DEAR PRUDENCE

Dear Prudence: Since my daughter married “Chris,” she has turned into a different person. It started on her wedding day, when she got drunk and screamed at me for “always putting her down” after I made a (not insulting!) comment about her non-traditional dress. That was four years ago, and things have gotten worse since then. She and Chris have spent every Christmas with his parents rather than me and my husband, she ignores calls and texts, and she has gone from attending every pre-pandemic family function with thoughtful gifts on birthdays to missing all but funerals and sending gift cards as Christmas presents. She has spoken to us twice since February, and on one of those occasions ended up screaming abuse at us until my husband hung up.

I found out the worst news recently and cannot process it. My daughter is pregnant, and not only had she not told us, but she didn’t plan to. I only found out, mortifyingly, because a friend saw something on social media and asked me about it (I’m not on social media). My husband and I tried getting through to our daughter, but she has changed her personal number and only Chris answers the house phone. When confronted, he told us that she no longer wanted any contact with us, and that “they” did not want us in their child’s life. My husband and I miss the sweet, warm girl that we raised, and feel as though we’ve lost her to a cold, angry stranger.

—Heartbroken

I want to leave open the possibility that someday you and your daughter might be able to reconcile, or at the very least have an honest conversation about your relationship that doesn’t devolve into a screaming match. But I don’t think you’re going to get there by assuming her husband is running interference between the two of you without your daughter’s knowledge and input, or by trying to contrast her adult self to the “sweet, warm girl” you knew years ago. (Would you like it if someone said they liked you better when you were a little child?) It sounds like your daughter has asked her husband to serve as a buffer, likely because of how badly the last few direct interactions between the two of you have gone.

There’s a thread of unwillingness to consider your daughter an adult actor capable of making rational decisions in your letter. You say that she has “some responsibility for her choices,” when in fact she has total responsibility for them. It’s not extreme to stop speaking to someone when your relationship has deteriorated to the extent you describe. It may be painful, and you might not like it, but one follows the other quite logically.