A thief in the family?
Dear Annie: My wife and I have always enjoyed hosting events for our family over the years. This past July, we hosted a cousins reunion, which brought approximately 40 guests to our home. Our home is not huge, so everyone had access to all parts of it.
The reason I am writing is that approximately a month after this event, my wife was going to wear her mother’s wedding ring (a gold band with five large diamonds) to a social event, but she discovered it missing from her jewelry box.
Needless to say, it makes us sick to think that someone would have taken this ring, but we have no idea what else could have happened to it. We have asked our children and grandchildren whether they saw anyone looking through her jewelry box, but they said they saw no one. Nothing else in the jewelry box was disturbed. It is coming up on the holidays, and we usually send out a Christmas newsletter about the year’s events. Should we mention the ring in this letter or just let it go?
—Feeling Betrayed
Dear Feeling Betrayed: Jump to conclusions and you’ll land in a mess. There are many explanations for why the ring has gone missing that don’t involve family betrayal. Maybe it was lost or stolen before the reunion. I see no harm in including a brief note about it in your family newsletter.
Dear Annie: Though your response to “Personality Problems” — who is frustrated her husband doesn’t seem to care as much about the grandkids — provided some good pointers, I feel that you missed something important.
Reread her letter and note how focused — one might say obsessed — the writer is about her grandchildren. Note that she seems very self-satisfied, probably because she is getting everything she wants, with the exception of having her husband want all those things, too.
While she’s observing that he never misses the grandkids when they are away travelling, he is probably observing that all she talks about while they’re away is how she wishes she were home so she could see the kids, pressuring him to end the trip earlier than he wants to.
And is it possible that the reason he has few hobbies or friends is that she does not approve of the things he wants to do or the people he wants to befriend?
What I saw when I read the letter were two people with very different ideas about what retirement should be like for them. I also perceived how controlling one of those people seems to be. Her husband might be more willing to be a good grandfather if he also had the opportunity to satisfy his own needs in retirement. —In Similar Shoes
Dear Similar Shoes: You make a great point.