Care & Feeding: My Daughter Has An Unconventional Marriage...

[minoanmiss]

...I Don’t Understand How She Could Accept This. I can’t seem to accept this new “grandson.”

Dear Care and Feeding,

My daughter, “Mindy,” has been married to “Carl” for a little under eight years. In all that time, they have also lived with another woman, “Noelle.” Everyone in their ménage à trois is in their early to mid-30s. I have a 4-year-old grandson, “Adam,” and two years ago, Noelle gave birth to “Daniel.” The whole “family” visits frequently, and I’m ashamed to admit it, but I am always excited about seeing Adam, but not Daniel. I know it disappoints the adult threesome, and Adam, who is a very perceptive kid, has started to notice and vocalize that I treat him differently than his brother. I do want to be better. But I’ll also confess that I’ve never really reconciled myself to their tripod arrangement, or understood how it can be that my daughter seems to be perfectly fine sharing a man with another woman. And I don’t seem to be able to view Daniel as a real grandson, even though everyone involved wants me to, and intellectually, I think it would be best. How do I fix myself?

—Old Fossil

Dear Old,

Being old doesn’t have to mean being fossilized. I am old—I’ll turn 70 on my next birthday—and I’m also stubborn as hell. If I can invite new ideas into my aging brain, so can you. I promise. (So can anybody.) You just have to be willing to.

You don’t even have to “agree with” or even understand your daughter’s willingness to “share,” you just have to respect it, which means accepting the basic fact that she’s not you. If she’s happy, and you love her, it’s on you to find it in your heart to love the people she loves, and especially to love the child—and any future children—she is raising, whether biologically related to you or not. You may be able to jump-start this by recognizing that if you continue to treat these two children differently, your daughter and her family may stop visiting, and you will lose not only your daughter but the child of whom you do consider yourself the grandmother. The truth is that if you cannot “reconcile” yourself to Mindy’s being part of a throuple rather than (as you’d prefer) a couple, you will eventually lose her anyway. And there’s a bonus to graceful acceptance of things of which we don’t have personal experience, or that may seem strange to us: It opens our minds and our hearts, which makes our own lives better. It also keeps us from fossilizing.

Comments

[ashbet]

Excellent advice!

LW needs to reconcile themselves with the fact that this is their daughter’s family, and they can either accept it or lose access to it.

[raven]

I kind of love this LW. They're about twenty times more self aware than most of the writers to these columns.

[mrissa]

If you'd had multiple versions of her making your friends miserable for a couple of decades I think the bloom would come off that rose pretty quick.

[jadelennox]

here's what I love about LW:

intellectually, I think it would be best. How do I fix myself?

That's exactly the right question to ask, and it shows a humility that the rest of the letter is struggling to attain. This is not "Am I the Asshole" or the worse "Am I the Angel", this is "whether or not I am the asshole, I'm the only person I can change to make this situation better for me and the kids, so please help me do it."

[raven]

Yes! Yes, that's it, that's exactly why I liked them.

[ashbet]

Agreed, it’s unusually self-aware for the LW to know that they are the problem, and that they need to come up with a strategy to fix it.

I hope they do find a way to get it together — favoritism amongst biological full-siblings is bad enough (ask me how I know), and acting this way toward half-siblings and step-siblings can be even worse.

They really do risk alienating the whole family if they can’t at least behave as if these kids, who are being raised as siblings (and who are presumably half-sibs, although that is admittedly a conjecture), are both their grandchildren.

[haggis]

I know a family like this roughly 14 years later. None of them have much contact with their LW-equivalent, because they won't acknowledge both children are part of the family.

[cereta]

Situations like this are why the phrase "act as if" was coined. LW may not be able to control their feelings, but they can control their actions. If they're careful and intentional about treating Adam and Daniel the same, the feelings will follow. Or maybe they won't, but at least LW won't have alienated her daughter and grandsons.

[liv]

I kind of recognize this situation because my parents don't really acknowledge the children of my polycule. I mean, they are basically decent people and are self-aware that it's their problem if they don't understand my relationship situation, and they're never actively mean to me or my partners. And they are always perfectly nice to the children, but in the same way that they're broadly nice to any children they happen to come across.

The situation has improved over the ten years I've been part of my partners' and therefore their children's lives; now my parents will generally include the whole family in invitations, and they don't actively change the subject when I mention them. So I can tell that they are working on it. But it's somewhat too late; for the first few years when they could have got to know the children and maybe stepped into a grandparent-like role, they were mostly pretending that they didn't exist.

In my case, my husband I don't have legally recognized children, so I don't have the problem of siblings being treated differently. But I do sometimes get impatient with Mum complaining that she doesn't have grandchildren like all her friends (and recently siblings). I have to bite my tongue not to say, I gave you every chance to be a grandmother and you didn't take it!

[conuly]

But I’ll also confess that I’ve never really reconciled myself to their tripod arrangement, or understood how it can be that my daughter seems to be perfectly fine sharing a man with another woman.

Only two of the three can marry, and who knows how they decided. Maybe the Daughter is sharing her wife with this man.

But seriously, I do not know how you can treat the kids differently at this age. Surely one small child is as endearing as another? And they're close enough in age that they can do it all together.