Keep sending your love to son
This column was originally published in 2012.
Dear Annie: My husband and I were both widowed before meeting. We are now 70 and have been happily married for six years. We both have grown children.
Everything is good in our blended family except for my son’s wife. Stacy has been a thorn in my side from the day they married 20 years ago. My former husband and I always managed to keep her quick temper under control. But since he died and I remarried, she’s gone overboard. She has stopped my son from having any contact with our family.
Stacy has been unable to hold down a job because she can’t get along with others. She is often jealous and has many unresolved issues from her childhood. She is keeping us away from her family, and none of us have seen my grandsons in three years. She says we aren’t trustworthy, but that isn’t true. We are not deceitful in any way, and our word is good.
The rest of the family continues to get together without my son and daughter-in-law, but we miss them very much. Those two grandsons don’t know us, and it looks like that won’t change anytime soon. My son is overwhelmed with Stacy’s control issues, so he just goes along with whatever she wants. Do you have any suggestions?
— Grandma with a Broken Heart
Dear Grandma: Without your son’s insistence, it is unlikely Stacy will come around. We understand that he is reluctant to rock the boat and possibly damage his marriage, but he shouldn’t be isolated from his family in order to placate his wife. It is a form of emotional abuse.
Please send cards, letters and emails without expecting replies.
Depending on your state, you also could sue for visitation privileges if you so choose. A lawyer with expertise in grandparents’ rights may be able to help you. Dear Annie: My father’s secretary of many years smokes a pack of cigarettes every day in her office. The ceilings are low, and the ventilation is poor. The secondhand smoke is detrimental to my father’s health, which is already compromised by other medical conditions.
My siblings and I have asked her many times to try to get help for her addiction, and to smoke outside or on the office balcony. Do we have to let her do as she pleases, even though it hurts to see Dad breathing in her fumes? — Montreal Fan
Dear Montreal: We have to wonder whether this secretary harbours some hostility toward Dad. Nonetheless, your father is the one who needs to speak up, and apparently, he is unwilling. So put in some fans, smokeless ashtrays and other helpful devices that will minimize the damage.
Annie’s Mailbox is written by Kathy Mitchell and Marcy Sugar, longtime editors of the Ann Landers column.