Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.
Dear Care and Feeding,
I have a 2-and-a-half-year-old son with a common food allergy. Our family and friends are well aware, and he is happily learning practices that keep him safe, like wearing a medical bracelet, declaring his allergy, and remembering to bring his backpack with his medication with us when we leave the house. He does not yet attend school or daycare and spends all his time with trusted adult family members, so I’ve focused more on teaching him to be ready for when a reaction happens and letting adults manage prevention.
What has become a challenge is keeping him safe around his grandmother, who has declining mental faculties and lives with a lot of extra help in assisted living. We visit weekly, at minimum, and often have meals with extended family. She is constantly trying to feed him snacks and has enough clarity to know she should not be, though she can’t always recall why in the moment. I often hear, “I know I shouldn’t but…” The reasoning is always some variation of, “I wanted to.” I fully understand that sharing food is an expression of love for her, but she’s exposed him to his allergen at least once, and possibly another time, in group settings where we haven’t been able to fully watch or stop her in time.
Do you have any suggestions for how to manage visits with her, especially with extended family, that can help prevent another food mishap? We often dine out, or rotate who hosts, so I cannot always dictate what food is available to eliminate his allergen, though our family is quite vigilant and considerate on our behalf. Grandma openly resents help (she sees it as an insult to her independence), so assigning a watcher to her will not go over well. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the little one to learn to refuse food from her but accept it from others, though we are working toward having him ask, “I am allergic. Is this safe?” I’m not confident she would be able to stop and think through the answer and act accordingly. I have always tried to seat her apart from him to limit her opportunities, but if someone next to his highchair gets up, she fills the space. I desperately want visits to continue, but I have no idea how to keep peace of mind and keep my little guy safe. She tells my husband she thinks I hate her and I’m lucky he knows better. I love her. My heart breaks for her decline and I know it only gets worse from here, so I want my youngest to have as much chance to make happy memories with her as possible. I just I don’t want him paying for that with another trip to the ER and I know she doesn’t either.
—More to Love than Food
Dear More to Love,
Let’s start with the good stuff: It sounds like your son is pretty irresistible, or grandma wouldn’t be this intent on doting on him. It also seems like you have a great support system in your extended family; it’s so easy for kids with allergies to be overlooked and menus to be planned without a safe alternative (or better yet, planned as an allergen-free meal) but it sounds like your family is willing to do all of that to keep your toddler included. Awesome! And on top of that, you’re teaching your son to take responsibility for his health and be a self-advocate, while at the same time safeguarding your mother-in-law’s legacy as an important person in his life. So, even though this specific situation is frustrating, hats off to you.
You’ve tried a lot of options to keep grandma from serving food to your kid, including assigning a “watcher” to her. I get why that didn’t work, but I wonder if you could give your son a watcher instead? You could assign alternating family members the job of being his allergy wingman each dinner. Again, he’s probably cute enough that they’d do it, and it would take the pressure off you. My other thought is to give grandma an alternative treat she can give him. What if she always keeps a baggie of safe snacks/candies in her purse for him? They could even be labeled “Max’s Snax” or something clever with his name so she associates them and him. That way, she’d always have something she could give him, and it would give the two of them a special tradition to share.
Unfortunately, this situation sounds like it will eventually get harder when her behaviors will be harder to manage. Once that stops working, you might need to think about changing the routine so that your visits do not include meals. None of this is easy, so I wish you many good years together.
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Dear Care and Feeding,
My husband and I adopted “Casey” when he was 11 years old. Casey is 10 months younger than his brother “Josh.” We were ready and willing to adopt Josh, too, but the biological family didn’t end up supporting that, and he lived with relatives. We maintained an open adoption, and the two boys have stayed very close, emotionally. My husband and I tried to take on an aunt- and uncle-type role to Josh and wanted to make sure our door was always open to him, because the boys are more like twins than just brothers. Josh was always polite but never wanted to get emotionally close.
Eight months ago, my husband died in a car accident. In addition to other family support, this somehow brought Josh very close. He’s been here for Casey and me as we grieve, and he shares some good memories of my husband that I’d forgotten. He comes on his own once a week to go for a walk or invite me to a movie, or, in the depths of the worst grief, help me do basic errands. He’s shy, so we often do things in silence, but it’s a friendly silence.
I was suddenly reminded of my husband while in public last week and couldn’t stop crying. I needed to get out of there and go home, and Josh said to a stranger, “My mom is grieving.” I’ve been thinking about it ever since—I feel happy that Josh is here in my life and we’re closer, but I’m so sad and angry that my husband will never experience it and that (it seems like) I had to lose him for this closeness with Josh to happen. How do I move forward?
—Now a Mom of Two
Dear Mom of Two,
You’ve been given a wonderful gift, and you’ve also been stolen from in the worst way. What a complicated set of circumstances and emotions.
Let me empathize with you, widow to widow. I have been in those situations where the grief comes out of nowhere. Sometimes the strangest things provoke sadness. Just yesterday I was driving and passed a black Kia Soul, which was the only car my late husband and I bought together. I didn’t even like that car, but seeing one “in the wild” randomly made me feel my husband’s absence. Other times, the grief surfaces in moments that should have been totally predictable, like the first time my child rode a bike, but nonetheless catch me unawares. Nora McInerny wrote, “Grief is weird, guys. Most books talk about it in nature terms, like it is a churning ocean, with waves and riptides and eddies that can pull you under. But mine is more like an expert stalker, adept at sneaking up on me undetected and strangling me from behind.”
I also know that feeling of anger mixed with sadness. You are sad and resentful that you’ve been given a gift (Josh’s tenderness) that you can’t share with your partner; you might even sometimes feel as if being grateful about the relationship is a betrayal of your husband. Sometimes my resentment of cancer is stronger than my grief for my husband, which then insidiously makes me wonder if I’m “grieving right.” Which is, of course, ridiculous.
In many ways, even though you and I have this important biographical detail in common, your letter has been the hardest to respond to, because there isn’t a universal answer about how to move forward. To me, it’s really just about accepting the grief as it comes. Jamie Anderson said that grief is “just love with no place to go,” and it helps me to accept and rename my grief. So, when you feel sadness and anger about your husband’s death, acknowledge it—”I am lonely,” “I am resentful”—but then remember that that feeling is just love dressed up in a different outfit. In that way, your soul is just trying to share Josh’s love with your husband. Your husband is a part of this new chapter in your family, even if he didn’t experience it during life.
You’ll move forward, a step at a time, because there isn’t any other choice. But it will get easier, as the ball in the box metaphor explains. The grief will still hurt months and years from now, but it will take up less space. And in its place will be many new memories made with two wonderful boys who wouldn’t be in your life were it not for your husband. It’s not an equal trade-off, but I promise the beauty will one day outshine the pain.
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Dear Care and Feeding,
My husband’s best friend and his wife divorced 10 months ago. We have been friends with him, his ex-wife, and their 17-year-old daughter for 21 years—we even bought a summer house in their town last year, before the surprise divorce proceedings began. Recently, we spent the night at this friend’s summer house, as did his ex-wife and daughter, to celebrate the daughter’s high school graduation.
Everyone went to bed around 1 a.m. The problem occurred at 6 a.m. when I woke up and was surprised to see my 15-year-old daughter also awake. She had a look of terror on her face. She shared that she woke up at 3 a.m. because she had to go to the bathroom but was unable to leave her room because our host and his ex-wife were having bombastic sex in the room next door. She was terrified, listening to a very loud female performance. After they finished, my husband’s friend came out of the bedroom visibly tired and in his underwear, which my daughter saw from her room.
In her words, she is traumatized from this incident and does not want to see the ex-wife for sure, and maybe not my husband’s best friend either. Her descriptions of what she witnessed were very detailed and upsetting. She is not into romance yet and can’t even watch movies involving adults kissing. This experience has turned into one she cannot forget. We are being supportive of our daughter and limiting our contact with the friend and his ex-wife for now. My question is, should one of us tell them why we are keeping our distance? Or should we just stay away for now and hope next summer will be better? We are afraid of losing their friendship over this if we say something to either of them. But we are also afraid of losing our daughter’s trust by not sticking up for her and respecting her boundaries. This has also opened up issues for us as parents about how we feel about exposing our kids to a couple who are divorced and surprisingly not living life as divorced people should when children are around.
—What to Do with Divorced Friends Behaving Badly
Dear What to Do,
First off, you need to check your disapproval at the door. There are no absolute rules for how divorced couples “should” behave. Your friends are allowed to have all the sex they want, divorced or not. So long as the arrangement works for them, it’s none of your business. It’s upsetting that you would let their decisions as consenting adults impugn your opinion of their characters. Your friends had a lapse in judgment regarding volume; nothing more.
If you truly are such good friends, it should be no big deal to drop them a line. “Hey, sorry we’ve been AWOL, but there’s an awkward situation. [Daughter] heard you guys having sex and is freaked out by it, so we’re just trying to give her some space to process. Sorry if that’s embarrassing, but we figured it was better than ghosting you.” Because honesty among good friends is much better than pulling a disappearing act. Plus, delivering this kind of message can pretty much guarantee that the incident won’t repeat in the future, if you ever share a house again.
As for your daughter, I don’t know what kind of vocabulary or behaviors she heard, so it’s hard for me to understand this incident as terrifying/traumatizing. Still, that’s not for me to decide; she’s clearly upset and needs help processing. If that’s not something she can do on her own or by talking it out with you, there’s nothing wrong with finding her a counselor or therapist to help her talk through this one-off incident.
Dear Care and Feeding,
When I was dating my now-husband, I knew he had gone no-contact with his mother, whom he described as a “psycho.” He didn’t talk about her much, and I respected his silence. I’d never met her, I was happy never to meet her, and I thought it would just be a random bit of trivia. About a week and a half ago, when he was talking with some of his folks, he found out she had a ruptured intestine and it was very serious, like 50-50 odds of her dying. And while he didn’t really want to, he felt he had an obligation to visit her in the hospital. Having some idea of how fraught that relationship was, I offered to go with him to the hospital. We got into her hospital room, and the first thing out of her mouth was, “What took you so long to come, you little piece of shit?” The rest of the visit was close to an hour of listening to her alternatively berate him for taking so long to finally visit his dying mother in the hospital, and caustically wondering why he even bothered, given how worthless of a son he was. I eventually needed some space and managed to get hubby out with me.
Since then, I’ve been distracted and unable to work productively on my Ph.D. thesis. Part of it might be that it’s tangentially related to what I’m working on, namely, mechanics of othering and dehumanization in conflicted areas. It certainly felt like a dehumanized personal interaction and was profoundly disturbing. My husband’s main reaction has been to apologize for exposing me to his mother’s vitriol; he thinks that he should have been clearer about what she’s like or insisted I stay home. I’ve signed up for counseling, but I can only really afford the on-campus psychological help, and I won’t be able to even start seeing someone for a month or two.
Normally, when I have problems like this, I reach out to my husband, but he doesn’t seem to be able to help or even notice my struggle here, and I don’t want to make it sound like he’s at fault for dragging me into the abusive relationship he has with his mother. And I don’t have a wide support network nor can I afford to take a month and a half off of my thesis. Can you recommend anything I can get for help that would at least get me working again, and quickly?
—Sucked Into the Vortex
Dear Sucked In,
I get that you don’t want to burden or appear to blame your husband for your distress, but I also don’t think it’s a good idea to keep him in the dark. Our partners are there to help us process (as you’ve relied on him to do in the past) and there are ways you can be honest with him about struggling without saddling him with the responsibility of fixing you. If you come clean with where your head is at, he might be able to provide useful clarity as you wait for therapy to begin.
Speaking of professional help, online therapy can cost less than $100 a month; I know grad student salaries are paltry, but if you can swing it, it might be an option to consider until your in-person care can start. Alternatively, since you mention that the incident was so reminiscent of your research, I wonder if a fellow graduate student or professor might be willing to unpack the experience with you, at least from an academic perspective. They may see similar or different patterns than you, which could help you process your emotional reaction. Even journaling can be a helpful tool, not only in deconstructing the visit but also in establishing a written record from which you can effectively launch your therapy sessions. Good luck!
—Allison
More Advice From Slate
I just got home from a weekend visit with my close friend, her husband, and two sons (aged 3 and 1). We have been friends for more than 20 years and visit each other regularly. This time, the just-turned-3-year-old was in a tantrum-throwing stage … about pretty much everything. It was an extremely uncomfortable weekend, though not because of the tantrums (I recognize that the developmental stage he’s at comes with big emotions that he doesn’t yet know how to handle), but primarily because of the parenting style of my friend and her husband.