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1. I have a 12-year-old daughter who doesn’t like school. She gets decent grades and is smart, but prefers to do her own thing. When middle school started, she began to be sick all the time. In the morning she would say things like, “I was up all night long on the toilet. I have diarrhea. My head is killing me. My throat hurts.” She says this so convincingly it’s hard to tell when it’s the truth or she’s making it up—but when I let her stay home, I often find out later that she had a math test that day, is having trouble with a kid in gym, or just didn’t want to go.
Sometimes she really is sick, but the many lies have made it impossible for me to tell! She will put on a big show and insist that she can’t go to school, and instead of having compassion for her and taking care of her, I have to tell her I just don’t believe her. Then she’ll flat-out refuse to go. She is generally an avoider of tasks she doesn’t prefer (aren’t we all, really?), but this situation is frustrating and irritating to me because she gets behind on assignments and her grades suffer. How can I tell the real sickness from the fake sickness? And what kind of consequences can we give her when she does stay home?
—I Don’t Believe You
Dear Believe,
I can imagine how frustrating this must be for you. But it may help if you take a step back from your irritation to ask an entirely different question. Don’t try to figure out how to sniff out the lie, how to punish her when you learn that she has lied, or how to make staying home so unpleasant for her that she reserves this option only for when she is so deathly ill, she has no choice but to stay in bed. What if, instead, you focused on the things that are happening in her life with which she can see no way to cope except by avoidance, which also involves lying to you? And helping her develop the skills and strategies she needs (we all need!) to deal with what she fears, dreads, or just dislikes—since right now she is using the only strategy she knows of, and (unlike you, the grown-up) isn’t considering the larger consequences of each short-term avoidance of a problem.
Take them one at a time. Math is hard? “All right, I get it—math was hard for me too. [Or: I felt the same way about science/history/Spanish.] Let’s brainstorm ways to make it less hard.” Working with a tutor? Changing the way homework and studying get done (maybe math first, while she’s still relatively fresh and has the brain power for it)? Helping her learn the good study habits she’ll need for years to come? Having a real conversation with her about what tests are for? (I’ve had this conversation with 18-year-olds to whom it has never occurred that a test doesn’t have to be a hoop to be jumped through, but can be a “trick” to get them to learn what they need to learn, and then to let them and the teacher administering it know what they still need to work on.) What kind of trouble is a kid giving her at school? Let’s strategize about how to deal with that. And what does, “I just don’t feel like going to school” actually mean? Don’t take it at face value. Ask her to talk about it. Talk to her about what you do and what others do when they have an obligation they don’t feel like fulfilling. (But please don’t say, “You just have to suck it up.”)
If you have real conversations with her about all this, she may begin to trust you; she may stop feeling that she has to lie to you. And when she tells you the truth, practice compassion, patience, and understanding in your response to her—and, yes, sometimes do allow her a “mental health day” when she makes it clear she really needs it. I allowed my child to give herself a day off several times a year. She knew she had to choose them carefully, as they weren’t limitless, and she chose fewer and fewer as time went on. By high school, she abstained from taking them at all—though she still had the option to—because she didn’t want to miss the work and have to make it up. And by then, she had the coping strategies well in hand for making it through a day she knew was going to be hard.
—Michelle
**********
2. Dear Care and Feeding,
I believe that my brother’s wife killed him. On Thanksgiving, when they were over for dinner, my brother complained of pain and swelling in his calf muscle. My sister-in-law dismissed it. She said he had probably just “pulled a muscle.” But my brother said he couldn’t think of anything he had done that might have caused that. The pain continued all afternoon, and while he was hobbling around, he mentioned several times that maybe they should go to an urgent care to get it checked out. His wife downplayed it, said it was “just a cramp,” pointed out that it was a holiday, so nothing would be open, gave him some Tylenol, and told him he could put a heating pad on it when they got home. I mentioned that most muscle cramps last only a few minutes, not hours; I agreed with my brother that they should check it out. Unheeded advice. Friday, late morning, we received a call that my sister-in-law, coming home from Black Friday shopping, found my brother on the floor. He was pronounced dead by the paramedics; no life-saving measures were taken. The preliminary (and probable actual) cause of death was determined to be a blood clot in his leg that had traveled to his heart.
My SIL has a history of being cheap about going to the doctor. One of their kids broke their finger when they were younger, and she put it off as a sprain. Just last winter she was in the hospital for pneumonia because she put the symptoms off as “just a cold.” There are many other examples of where medical attention should have been sought but wasn’t, or not until after the condition worsened. Now she has asked me to help her with sorting and putting up for sale my brother’s “man stuff” (tools, etc.).
I can’t even look her in the eye, let alone help her, knowing that if they had sought medical attention on Thanksgiving, my brother might (and probably would) still be alive. The excuse I am giving her right now is that I am still grieving too much to take this on—the funeral was so recent!—but I know that excuse can only go on for so long. She thinks what happened was an unavoidable “accident” and has no guilt about it, which bothers me a lot. I have even thought about going to the police and explaining what happened but my wife says that wouldn’t do any good. What should I do to get over my anger with my SIL? Just go ahead and accuse her of killing my brother, so I can get it off my chest?
—My Brother’s Wife Killed Him
Dear Brother,
I am very sorry for your loss. Of course, you’re grieving—that’s not an excuse; it’s the truth. But I must tell you gently that your anger at your brother’s wife is misplaced. Your brother was an adult who could have decided to leave the gathering and seek medical attention. If his wife refused to drive him, you or someone else could have offered to. If none of you were willing or able to, he could have called for an Uber. Or even 911.
The problem here seems to have been that everyone was cowed by your sister-in-law, who seems to call all the shots, and no one, including your brother, wanted to rock the boat—which contradicting his wife would have done. I am not suggesting that you and your entire family should carry the guilt you wish your sister-in-law felt about her husband’s death. But it isn’t fair to consider her the “killer.”
I wish your brother had stood up for himself. I wish (less significantly) he’d insisted that their child’s finger be examined rather than written off as a sprain, and that, for your sister-in-law’s own sake, both he and she had taken her upper respiratory symptoms seriously before they developed into pneumonia and she landed in the hospital. There’s not much use in dwelling on what could’ve been, but perhaps, having established the habit of asserting himself, your brother might have been able to take himself to the ER that night; perhaps, having been proved right so many times, his wife might not have been so resistant to his seeing a doctor on that fateful, terrible Thursday.
In any case, you might do yourself a favor and have a conversation with her—one in which you express your remorse over not insisting that your brother go to the hospital “whether he wanted to or not,” and your wish that you had known what was actually going on with him. Perhaps that would give her a chance to open up about any guilt she may be doing her best to conceal (or not to feel at all). But even if it doesn’t—even if she maintains that what happened was unavoidable (and cluelessly assures you that you have nothing to feel guilty about)—you will have found a way to get out into the open the fundamental fact that you feel certain your brother should have sought help then and there, and that if he had, he might still be alive. Your anger is bigger, wider, and probably more complicated than you think it is. Making your sister-in-law its scapegoat is not going to help you feel better.
***********
3. Dear Care and Feeding,
My brother just informed me his family will not attend the baby shower I am throwing for my only child. They do not like her. She has borderline personality disorder, and she can throw some vicious one-liners. They’ve chosen through the years to have little contact with her, even though my brother and I are close. His family’s relationship with my parents and me has been cordial, but they have done nothing to have a relationship with my daughter (and vice-versa). I would like them to attend the shower for the first and probably only baby our family will see in the next generation. It will hurt me and my parents if they do not attend, and their continued refusal to have anything to do with her will only do more damage as time passes. I want them to do this for the family—it’s the right thing to do! They should join us at this celebration. What do you think?
—In the Middle
Dear Middle,
I think you can’t force people into relationships with each other, and that it’s unwise of you to try to turn a baby shower into a family-loyalty test, or a referendum on the future of your brother’s family’s relationship with your grandchild-to-be. You’ve invited them; they’ve declined to attend (that is an invited guest’s prerogative). I assume you invited your brother’s whole brood as a unit, and that’s why he was the one to RSVP on their behalf. (If you wanted to force each member of his family to individually address their feelings about their niece/cousin, so that you’d have the chance to engage with each of them, one-on-one, about this, instead of all of you relying on—or hiding behind—your brother, you might have sent separate invitations to each. But why force it, after all?)
I will say that demanding that people do something “for the family” that they don’t want to do is a path to estrangement. If you would prefer that to the cordial but not close relationship you currently have with your sister-in-law and her children—and are willing to risk losing your brother, too (which, if you make him choose, you very well might)—then you can keep pushing. But if I were you, I’d celebrate the impending birth of my daughter’s child only with people who love her and want to be there. And later, when the baby arrives, stand down and see what happens. Babies sometimes have a way of bringing families together. Not that you should count on it. If your daughter is awful to her aunt and cousins, even a baby may not help. But you never know.
1. I have a 12-year-old daughter who doesn’t like school. She gets decent grades and is smart, but prefers to do her own thing. When middle school started, she began to be sick all the time. In the morning she would say things like, “I was up all night long on the toilet. I have diarrhea. My head is killing me. My throat hurts.” She says this so convincingly it’s hard to tell when it’s the truth or she’s making it up—but when I let her stay home, I often find out later that she had a math test that day, is having trouble with a kid in gym, or just didn’t want to go.
Sometimes she really is sick, but the many lies have made it impossible for me to tell! She will put on a big show and insist that she can’t go to school, and instead of having compassion for her and taking care of her, I have to tell her I just don’t believe her. Then she’ll flat-out refuse to go. She is generally an avoider of tasks she doesn’t prefer (aren’t we all, really?), but this situation is frustrating and irritating to me because she gets behind on assignments and her grades suffer. How can I tell the real sickness from the fake sickness? And what kind of consequences can we give her when she does stay home?
—I Don’t Believe You
Dear Believe,
I can imagine how frustrating this must be for you. But it may help if you take a step back from your irritation to ask an entirely different question. Don’t try to figure out how to sniff out the lie, how to punish her when you learn that she has lied, or how to make staying home so unpleasant for her that she reserves this option only for when she is so deathly ill, she has no choice but to stay in bed. What if, instead, you focused on the things that are happening in her life with which she can see no way to cope except by avoidance, which also involves lying to you? And helping her develop the skills and strategies she needs (we all need!) to deal with what she fears, dreads, or just dislikes—since right now she is using the only strategy she knows of, and (unlike you, the grown-up) isn’t considering the larger consequences of each short-term avoidance of a problem.
Take them one at a time. Math is hard? “All right, I get it—math was hard for me too. [Or: I felt the same way about science/history/Spanish.] Let’s brainstorm ways to make it less hard.” Working with a tutor? Changing the way homework and studying get done (maybe math first, while she’s still relatively fresh and has the brain power for it)? Helping her learn the good study habits she’ll need for years to come? Having a real conversation with her about what tests are for? (I’ve had this conversation with 18-year-olds to whom it has never occurred that a test doesn’t have to be a hoop to be jumped through, but can be a “trick” to get them to learn what they need to learn, and then to let them and the teacher administering it know what they still need to work on.) What kind of trouble is a kid giving her at school? Let’s strategize about how to deal with that. And what does, “I just don’t feel like going to school” actually mean? Don’t take it at face value. Ask her to talk about it. Talk to her about what you do and what others do when they have an obligation they don’t feel like fulfilling. (But please don’t say, “You just have to suck it up.”)
If you have real conversations with her about all this, she may begin to trust you; she may stop feeling that she has to lie to you. And when she tells you the truth, practice compassion, patience, and understanding in your response to her—and, yes, sometimes do allow her a “mental health day” when she makes it clear she really needs it. I allowed my child to give herself a day off several times a year. She knew she had to choose them carefully, as they weren’t limitless, and she chose fewer and fewer as time went on. By high school, she abstained from taking them at all—though she still had the option to—because she didn’t want to miss the work and have to make it up. And by then, she had the coping strategies well in hand for making it through a day she knew was going to be hard.
—Michelle
2. Dear Care and Feeding,
I believe that my brother’s wife killed him. On Thanksgiving, when they were over for dinner, my brother complained of pain and swelling in his calf muscle. My sister-in-law dismissed it. She said he had probably just “pulled a muscle.” But my brother said he couldn’t think of anything he had done that might have caused that. The pain continued all afternoon, and while he was hobbling around, he mentioned several times that maybe they should go to an urgent care to get it checked out. His wife downplayed it, said it was “just a cramp,” pointed out that it was a holiday, so nothing would be open, gave him some Tylenol, and told him he could put a heating pad on it when they got home. I mentioned that most muscle cramps last only a few minutes, not hours; I agreed with my brother that they should check it out. Unheeded advice. Friday, late morning, we received a call that my sister-in-law, coming home from Black Friday shopping, found my brother on the floor. He was pronounced dead by the paramedics; no life-saving measures were taken. The preliminary (and probable actual) cause of death was determined to be a blood clot in his leg that had traveled to his heart.
My SIL has a history of being cheap about going to the doctor. One of their kids broke their finger when they were younger, and she put it off as a sprain. Just last winter she was in the hospital for pneumonia because she put the symptoms off as “just a cold.” There are many other examples of where medical attention should have been sought but wasn’t, or not until after the condition worsened. Now she has asked me to help her with sorting and putting up for sale my brother’s “man stuff” (tools, etc.).
I can’t even look her in the eye, let alone help her, knowing that if they had sought medical attention on Thanksgiving, my brother might (and probably would) still be alive. The excuse I am giving her right now is that I am still grieving too much to take this on—the funeral was so recent!—but I know that excuse can only go on for so long. She thinks what happened was an unavoidable “accident” and has no guilt about it, which bothers me a lot. I have even thought about going to the police and explaining what happened but my wife says that wouldn’t do any good. What should I do to get over my anger with my SIL? Just go ahead and accuse her of killing my brother, so I can get it off my chest?
—My Brother’s Wife Killed Him
Dear Brother,
I am very sorry for your loss. Of course, you’re grieving—that’s not an excuse; it’s the truth. But I must tell you gently that your anger at your brother’s wife is misplaced. Your brother was an adult who could have decided to leave the gathering and seek medical attention. If his wife refused to drive him, you or someone else could have offered to. If none of you were willing or able to, he could have called for an Uber. Or even 911.
The problem here seems to have been that everyone was cowed by your sister-in-law, who seems to call all the shots, and no one, including your brother, wanted to rock the boat—which contradicting his wife would have done. I am not suggesting that you and your entire family should carry the guilt you wish your sister-in-law felt about her husband’s death. But it isn’t fair to consider her the “killer.”
I wish your brother had stood up for himself. I wish (less significantly) he’d insisted that their child’s finger be examined rather than written off as a sprain, and that, for your sister-in-law’s own sake, both he and she had taken her upper respiratory symptoms seriously before they developed into pneumonia and she landed in the hospital. There’s not much use in dwelling on what could’ve been, but perhaps, having established the habit of asserting himself, your brother might have been able to take himself to the ER that night; perhaps, having been proved right so many times, his wife might not have been so resistant to his seeing a doctor on that fateful, terrible Thursday.
In any case, you might do yourself a favor and have a conversation with her—one in which you express your remorse over not insisting that your brother go to the hospital “whether he wanted to or not,” and your wish that you had known what was actually going on with him. Perhaps that would give her a chance to open up about any guilt she may be doing her best to conceal (or not to feel at all). But even if it doesn’t—even if she maintains that what happened was unavoidable (and cluelessly assures you that you have nothing to feel guilty about)—you will have found a way to get out into the open the fundamental fact that you feel certain your brother should have sought help then and there, and that if he had, he might still be alive. Your anger is bigger, wider, and probably more complicated than you think it is. Making your sister-in-law its scapegoat is not going to help you feel better.
3. Dear Care and Feeding,
My brother just informed me his family will not attend the baby shower I am throwing for my only child. They do not like her. She has borderline personality disorder, and she can throw some vicious one-liners. They’ve chosen through the years to have little contact with her, even though my brother and I are close. His family’s relationship with my parents and me has been cordial, but they have done nothing to have a relationship with my daughter (and vice-versa). I would like them to attend the shower for the first and probably only baby our family will see in the next generation. It will hurt me and my parents if they do not attend, and their continued refusal to have anything to do with her will only do more damage as time passes. I want them to do this for the family—it’s the right thing to do! They should join us at this celebration. What do you think?
—In the Middle
Dear Middle,
I think you can’t force people into relationships with each other, and that it’s unwise of you to try to turn a baby shower into a family-loyalty test, or a referendum on the future of your brother’s family’s relationship with your grandchild-to-be. You’ve invited them; they’ve declined to attend (that is an invited guest’s prerogative). I assume you invited your brother’s whole brood as a unit, and that’s why he was the one to RSVP on their behalf. (If you wanted to force each member of his family to individually address their feelings about their niece/cousin, so that you’d have the chance to engage with each of them, one-on-one, about this, instead of all of you relying on—or hiding behind—your brother, you might have sent separate invitations to each. But why force it, after all?)
I will say that demanding that people do something “for the family” that they don’t want to do is a path to estrangement. If you would prefer that to the cordial but not close relationship you currently have with your sister-in-law and her children—and are willing to risk losing your brother, too (which, if you make him choose, you very well might)—then you can keep pushing. But if I were you, I’d celebrate the impending birth of my daughter’s child only with people who love her and want to be there. And later, when the baby arrives, stand down and see what happens. Babies sometimes have a way of bringing families together. Not that you should count on it. If your daughter is awful to her aunt and cousins, even a baby may not help. But you never know.
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I don't know what's going on with Daughter - is she being bullied? Does she have an incipient anxiety disorder? Is the school just that overwhelming? - but I have the distinct impression that LW didn't even think to ask any of these questions.
LW doesn't need to impose better consequences. LW needs to speak to the staff at the school about what the heck is going on there and get Daughter on the list for potential therapy. Not that she necessarily needs it, but if she does those waiting lists are hell and I only know one way to jump them, so LW won't want to waste any time.
2. This is excellent advice that LW2 is not going to take. Hopefully, they'll find their way through to some sort of peace.
3. Those reasons aren't missing at all!
It's my understanding that people with BPD often had an abusive or neglectful childhood, with parents who do not tend to prioritize their children's emotional needs over their own wants. LW3 sounds just like that in this little letter.
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(Also, let’s note that LW didn’t even tell us if Daughter wants those people there, a fact I only just realized.)
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The advice is good but also I really feel for LW's own sake they should feel no obligation in helping SIL sort through brother's things. She will sort something out if she has to.
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And if she's regularly claiming to have diarrhea bad enough to be up all night and wiped out the next day, you should be taking her to a doctor to ask if there's some underlying thing causing it. (it could even be the math test! 'my anxiety gave me horrible diarrhea' is not that unlikely.)
(Yes, 12 is old enough to try to power through instead asking for help because it's embarrassing - but then they would probably also try to power through school.)