TELL ME ABOUT IT

Dear Carolyn: I’m a 70-year-old mom of a 35year-old, newly married son, my only child. What are your thoughts about his telling me that if I visit them, I need to stay in a hotel? I visited him before and stayed in his apartment. Prior to that, he lived in a different city, and said if I visited, I needed to stay in a hotel. As explanation or support he writes only that all his friends have their families stay in hotels. Just a by-the-way: I know lots of his friends and this isn’t true. My son and his wife host their out-of-town friends in their second bedroom with a comfy sofa bed. I’ve emailed back that I, like the rest of my family and everyone else I know, aren’t people who stay in hotels on short family visits.

I don’t know his wife well. We haven’t chatted or spent time together just us two. She has a warm personality, many friends and writes me friendly thankyou notes for gifts I send her.

I 100 percent get that other families happily do stay in hotels for excellent reasons. I may change my thoughts, like if my son has children or whatever (though parents I know and parents of his friends stay with their children and grandchildren on visits). – “Jane”

If you indeed “aren’t people who stay in hotels on short family visits,” then you aren’t people who will ever visit your son.

For the record, I can think of about a dozen more helpful people not to be. You can not be people who:

❚ presume to tell your hosts how to host you. Because doing that is so incredibly rude.

❚ rummage around in a son’s other relationships for proof of how justified you are to feel wronged by him.

❚ expect grown children to follow your blueprint for what “family” does or doesn’t do.

❚ shift blame onto the most vulnerable target. You say yourself that your son made the hotel request once before, pre-marriage. So quit the side-eye at the wife.

❚ refuse to be an agreeable guest, and then marvel when you’re invited only under certain conditions.