Disappointing daughter expects to get support
DEAR AMY >> My daughter just announced her engagement to her boyfriend, “Clay.”
They are both heavy pot users.
Clay is also a convicted felon (for selling narcotics), a college dropout, and has psychiatric and physical health problems.
He picks up occasional work but cannot and does not support her. He can barely support himself. He has terrible hygiene.
Worse yet, he seems to be incredibly reckless. He has totaled three cars in three years.
My husband and our other children insist that I must support my daughter's life choices, but I cannot bring myself to. I see only pain and poverty in her future.
We raised our beautiful daughter in an upper middle-class family, sent her to private college and on European trips.
We supported her 100 percent over the past year while she successfully undertook and excelled in a prerequisite program to start a three-year master's degree toward a new career.
She recently got a minimally-paying job and wants us to continue to help support her while she moves forward with grad school and the boyfriend.
Her siblings have said that if I don't support her choices, I will lose contact with all of them.
I feel like I'm being blackmailed into watching a horror movie play out. My heart is broken. If I cut off my daughter financially, she'll hate me.
If I don't support her relationship with her boyfriend, they'll all hate me.
My husband, who wants to retire soon, wants me to at least support her relationship, and is willing to tell my daughter to take loans and support herself. Could you weigh in?
— Heartbroken Mom
DEAR HEARTBROKEN >> I see a distinction between “support” and “accept.”
Yes, you should accept your daughter's choice because she is an adult and she has the right to make terrible choices.
If you accept her, must you also “support” her? Absolutely not.
She may need to experience the reality of living a marginal life in order to make a choice about it.
If she continues with her graduate program and you can afford it, you might choose to pay only her school bills. If she completes each semester successfully, you can choose to pay for the next semester. This would be extremely generous. She and “Clay” will then have to work to support their living expenses.
Invite them over for dinner, include them in family events, and yes — you may be forced to face and tolerate your disappointment in your pot-using daughter and her choice in partner, but until she is forced to face her own choices and disappointments, she will never be inspired to perhaps choose differently.