I get the feeling that these people make their own problems....

[conuly]

1. Dear Annie: I'm a brokenhearted Nana who could really use your advice.

I have a 10-month-old grandson whom I adore, but I'm not allowed to kiss him -- not even on the back of his head. Recently, in a moment of pure affection, I forgot and gently kissed the back of his head. It was instinctual. I love him so much, it just happened.

The reaction was swift and harsh. I was scolded and now I'm not allowed to hold him unless he's sitting on my lap, facing away from me. To make matters worse, I'm only allowed to see him every other weekend for two hours, and someone has to be in the room to supervise me the entire time.

I've tried to talk to my son about it, but any attempt leads to an argument or a shutdown. I feel like I'm walking on eggshells just to be near my grandson, and my heart is breaking.

Is there anything I can do in this situation? I feel so lost. -- Heartbroken Nana

Dear Heartbroken: I can feel the love and the pain in your letter. This situation sounds heartbreaking, but it's rooted in something more than just that one kiss. Many new parents today have firm boundaries, often tied to health concerns or parenting philosophies. Right or wrong, it's their call.

For now, the best way to stay close is to respect the rules, as hard as they feel. Show your love through gentle presence, patience and consistency. In time, as trust rebuilds and your grandson grows, the restrictions may ease. Let your son know you're willing to follow their rules because your priority is staying in your grandson's life. Your love is clear. Let that be your guide.

Link one

**********

2. Dear Annie: I've been dating a wonderful man for five years, and for the most part, our relationship is strong and loving. We don't live together, so we typically see each other just a couple of times a week, with more time together when we go on vacation. That time feels precious to me. But lately, I've found myself increasingly frustrated, and I'm not sure how to bring it up without sounding jealous or petty.

The issue is his 30-year-old son, who calls or texts him constantly, even when we're on vacation. It's not about emergencies -- just frequent check-ins or casual conversations that end up interrupting our time together. I understand and respect the bond between a father and son, but I can't help feeling like a third wheel when we're supposed to be enjoying quality time as a couple.

I don't want to compete for attention, and I certainly don't want to damage their relationship. I just wish my partner could create some boundaries during our time together so we can stay focused on each other.

How can I bring this up in a way that's honest but kind, and without sounding like I'm being unreasonable? -- Feeling Overlooked

Dear Feeling Overlooked: You are not being unreasonable. You are simply asking for quality time in a relationship where time together is limited. That is not jealousy. That is emotional honesty.

It is clear your partner has a close bond with his son, and that is something to appreciate. A father who stays connected to his adult child is often someone with a strong sense of loyalty and care. The issue here is not the son reaching out. It is the lack of boundaries around when and how your partner responds, especially during your shared time.

Healthy boundaries do not weaken relationships. They strengthen them. They help everyone feel respected and valued. Right now, your needs are being unintentionally sidelined. It is perfectly fair to say, "I really value our time together, and it would mean a lot if we could unplug a bit during holidays so we can truly connect."

This does not mean shutting his son out. It means carving out space for your relationship to thrive. If your partner understands and loves you, he will want to find that balance, too.

Link two

Comments

[conuly]

1. There are two ways to understand this. The first, which LW clearly intends, is that the parents are utterly unreasonable and cruel and she can't possibly follow this arcane rule.

The second, which I think may be a little bit more likely, is that the baby has a serious health concern, LW absolutely knows it, LW has also been undermining the parents every way she can since forever, and if she keeps it up they'll ban her from visiting entirely.

Either way, the way forward is to follow their rules and smile.

2. Don't compete with your partner's child, you won't win. If these phone calls and texts really are unreasonably frequent - which we don't know, because LW was not at all clear on the frequency! - then LW will most likely need to find a new sweetie, because Boyfriend is not, at this point, going to ask Son to stop.

Alternatively, if "calls and texts constantly" means "this takes up perhaps 10 minutes of the day, total, between the hours of 9am and 8pm" then LW needs to get a grip. It's not a crime for a man to want to keep in touch with his dad.

(But it's fair, either way, to ask that the phone stays off during dates - not vacations! dates! - and dinners.)

[lilysea]

I am suddenly reminded of my partners former housemate, who had a surrogate-daughter type relationship with him (and used to buy him Father's Day cards),

who, when she was age 25 or so,

one time called both of us nonstop when she knew we were out to diner and then the theatre

because of the emergency that ***the home internet had stopped working***.

I was not impressed. We came out of the theatre when the play was over, turned our phones on, and for a few minutes, before we managed to get hold of her, genuinely were worried that she had had some kind of health crisis. (She'd been in hospital very unexpectedly for a sudden health emergency the year before.)

There was no reason the internet being out for a few hours was a genuine emergency that merited a gazillion phone calls to both of us, she was just bored and wanted to play Dragon Age.

[conuly]

Ooof.

[ambyr]

Honestly, my first assumption about letter 1 was that "Nana" had an active oral herpes outbreak and was blithely minimizing parental instructions not to kiss the kid until the sores healed.

[watersword]

That's where my mind went too. I do not think the LW is a reliable narrator.

[movingfinger]

I'm wondering Nana is fully vaccinated for everything. I know a lot of parents of infants who are getting terrible, wobbly-lip tantrums from grandparents who don't think their germs can harm the baby.

[dissectionist]

And even if Nana is vaccinated for everything, we live in the age of Covid, and vaccination doesn’t stop one from passing the infection on. (It does briefly reduce the risk of catching it, which is great, and provides durable protection against severe disease, which is fantastic. Still worth getting boosters even though the protection from infection is temporary and imperfect.) About 10% of children already have Long Covid, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want my kid becoming the next one.

[ysobel]

Herpes is what I thought of too.

Relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewParents/comments/1d9aa0v/i_gave_my_baby_daughter_herpes_hsv1_by_kissing/

[adrian_turtle]

I agree that LW1 is an unreliable narrator who wouldn't know a boundary if it bit her, and it appears to be biting her now. The child could have some health problem LW doesn't know about, or he could be in robust good health and his parents are cautious about contagious diseases because of the last 5 years.

There is a 3rd possibility. If either of the baby's parents has a history of sexual abuse, they might be very protective of their son, with hair-trigger reflexes around somebody saying they can't control how they express their affection, or "I love him so much, it just happened." I can see why the parents might want to make relatives demonstrate their ability to respect boundaries wrt the baby. And I can see why LW's son might not want to discuss his reasoning: the simplest being that if you have to defend a boundary, it isn't really being respected.

[melannen]

I wonder, LW 2, if your problem is so much that Son is constantly in contact with his father - as that you aren't.

You don't state it outright so it's hard to say but it feels like there's kind of a subtext here that you feel like you aren't getting as much time with your partner as you want to, and you resent that the son can have as much time as he wants. Even if that's not what you're feeling, I wonder if it would help if you did have more casual checkins yourself. Do you feel like you can text or call him whenever just to chat? Do you ever do that? How does he respond if you do? Have you ever talked about that part of it?

He'd almost certainly be more receptive to "I like our life now but sometimes on the days we don't see each other I feel disconnected, so I'd like to call more and know you'll be happy to chat" than "I feel like I'm always a third-wheel to your son, please stop answering his calls".

[princessofgeeks]

Letter #1.... I have a strong feeling that this is totally the tip of a very ugly iceberg. And without knowing more, my sympathy is trending toward the parents and away from Nana.

Letter #2.... I have no sympathy for this letter writer at all. Sorry. Glad I'm not the advice columnist in this case.

[redbird]

OK, this isn't even "they won't talk to me about this"--it's that she "tried to talk to her son about it, but any attempt leads to an argument." GIven that, I suspect that (a) she knows damned well why she's not allowed to kiss her grandchild, but thinks the parents are being unreasonable, and (b) that "tried to talk" was long on "but why?!" and demanding that they change the rules, and short on anything like an apology. A real apology, not "I'm sorry you're upset, but what I did was only natural, so you shouldn't be upset."

[ashbet]

1) LW1 was told not to do a thing.

2) "I love him so much, it just happened."

3) LW1: "Whyyyyyy am I experiencing consequences for doing the thing that I was told not to do???"

I also wonder whether LW1 has oral herpes (my brother and I were not allowed to kiss my Dad on the face because he had it, and that's probably the reason why I have managed to avoid ever coming up positive!)

Also, with Covid (and various other childhood diseases making a resurgence because of antivaxxers), I can understand making a rule that other adults can't kiss the baby, who doesn't have a fully-formed immune system yet.

[ethelmay]

I will just say that WITHOUT the context that LW1 is obviously overstepping boundaries, I do think a kiss on the back of the head is unlikely to transmit any germs in a way that matters. That is, not more than just having the child on your lap (and hence breathing on them) would do. But that one tiny justifiable point does not make their story add up in their favor.

[green_grrl]

A kiss on the back of the head can transmit neonatal herpes. And herpes is transmissible even before a cold sore shows up. I suspect this is the reason for that boundary, although visiting the baby with a mask is probably another good one to implement.

[ethelmay]

From the back of the head? How, unless the baby has an open sore on their head?

[green_grrl]

IANAD so I don’t know much about it. It might be that their hair is so thin and fine at that age. I just know babies have ended up in the hospital for it. It’s different/worse than them just getting a cold sore.

[ethelmay]

Oh, I can well believe such an infection may be serious in a newborn. I just don't see it developing from a contact with intact skin that the baby can't even reach with its hands.

I had at least one baby advice book that suggested prechewing food for babies starting solids. Terrible advice for multiple reasons, but the one that especially got me is the likelihood of colonizing the baby's mouth with caries bacteria just as the first teeth were coming in.

[green_grrl]

😬 Yikes!

[conuly]

I just don't see it developing from a contact with intact skin that the baby can't even reach with its hands.

Herpes spreads through casual skin-to-skin contact. There don't need to be cuts or sores, nor does it have to enter the mouth.

[lilacsigil]

In babies that young it can colonise their skin. It's very, very serious.

[michelel72]

User ysobel above (comment 1.b.3. in my view) posted a link to the case I'd previously heard of -- no noticed skin imperfections on the baby's head, but her father's kiss to the top of her head transmitted the virus. He says he's since learned that the standard advice now is not to allow kissing anywhere on the head in the first 28 days (though his daughter was older than that at the time).

[ethelmay]

Deleted another comment posted before I saw this bit of the thread. I had never heard of such a thing and don't understand how it wouldn't happen constantly, given how common cold sores are and how little attention people often pay to them. Surely people very often put their cheeks on tiny babies' heads, even if they're not consciously kissing them, and might make contact with the corner of a mouth?

[melannen]

I think the chances of getting neonatal herpes through the methods people are talking about here is fairly low - not zero, and the consequences if you do are dire, but I would guess that most babies who have a parent with oral herpes won't catch it before they are out of the very dangerous unless they are doing *really* high-risk things - I don't have stats on neonatal specifically, but with genital herpes, even if you're regularly having unprotected sex with someone with an active genital infection, which is the highest possible exposure, there's still only about a 10% infection rate over a year. That's still super high, not worth the risk, but not up there in the "every mildly exposed person will get sick" range at all.

Once they're past the risk of neonatal herpes, my experience is that most kids with infected parents who aren't being super careful pick it up within a couple years, though. Some of my friends in elementary school thought cold sores were a normal thing everyone got because everyone in their family did; other friends in elementary school didn't even know what they were until a friend came to school with one because they'd never met someone who got them before. There weren't many in-between.

[lilacsigil]

It's not an issue for all babies - if their mother has been infected with herpes virus pre-pregnancy, they pass on some immunity to the child. That's why it's not an issue for most babies.

However.

If the mother has never had herpes or the baby has immune issues or is premature, the baby is vulnerable (and that's what could be the case here). If the mother acquires herpes in the third trimester, the baby may be born with it. If the mother has an active genital herpes outbreak at the time of birth, the baby may be born with it. This happens to about 1 in 3000 babies and it can kill.

[torachan]

As someone who used to hang out with a friend who was just always on her phone chatting to other people while we were supposed to be hanging out, so that I was just sitting there doing nothing (this was pre-smart phone, just regular cell phone calls), I very much sympathize with LW2. It sounds like their partner is that way with his son, and I don't think it's asking too much to have the person you're hanging out with (whether a friend or partner) not constantly ignoring you in order to chat with someone else.

[ysobel]

Agreed, though there's an important difference between saying "I'd like you to be present when we're together" and "I'd like you to text your son less when we're together" that LW should be careful of.

[sushiflop]

My mind went right to this too.

[jadelennox]

I'm fascinated that everyone went to disease with LW1. Because of the extremely limited and supervised time, I actually assumed a history of sexual abuse.

[conuly]

Either way, LW is a grown woman and should have the self-control to follow this rule.