOM IN KENTUCKY

DEAR REALLY MOM: First address this with your daughter. Explain that when her bio mom gave birth to her, she was unable to keep her, so she gave her to you to raise. Tell Opal you love her, she fills your heart with joy every day and that you, unlike her bio mom, will be there for her every day of your life.

Then, tell the woman who gave up your daughter that you had planned to tell Opal about the adoption when she was a little older, that she bungled the situation and that, for the foreseeable future, you want her to stay away and not further traumatize Opal.

Link

Comments

[conuly]

1. The biggest screw-up in this response is that Opal already knew she was adopted. Her biomom didn't "bungle introducing the subject", she just brought it up in a negative way.

2. LW doesn't suggest that they want to cut off ties between Opal and her biomom, and honestly, I'm not sure that'd be the best thing for Opal anyway - especially if that also cuts her off from other family members, like her biological siblings. LW just wants to find a way to talk to Biomom about it, get them on the same page.

3. What I'd recommend is that LW consult with a child therapist on the best path forward. Unlike Abby, I think it'd probably be pretty traumatic to separate Opal from an adult in her life that she's been close to, but it may be wise to limit them to supervised visits and phone calls for a little while. But I don't know, because I don't know the situation.

[cimorene]

Yeah, does this gig pay so badly that Abby doesn't even have time to read the letters?!

[jadelennox]

I just plugged the letter into whatever BS large language models that don't require an account (GPT 3.5 & Perplexity, I think), assuming that's why the answer was so bad. But no, even the piece-of-crap large language model chatbots got this more right than whoever is answering Dear Abby.

[cimorene]

I mean, Abby is pretty bad now usually, but this seems special somehow. Usually Abby isn't even the worst, but even the worst columnists USUALLY seem to have read the letter...

[minoanmiss]

You deserve whatever Abby got paid

[green_grrl]

Did an editor not even look at this?

[ambyr]

Are we experiencing the first AI advice columnist? Because this sure feels like AI-style misunderstanding.

[jadelennox]

not that results from large language models are replicable, but I don't think so, bizarrely.

[ioplokon]

Wow; I'm wondering if maybe the original letter was much longer & this is edited for length/style? But even then, a pretty big mistake to make... (and presumably you'd figure out your mistake in editing?)

[swingandswirl]

... man, I'm very glad someone new is taking over for Abby, they would have to do a lot of work to be worse.