Parenting Grown Children: What Dr. Spock Forgot to Tell Us

Wedding Blues: Who's walking the bride down the aisle?

Restructured families--divorced parents and step-parents--aren't easy for our grown kids to navigate, especially when their weddings roll around. Traditions and protocols that involve multiple parents and their participation in the ceremony can be a minefield of hurt feelings.

As young couples revise their approach to traditional wedding ceremonies, one ritual that has been inflicting pain is that of walking the bride down the aisle. Who's gonna do it? Should it be done at all? A few posts ago, we looked into the case of how a father felt when his daughter told him that neither he nor anyone else would be escorting her down the aisle. No man-to-man handoff of the bride. That was the bride's point: She was not chattel to be given away.

Now we have an instance where the dad is hurt because his daughter has asked her stepdad to walk her down the aisle. Like the dad in the previous post, he is threatening not to attend the wedding. He writes to the NYTimes Ask the Therapist that he and the bride's mother have been divorced for 36 years but during that time he has been "an active and present dad, and we have a good relationship." Nonetheless, the father writes, in addition to giving the bride away "I’m assuming he will also be the one to have a father-daughter dance. This has crushed me. I didn’t say anything to her other than, “Oh, OK.” But I was devastated."

Psychotherapist Lori Gottleib acknowledges the depth of his wound:

These traditional fatherly roles — walking the bride down the aisle, sharing a dance — can carry enormous emotional significance for some people. Perhaps for you, having your daughter’s stepfather perform these rituals feels like an erasure of your parental identity and all the years you’ve invested in being present for your daughter, as well as a referendum on your daughter’s love for you compared with her love for her stepfather.

Gottleib reminds the dad that there’s another way to look at this.

Given that your daughter wants her stepfather’s involvement in her wedding, it sounds like he has been a warm and meaningful presence in her life. Could you step back, and appreciate him not as a rival or replacement in your daughter’s life, but as a positive addition for her? Can you see both your fatherly roles as a collaborative investment in her life rather than as a competition?

Her main piece of advice is no surprise: The dad should not go AWOL for the wedding.

Skipping your daughter’s wedding would transform your hurt feelings into a story that only you are telling, one of not being wanted, or important to her, and rewrite the narrative of your relationship in ways you don’t intend.

One final piece of Gottleib wisdom to the dad and by extension to any of us who've faced situations where our grown children have inflicted pain on us, however unintentional:

The truest measure of your parenting is in the consistent presence you’ve maintained throughout her life. Don’t let one reactive decision erase that legacy. The wedding day will pass, but your decision to attend despite your hurt feelings will speak volumes about your character and your willingness to be the father your daughter needs. And that, I guarantee, is what she’ll remember long after the cake has been cut and the last dance danced.

Painting: Wedding March, Theodore Robinson

 

 

 

Wedding Blues Update: The joyous upside of a daughter's nontraditional wedding

Consider this the antidote. In my last post, I blogged about a mother of the bride who was distraught that her daughter was breaking all the traditional rules of a wedding (no bridal gown, no attendants, no celebratory dinner reception plus the father banned from walking his daughter down the aisle--the latter not an easy break to accept). The parents of the bride threatened not to attend the wedding.

On her substack, Deborah Copaken (author of Ladyparts, a book and a blog) takes her daughter's upcoming wedding (low on the usual trappings of tradition) and writes of the joy she finds in planning the wedding with her daughter and how that joy--any joy in our lives--should come before the deep distresses we may currently be experiencing.

Here are a few quotes from the piece, "Planning a wedding during the apocalypse," that parents (not just moms) of grown children might find relevant and comforting.

If I told you how many hours my daughter and I each spent searching every corner of the internet for the right “vibe” of tablecloth over these past several months, you might wonder, as she recently did, why bother? Why bother to care about whether or not we add a runner to a tablescape in a hellscape? Why create a DIY wedding canopy out of seven-foot birch logs and a piece of fabric from our former ally, France, when the protective canopies of NATO, Medicare, healthcare, and social security are being strip-mined from the fabric of our lives? ....how can you even think about what fabric of tablecloths should be at a wedding? 

But think we continued to do. And do. And do. Until we suddenly landed on a solution.

...Burlap: the fabric of both the people and potatoes. ... The fabric that says, I’m not trying to make a fuss here at my wedding, okay, I just want to be free to live, work, and love, is that too much to ask?

Copaken leans into religious tradition to unspool her feelings about the upcoming wedding and its rituals:

In Judaism, the Talmud teaches us that if a wedding procession meets a funeral procession at an intersection, the wedding revelers must always be given the right of way. And if a death in the family occurs on the same day as a wedding, the celebration of love takes precedence. Simply put, happy, future-looking events should always eclipse sad, backward-looking ones.

And here is how she acknowledges the importance of tradition, even if it's not celebrated in a traditional way:

So, this May, as spring flowers push through thawing soil, and Earth asserts its resilience while it still can, we will gather among her trees. And we will smile for the camera. And we will cover our tables with burlap and fruit. And we will don dresses and suits and comfortable shoes—my daughter’s encouraging all of her friends and family to wear sneakers to dance—to bear witness as two humans profess their love for one another, out loud, under a cotton cloth supported by thin logs held up by their best friends: a canopy that represents their home, the strength of their loving bond, the importance of community to help them uphold it, and an open-sided fragility to elements beyond their control.

painting: Renoir, Dance at Bougival

 

Wedding Blues: When the bride and groom break with family traditions

Some of us dream (this writer excluded) of planning our child's wedding, especially if our child is the bride. Oh the bridal gown we'll buy, the party we'll plan, the food we'll serve, the band we'll hire, the flowers we'll choose. And if we have clear and happy memories of our own extravagantly traditional wedding, we're probably even more excited to hit the same high notes.

Except, maybe our daughters (and sons) aren't. A very disappointed mom wrote to Nichole Chung,  Slate's Care and Feeding column, to complain about her bride/daughter's very different idea of what her wedding will be like. The mom and dad are threatening to boycott the toned-down event. Read on to get a sense of the mom's complaint [edited for brevity]

My daughter is engaged to a nice enough man but has thrown out every tradition that is important to us:  They refuse to create a registry, so my friends have no idea what to get them for wedding presents—turns out she is not even inviting my friends to the wedding, just their own friends and family. She isn’t having a bridal party, and her sisters are hurt because they wanted to be bridesmaids. I was so looking forward to shopping with her for her bridal gown, but she bought a plain white dress. Worst of all, she won’t let her father walk her down the aisle because, in her words, she’s “not property to be given away.”

There is no reception, just champagne (no bar either!) and wedding cake in the basement (!!) of the church. She and her fiancé are both refusing to do anything we want. They are both doctors and can pay for what they want. Her father and I are not sure we want to be there. How do we navigate this without alienating our daughter?

Here's part of what Chung had to say:

The only thing to do here is to get over yourselves. Your daughter and her fiancé are adults, they’re paying for their wedding, and they get to have the kind of celebration they want. Their special day is not about you; it’s about them and the life they want to build together.

They want to throw a smaller and far simpler affair than you’d envisioned—so what? This should be super obvious, but not everyone values the same traditions or wants a huge to-do. I understand feeling a little regretful that your daughter’s wedding won’t be just as you expected.

I don’t understand getting so worked up about it that you’d consider boycotting her day entirely. If you’re really willing to risk hurting and possibly becoming estranged from your child because she wants to get married without a bunch of arbitrary and ultimately unimportant “traditions,” your priorities are seriously, deeply messed up.

I stand with Chung. What would you tell the mom?

painting: Joan Vienot

Wedding Etiquette: When the invites to our child's wedding are limited

Something there is about a son or daughter's wedding that can multiply problems rather than joys. A lot of the issues for us as parents--besides whether we're going to foot the bill--is what can be called, for lack of a better word, our "allotment." That is, the number of people we can invite. It's often smaller than we would like.

That was the issue in a query to Carolyn Hax. The groom's mother was upset that her allotment would not allow her to invite the many cousins with whom she is close. Here's her lament:

My son just got engaged, and we are all thrilled. He is giving me such a small list, though, that I can only include some first cousins and not others. I hate to hurt anyone’s feelings, but we are closer to some than others. I’d be happy to give my son and daughter-in-law more money, but my son says it’s about the space, and even more than that, he just wants to keep numbers down. He doesn’t want his wedding filled with people he doesn’t really know.

Carolyn gets right down to a solution:

How about no cousins at all? Just because you have these slots doesn’t mean you have to use them.....Choose the people you want most whom you can invite without directly hurting someone else. .... Assure any complainers (ugh) that your allotment was so small, you chose not to pick and choose.

There are other ways of getting around allotments: When I was getting married and the numbers were limited by the venue, my parents had a party for the cousins and friends--theirs as well as my in-law's--who couldn't be invited to the wedding. They held it a few weeks after we returned from our honeymoon and everyone got to see us and feel part of the celebration. Years later, we did the same for our son and his bride. The event was joyous. (BTW: Gift-giving was discouraged!)

credit: The Boating Party by Renoir

 

Money Matters: Can we control the gifts rich relatives give our kids?

We're a protective species. When it comes to our kids, we want fair play in all things, even when it's only a matter of gifts from family members. Or maybe I should say, especially when it's gifts from family members and even more especially when those relatives happen to be rich. We may not want them to give our kids hefty high school or college graduation checks for fear of our kids feeling "entitled." Or we may appreciate their being generous but we want them to be even-handed--making as big a fuss over one child as the next. (I posted on this issue here.)

Beyond fairness, we may have high expectations that a wealthy uncle or sister will shower our child with a lavish wedding gift when that child marries, a gift that might help set them up in life.

That was the issue raised in Social Qs. The complaint a mother of the bride sent to Philip Galanes was straightforward:

My daughter got married last month...My sister and her husband came with their two children. They are extremely wealthy — like, flying-on-private-jets-to-expensive-vacation-homes wealthy! (We are not.) I assumed they would give my daughter a generous cash gift to be used as an eventual down payment on a home. Instead, they gave her five place settings from her gift registry that cost $500. I am hurt and angry about their lack of generosity. My mother thinks I should talk to my sister about this so it doesn’t affect our relationship. Your thoughts?

It will come as no surprise to anyone who follows Social Qs that Galanes sees the situation through a different prism. He reminds the mother of the bride that she is not entitled to "commandeer other people's money."

Galanes then adds a sound observation and solid piece of advice:

"Where I come from, $500 is not a chintzy wedding gift. And you didn’t say anything about your daughter’s relationship with her aunt and uncle. So I disagree with your mother for now: Don’t talk to your sister about her gift until you have made peace with the fact that it was hers to give."

photo credit: Maia Lemov

The Grandchild IOU: Can we sue if our kids don't reproduce?

Here's the premise: After we've helped support our adult children through college and early work years, they (and their spouse)  owe us grandkids. If they don't deliver, they should pay us back. Moreover, we can sue them if they don't fulfill their part of the next-generation equation. 

Hah! A laughable notion, right? But in India, a mom and dad are suing their son and daughter-in-law for failing to come up with a grandchild after six years of marriage--and years of financial support that included paying for a lavish Bollywood-style wedding.

The suit may sound out of whack to our Western ears but, as reported in the New York Times, in India the suit  made headlines in national newspapers and "prompted a debate about how much control parents should have over their children’s life choices." The demand is, according to the couple's lawyer, "an Indian parent thing." (The parents are suing for $650,00 in damages.)

Cultural differences aside, it's hard to accept that a sense of let-down can be righted by a financial transaction. That said, the grievance is all too relatable. It's culturally acceptable here to encourage our recently married children to "get on with having a family," even to make what we think are "cute" little remarks along the lines of "what are you waiting for?" If they decide to go forth childless, we may choose to make our displeasure and disappointment known at our peril.  

Here's a little more from the Times story on what pushed the parents over the edge.

After spending their savings to have their son trained as a pilot in the United States, Sanjeev Ranjan Prasad and Sadhana Prasad financed his lavish wedding back in India, along with a luxury car and an overseas honeymoon.

They assumed their investments would eventually pay off, in the form of a grandchild. But as time ticked by, they say, the not-so-newlyweds showed little interest in producing one.

After waiting anxiously for six years, they decided to sue.

While the suit is given little chance of succeeding, that doesn't mean it hasn't hit a sympathetic chord with many parents of adult children.

Raavi Birbal, a lawyer in India, said that the suit would probably not go far because its arguments violate rights enshrined in India’s Constitution, including the right to liberty.

“This is actually a very rare case,” Ms. Birbal said. “That is why it is so much in the limelight. But, ultimately, it is the couple’s choice to have a child, not that of their parents.”

Hari Bhushan Yadav, 52, a shopkeeper in Haridwar, said that residents had been discussing the case with great interest over tea outside his shop, and that older people tended to sympathize with the plaintiffs.

painting: Claude Monet, The Cradle

 

 

Zipped Lips: Are we still in charge of correcting a social faux pas?

When our kids were young and living under our roof, if they were impolite or said something inappropriate to their grandmother, we stepped up to point out (kindly, of course!) a more polite way to do or say something. But now that they are adults, is it still our job? Are we still in the social-correction business? Here's why I'm thinking about this:

A friend, let's call her C, was grousing about her son (let's call him D) who's 34, married and dad to a toddler. He was invited to an old friend's wedding--a friend from childhood whom D sees only occasionally but who came to D's wedding three years ago. Now the friend is getting married in his bride's hometown. The pandemic being a disrupter, weddings may come with all kinds of new limits and adjustments. In this case, spouses were not invited to the wedding. Going to the wedding would mean that D had to fly to a city one time zone away and be there for the weekend while his wife stayed home with the baby.

D opted not to go. He told his mom that his wife had nixed the idea.

C was livid. The wife being the nixer was only part of it. The groom's mom was C's old friend and had mentioned to C that her son had been disappointed that D was not at the wedding.  So C wrote her son an email telling him he should have gone to the wedding, that his old friend had come to his wedding, that she and the grandpop would have helped D's wife with the baby while D was away.

Although her son has not responded, C has no second thoughts about shooting off the email. She tells me, "I'm still his mother and it is still my job to call him out when he does something wrong. No one else will do it."

Is she right?

painting: William Chase, "A Friendly Call"

 

Our Daughters' Naming Rights: Free at last to choose what name to use when they marry.

There is something primal about my generation's desire to see a family name carried forward through marriage. In its simplest, most traditional form this means our sons marry, have children, and bingo! the name moves down the line. The wife's family? Well, they lose the name game. The link to their family history is broken.

But we no longer live in hide-bound traditional times. Today, daughters marry and may choose to keep their original name or they and their spouse may devise a combination--a hyphenation of last names or a new name made up from bits of each family name.  Sons, along with their spouses, may change their names to the newly devised combination.

Life is so interesting; name changes and the reasoning behind them so fascinating--although not so easy for the traditionalist generation to accept. As one of the cards in a deck of Lojong (Tibetian Buddhist sayings) my daughter made for me, puts it, "Don't Misinterpret. We don't get wise by staying in a room with all the doors and windows closed."

On a recent visit to my daughter and her family--for my granddaughter's high school graduation--we found ourselves caught up in a discussion about the decision women today make about their names when they marry. I remembered when I married--at the ripening age of 25 (relative "old" for my generation). I was starting my career as a journalist but had published only one or two stories. I was not yet an established or recognized byline. I was going to take my husband's name. My boss a Time Inc.--a woman ahead of her times--urged me not to do it. I was deaf to her suggestion. This was the 60s and I was of the generation that, as teenagers, we scribbled our fantasy married names on sheets of notebook paper whenever we had a crush on a boy.  Besides, I was excited to take on a new name with fewer syllables than the one I had been born to.

My daughter married in her 30s with her career more firmly established than mine had been. She had authored a book and had a recognizable name in academia. She kept our family name, which her father confessed he found thrilling. Her daughter has her father's name, which my daughter says occasionally causes confusion when she calls her daughter's schools or doctors.

There's also a young woman who is like a goddaughter to me. She's the daughter of my best friends who are now deceased.  When my "goddaughter" married (in her 30s), she and her husband took the same name--a  combination of both their names. This kept a link to their own family names and careers but now they and their daughters have the same last name.

WHat's the history here of women adopting their husband's name? TUrns out it dates back to the 9th century and something called the doctrine of coverture in English common law. Under this doctrine, women lacked an independent legal identity apart from their spouses.

Psychology Today follows up on that historical note:

At birth, women received their father’s surname; when they were “given away” at marriage, they automatically took their husband’s surname. The phrase “giving away the bride” was intended literally—under the doctrine of coverture, women were property, transferred from husband to father, and largely prohibited from owning their own property.

Mirel Zaman, a blogger on Refinery29, was lamenting her decision to take her husband's name (she made her maiden name her middle name and dropped her middle name). She writes that she felt she lost a piece of herself. Beyond that, though, she researched more recent history. What she found was that well into the 20th century, women had to fight state governments if we didn't want to change our names when we married. States could make us take our husband's name in order to vote, open a bank account or secure our own passport.

It wasn't until 1975 that the last of the state laws requiring a woman to take her husband’s last name after marriage had been eliminated.  Zaman writes,

"This was thanks to the women’s rights movement, in which marital names became a core issue insofar as they pertained to a woman’s personal liberty. It was such a prominent issue that the number of women keeping their birth-given surnames hit an all-time high in the 1970s, according to a small 2015 Google Consumer Survey analyzed by The New York Times’  The Upshot. That figure dipped in the more conservative 1980s, before rising again each subsequent decade.

How do the psychologists at Psychology Today see the fallout in the 21st century if women make name choices that run counter to tradition?

Women face censure for nontraditional name choices. Women who retain their birth surname are seen as selfish and uncommitted to their marriage and family .... Observers may hold women with nontraditional surnames to higher standards of “performance” as wives. Needless to say, this censure is not applied to men who retain their birth name—as long as the possibility of men changing their name remains largely unconsidered and invisible, men’s retention of their name appears natural and inevitable.

The writers also make this point:

As long as women are subjected to unequal societal pressure to change their surname, the practical and professional costs to name change are disproportionately born by women, as are the psychological costs of losing an individual identity.

Hard to believe that a little more than fifty years ago states could put our choice of name under a husband's thumb. And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same.* That said, our Betty Friedan moments back in the day have helped our daughters to move the "married name" ball down the field--even if their daughters will have to move it further along.

*In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

 

Observation: The profound value of mothers to their adult daughters

 

As Mother's Day nears, what more touching message could we hear than this one from author Abigail Tucker via an e-newsletter from NYTimes staff editor, Sarah Wildman.

Only human females and a handful of long-lived whales have a lengthy life phase when reproduction ends and the time arrives to pitch in with the grandkids,” Tucker explains in the piece, which is adapted from her newly published book “Mom Genes: Inside The New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct. This all-hands (or all flippers) approach to ensuring your genetic legacy apparently pays dividends.”It turns out that a grandmother’s help can have a profound impact on a new mother’s well-being, on the success of her pregnancy and even on how her children thrive.

During the pandemic, even those mothers who live close to their own mothers have often been forced to be distant. For many others — like me — who live hours apart, this time has caused us to reconsider why we don’t live close enough to continue to be mothered well into adulthood. It’s not just wishful thinking; as Tucker explains, there’s a science to our sense of need.

painting of mother and daughter: Berthe Morisot

 

 

 

Nuptials: Grandchildren at the wedding? It's the bride and groom's call, not the granny's.

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO DA RIMINI  - Le Mariage de la Vierge

Two years ago, when a co-worker was in the throes of being a first-time grandmother, she asked her son to invite his sister's toddler to his wedding. The son and his bride refused. My co-worker argued the point but the bride and groom's vision for their Saturday evening formal wedding did not include small children. The mother of the groom pouted and complained, and then came up with a solution: She brought the toddler to a casual morning-after brunch where due homage was paid by extended family and friends to an adorable child: a grandmother's pride, salvaged.

I was reminded of that episode by a letter to Philip Galanes at SocialQs.  A grandmother was outraged that her husband's niece failed to invite his (and her) three pre-teen grandchildren to her wedding--a destination event at a popular resort. The grandmother writes that she had told the bride that she had rented a large home at the resort to accommodate her adult children (who were invited) and the grandchildren. Once again, the bride had her own vision of her wedding and said No to adding the children to the guest list. The grandmother wrote to Galanes to say she has refused to go to the wedding and has canceled the rental. Her husband, who is to officiate at the wedding, and her son would attend, but she would stay home. "We should have been told about the children [not being invited] much sooner," she wrote. "Thoughts?"

Galanes had plenty of them. "The din of your foot stomping and harrumphing has caused you to miscalculate: You are throwing away a lovely family vacation at a 'popular tourist destination'...in a fit of pique over your grandkids' exclusion from a rubber chicken dinner they probably wouldn't enjoy anyway."

Beyond that point, Galanes notes that "Brides have more on their minds than other people's grandchildren. And making an exception for yours would probably rub others guests with children the wrong way."

It's a reminder, once again, that we are not the star of events--weddings or other occasions our children plan. lWe can ask for a favor but adult children (or nephews and nieces) will have their own reasons to say yes or no. As they should.