Dear Auntie Millie,

Ever since my daughter got divorced five years ago, she has been trying to control my relationship with her ex-husband, whom I still think of as my son-in-law. We did not arrange my daughter’s marriage, but over the course of the five years for which she was married, I grew to like her husband a great deal. He always seemed caring, responsible, and ambitious for his family; being a very high earner, he also never stinged on food, clothes, or anything my daughter or the children wanted. Between him and my daughter, he was always the charming, gregarious one who knew how to get on with people, entertain guests, and so forth, whereas my daughter is quite reserved and often comes across as unwelcoming. When she first announced that she was getting a divorce, I did ask her if anything bad had happened, for example if he had been carrying on with another woman. She said that he hadn’t but that she didn’t want to discuss the details of her marriage with me or her father. Suffice it to say, I never really understood why she wanted a divorce, and I was quite shocked that she would make such a big decision on her own without asking for her parents’ permission, approval, or even opinion. I tried to talk some sense into her before she went ahead with it, but she refused to listen to me. She said that they planned to remain on civil terms only in order to “co-parent” their two children, as she put it, but that apart from this they were each going to live their own life and not “pretend to be friends.” I thought this was extreme, but as my husband didn’t want to take a stand, I felt trapped into accepting her decision.

Since then, my daughter has been extremely upset with me for including my son-in-law in family gatherings even when they take place at our house. I understand I can’t force her to invite her children’s father to get-togethers that she organises, whether these take place at her house or outside, but surely I have the right to decide on the guest list when I am hosting a gathering under my own roof? The first time I invited my son-in-law, my daughter was furious that I hadn’t told her, but after that, she has said no every time I’ve asked her if he can come to something. Under such circumstances, I have no choice but to just invite him without telling her if I want to include him. In my opinion, it’s much nicer for the children to have both parents present at family gatherings, festivals, and other special occasions, especially considering the fact that all their cousins have both parents there. I can’t understand why my daughter would want her own children to feel like outcasts. Surely the children can’t be expect to only see their parents one at a time, as though they live on different planets!

Recently, my son-in-law fell quite ill and had to have an operation. I had always believed that no matter what had happened between them, at the end of the day my daughter would still see him as the father of her children and care about his well-being. However, she really shocked me by refusing even to go and visit him in hospital, let alone care for him as a family member would. He did have his own parents and siblings there, but I am sure it was very upsetting for my daughter’s children to realise that their mother doesn’t even care if their father lives or dies. Not only that, my daughter actually showed her temper at me when I revealed that I had been visiting my son-in-law at the hospital. She accused me of caring more for him than I’ve ever cared for her, but that’s exactly the problem with my daughter, she always exaggerates and is never able to approach any disagreement reasonably. I would not be surprised if that was why her marriage fell apart in the first place. Just because I brought a few favourite healthy dishes to my son-in-law while he was recuperating from surgery, doesn’t mean I’ve chosen to take “his side” — and anyway, how could I take his side when she has never even told me what the two sides are? I’ve never asked him for his side of the story either because that would be prying, and to me it doesn’t matter. Family is family, and I can’t stop thinking of him as family just because of one piece of paper. How do I help my daughter to learn how to treasure family in the same way?

Sincerely,

Matriarch, Petaling Jaya

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Dear Matriarch,

I can’t help thinking that you must have written to me expecting me to take your side in this, as an older woman myself. Unfortunately, I feel very little sympathy for you, and am inside overcome by an urge to box your ears. For both our sakes, I hope you never find yourself within swinging distance of my boxing arm, geriatric as it may be.

It is, quite frankly, a miracle that your daughter has not cut you out of her life entirely. You have crossed every line she has tried to put in place and shown no respect for her well being or her privacy. Your language betrays your arrogance and high-handedness at every turn: you continue to refer to your daughter’s ex-husband as your “son-in-law” because that’s what you feel like calling him regardless of what anyone else’s preferences might be; you resent your adult daughter for failing to have solicited your “permission”, “approval”, or “even opinion” to make decisions for herself and her children. If she trusted you and saw you as an appropriate confidante, she might have chosen to share how she had arrived at that decision, but she was under no obligation whatsoever to tell you anything. Different people have very different feelings about how much of their private lives to reveal, even to their parents. This is simply how it is, and the fact that you have attained matriarchal status without having learnt this is yet another indication that you pay very little attention to other people’s comfort and far too much attention to your own ego.

In my responses to the letters I receive, I try very hard to refrain from telling people what they should have done, because it is usually more helpful to think about what could be than to dwell on what should have been. However, in your case, I feel I need to say this: if you had kept quiet and waited patiently for your daughter to open up to you instead of forcing her into uncomfortable situations with her ex-husband, she may at some point — depending on what your past relationship was like — have shed more light on the factors that led to her divorce. In future, with her or with other people, think about how to build trust rather than how to squeeze information out of people or force them into situations that fit your own rigid ideas of how things should be. You seem to have a image of how a family should behave regardless of what they actually feel, and this image is not based on any actual evidence or close observation of other people (a pursuit in which I doubt you are even interested). To begin with, your husband’s own thoughts about the whole situation appear to have been completely irrelevant to you from the beginning, as soon as you surmised that he wasn’t just going to comply with your instructions. If you had been willing to have an actual conversation about why he did not want to intervene in your daughter’s decision, you might have gained some insight into her situation, his feelings, their relationship as father and daughter, or all of these.

Similarly, you feel that your daughter’s children are better off when you coerce their parents into enduring each other’s company, but you don’t seem to have asked them what they think. Divorce is sometimes the best solution both for unhappy parents and for their children, even if sadness and regret are inevitable on the path to that solution. Your grandchildren may well have accepted their parents’ divorce as a necessary compromise, but instead of helping them all move on, you may be making things worse by clinging to the very idea they’re trying to let go of. No one can ever know what the inside of someone else’s marriage or nuclear family looks like; you were not there in their home and you therefore have no idea of what horrors they may all have lived through together. That awareness alone should be sufficient to make you tread lightly, with kindness and empathy but no expectation that they speak of painful things until and unless they are ready. All you had to do was to be there for each of them separately, ready to listen if needed, but instead, you have bulldozed your way into the middle of their misery, convinced all the way of your own righteousness. You’re quite sure the children would’ve been upset by their mother leaving the care of their convalescing father to his own family, but as far as I can tell from your letter, you spoke neither to the children, nor to their father, nor to his family members about their wishes during that challenging time. You are convinced that your bustling in with your well-meaning comfort foods was well received, but I doubt you asked anyone involved what would be most helpful for them before deciding to you what made you feel best.

I therefore suggest that you stop doing as you please and start trying to listen to other people. Start by respecting your daughter’s wishes: if you want to maintain friendly relations with her ex-husband, do so on your own time: stop imposing his presence on her. It is utterly ridiculous for you to claim that you have “no choice but to” trick her into suffering the presence of her ex-husband. When you know she’ll say no if you ask her, you know it is wrong to invite him without asking her. Anything else relies on the sort of logic that is barely forgivable in a small child: “I did it without telling you because if I tell you you’ll scold me.” You are not a small child; you are a mother and grandmother, so please gather up your courage and your honesty and start behaving like an adult.

I will grant that you are allowed to like your daughter’s ex-husband, even if I am suspicious of your reasons for liking him, which seem so shallow that a part of me wonders if your attachment to him is not just a way to provoke your daughter by holding his purported superiority over her. Speaking of which, if you must compare her unfavourably to him, I hope you never do so to her face or in her presence, though your letter does not inspire confidence in your ability or willingness to keep such useless, unnecessary thoughts to yourself. If indeed you have been saying such things out loud, or, god forbid, speculating out loud on the reasons for which their marriage fell apart, please stop.

If you have the strength of character and humility for it, apologise to your daughter for the lack of respect you’ve shown for the last five years. Thank her for her patience and forbearance, and acknowledge that many children in her situation would have opted for estrangement long ago. Tell her you are going to make an effort to turn over a new leaf, and ask her to do you a favour and point it out to you when you blunder or regress, as you surely will. Don’t just pay these good intentions lip service; you must mean what you say, and you must be ready to accept her criticism and her guidance. It’s never too late to improve ourselves. You have nothing to lose by trying, and a much better relationship with your daughter to gain if you somehow manage to convince her of your good faith. Family is family, in your own words: it’s time to treat your own daughter like family by showing her that her feelings matter to you.

Yours ever,

Auntie Millie