Wife feels hurt by family’s decision to move away
DEAR CAROLYN: My wife was always very close with her sister until her sister moved out to the West Coast nearly 10 years ago. Over the past two years, my wife’s father died and her mother and grandmother have followed my wife’s sister out west, leaving my wife with no immediate relatives on the East Coast.
My wife has no intention of following her sister out to the desert, and their lack of proximity is not only physical now, but also political. My wife has only recently come to terms with issues she experienced during her childhood because of her mother’s neglect.
Is there any way for her to get her feelings across to her sister (and mother) about how their moving and insensitivity to my wife’s beliefs have hurt her emotionally, without their only thinking of themselves?
— Concerned Husband DEAR READER: How dare they do what they want when it’s not what she wants!
Painful and hurtful are different things.
Each of them gets to decide where to live. Wanting to live on the West Coast is a prerogative and a choice, not an insult. Mom could be taking “turns.”
Each of them also decides what to believe. Having a different ideology is a prerogative and a choice, not an insult.
And now some disclaimers, sponsored by 2022: 1. “What to believe” is not interchangeable with “what evidence says is true.” 2. If they back a party or ideology whose leader declares or implies that all [demographic group members] are [insult], then [demographic group members and their allies and all conscientious objectors to stereotyping] have grounds to take exception to their choice.
Now back to our advice in progress. If what you’ve written here is correct — that the sister merely adopted a different time zone and different views, and others followed her a decade later — then I don’t see what your wife could hold them accountable for besides existing on their own terms. I don’t see injury or intent.
What I see instead is loss. Your wife felt connected once and does not feel so now, and just lost her father. That is so hard.
As a loving witness, you can urge her to treat this not as victimhood, but as the normal, healthy, understandable grief that comes with multiple complicated losses.
That’s something you can’t fix for her any more than her mother, grandmother or sister can — but you can ask her to consider it as the reason she’s so upset, and, if she comes around to the idea, urge her to respond to it accordingly. That can mean anything from grief counseling — often more accessible than one-on-one therapy — to just saying to her family, instead of blaming them, “I’m so sad you all moved away.”
You mentioned one other thing that warrants a separate discussion: Your wife is navigating this hard transition while also training an adult’s eye on the childhood injuries she suffered from “her mother’s neglect.” That does deserve a reckoning — and professional therapeutic care, if your wife is open to it and hasn’t sought it already. What she carries within her from that experience can influence the way she feels and responds to just about everything, but to her family in particular. Just sorting that out might have the consequence of putting the rest into place.
Chat online with Carolyn at 11 a.m. each Friday at washingtonpost.com. Write to Tell Me About It in care of The Washington Post, Style Plus, 1150 15th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20071; or email tellme@washpost.com