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agonyaunt2024-11-25 02:52 pm
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2024-11-25 02:52 pm
Entry tags:
Care & Feeding: My Daughter Has An Unconventional Marriage...
...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.
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.