Daniel Mallory Ortberg is online weekly to chat live with readers. Here’s an edited transcript of this week’s chat.
Q. Passive-aggressive Christmas ornaments: I have had an exclusively beach-themed Christmas tree for about 15 years because it matches my home’s decor and, quite frankly, I’m a bit obsessed with all things seaside. All my ornaments are sentimental, from trips and the times I’ve lived by the ocean. I had children a few years ago (who are ocean-themed-named), and my mother-in-law wanted to start getting them ornaments. To my horror, last year she got each of them several forest critter ornaments and aggressively asked why they weren’t on the tree. When I capitulated and put them in not-visible areas, she got upset and moved them up front. She is generally domineering toward me, and this is just one more bizarre outlet for her.
My husband doesn’t want to get in the middle (he doesn’t care about Christmas anyway), and I have floated a small tabletop tree idea for the girls, but he’s not wild about that either. I am really thinking about the long-term—these ornaments could pile up and take over my theme, which would make me sad. I take a lot of joy from my mermen, octopuses, flamingos, etc. Am I being unreasonable, or should I make a stand?
A: On the one hand, I don’t love that your husband has attempted to stay out of “the middle.” Saying he doesn’t care about Christmas but continuing to let the two of you plan it, while he presumably still shows up/eats the food/looks at the decorations/marks the holiday with you, strikes me as a little weaselly. But on the other hand, I can’t join you in a sentiment like “To my horror, my children received forest-themed tree ornaments.” Even if your mother-in-law is a really difficult person, I don’t think this is the battleground to start with. If there are other areas where you’d like to say no to her and you want to enlist your husband’s perspective and support, by all means have at it. And by all means limit the number of her ornaments you put on the tree if they’re threatening to tip the tree over. But adding, say, three to five stoat- and pine marten–themed ornaments to an otherwise consistently marine Christmas-scape isn’t going to hurt. Figure out the important things you need to change, talk to your husband about helping you maintain a polite, relatively friction-free relationship with his family, and let this one go.
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Q. Bitter former mother-in-law: I lost my wife three years ago to cancer. We had two girls in elementary school. I remarried this spring. My new wife has two girls of her own. We have mostly successfully integrated our families. My former mother-in-law has not been happy about it. Before I got married, she had several “talks” with me about how she thought I was “rushing” into things. She accused me of “disrespecting” her dead daughter. I told her I loved my former wife, but my family couldn’t survive clinging to the past. I stopped her from having unsupervised visits with the girls because after every visit, they would act out against their stepmother and stepsisters. I told their grandmother it would be more helpful if she visited us. Then, at Thanksgiving, she crossed the line. I came home from the store to find everyone in tears. My former mother-in-law didn’t like the new house layout (we’ve moved furniture, repainted, and combined a number of family photos) and had attacked my wife for her education, her religion, and her background, saying she could never replace her daughter because she was “trash.”
I told her to get out. All the girls are still upset, and my youngest has been having nightmares again. Their grandmother has reached out to “apologize.” I told her it was too little and too late. She ruined what little trust I had in her, and I wasn’t going to let her ruin my family with her bile.
She started to cry. I told her she needed to get some professional help and not to try to contact us again. I will decide when and if she can see the girls again, but it won’t be any time soon. My wife is too forgiving. She thinks it would be cruel for us not to make an effort for Christmas. I am tired. My former mother-in-law has driven off everyone else in her life. Her son doesn’t speak to her anymore. I understand she is still grieving for her daughter, but that isn’t any excuse to act the way she did. She is damaging my family.
A: Hopefully your wife will be more receptive to hearing your decision framed as not just about punishing your former mother-in-law but about protecting the girls: “I’ve told her that I’m open to reestablishing a relationship between her and the girls, but we need time first, and she needs to see a counselor to find ways to deal with her grief that don’t involve attacking other people. It’s only been a month since she made the girls cry and gave them nightmares. I don’t want to put them through additional pain by trying to reconnect too soon. I need to see that [former MIL] is capable of patience, respecting the boundaries I’ve set for longer than a few weeks, and real reflection on how her behavior has hurt her grandchildren before I’m ready to put them all in the same room again. I think it would be cruel to rush this reunion and expose the girls to the kind of distress they experienced at Thanksgiving before we’ve had real evidence that she’s changed. Let’s keep Christmas small and simple this year, and focus on the kids.”
Q. My boyfriend makes way more than me: I’ve been with my live-in boyfriend for about four years. I’m in my mid-20s, and he’s in his late 20s. He’s always earned more than me by a significant amount, but recently his earnings have skyrocketed. I don’t know the exact figure he makes, but I have a pretty good idea, and think it’s anywhere between four and six times my annual salary. On top of this, I have a significant amount of personal debt, and he has none. He feels very strongly about not fully combining our finances, and I don’t have an issue with that. The way we have arranged our regular day-to-day finances seems to work well enough for both of us.
But here’s my issue: My income can support my debt payments, my portion of our day-to-day finances (which is divided roughly based on income percentages), and a very small amount of discretionary spending beyond that. On his end, he can easily blow excess money on items that most people would have to save for. Sometimes they’re small gifts for me, but more commonly they’re things for him, or things for him that I also benefit from. Think: new big-screen TV or vacations.
I’m starting to get frustrated. On one hand, I feel like I’m just garden-variety jealous, because who wouldn’t want to have that kind of money to blow? But on the other hand, it’s not like he never does anything for me—in fact he is very generous, treating me to dinners and taking me on vacations. So I feel like a spoiled brat for even being upset about this. I just feel like any decisions about spending beyond the day-to-day are made with zero input from me. For example, we already have a huge TV, but our dining table is practically falling apart. Am I being ungrateful for wanting a say? One last note that may be relevant: We do not have or have any interest in having children (in which case combining incomes might be more important).
A: You two should be talking about this regularly! I’ll include the usual boilerplate about how every relationship is different, lots of couples don’t merge their finances and remain committed to one another, etc., but I don’t think there are many healthy relationships where the parties involved never really talk about how they want to divide their income/debts/expenses. Since your question is basically just “Do I have grounds to have a conversation with my boyfriend about how we might partially combine our incomes where I advocate for myself?” I have a pretty straightforward answer: Yes. Do it. You two live together and have been a couple for four years; you’re not rushing the financial conversation here.
The main issue here is incredibly fixable: You want to be more involved in the decisions he makes when it comes to spending, especially household spending. That doesn’t mean you’re looking to tell him how to spend his money, and it doesn’t mean you’re going to demand he pay off your debts tomorrow. Making decisions as a couple (even if some of these decisions are ultimately his to make, and he’s simply seeking your input) is a pretty normal thing for couples to do; you’re not being “ungrateful” for the dinners he buys you by saying, “I think we should plan to replace the dining room table sometime this year. How much do you think we should budget for it, and what do you think is a fair split of the expense?”
Q. Conflicted friend of a sexual offender: I have been a longtime friend of a man who, I found out a few months ago, was this year convicted of a sexual offense. Only a handful of people in the U.K. have been convicted of this offense, and the laws have recently been updated to more easily convict against it. He narrowly avoided jail time for the crime but was given community service, and is also not allowed to own a smartphone with a camera. I have struggled to come to terms with whether I can still associate with this person at all, which is difficult enough. I recently saw him at an event, and he was using a smartphone that appeared to be his and would be against the rules of his conviction. Prudie, do I tell his probation officer, or do I stay out of this? My gut says that telling is the right thing to do, and I would be mortified if he committed the offense again and I had done nothing. On the other hand, I would like to think he has taken this “near miss” on the chin and will make his life better as a result, and that doing this would set him back further.
A: You don’t have to adopt wishful thinking as a policy. Tell your friend what you saw and express your concerns, and if his response doesn’t strike you as a totally plausible explanation of his behavior, tell him that in the interest of public safety, you’re going to talk to his parole officer. Then do it. You say you would “like to think” that he is making his life better, but you’re also apparently reluctant to speak to him even once about the crime he committed, what he thinks about it, what steps he’s taken to make sure he doesn’t reoffend, and whether he’s aware of how much his crime affected the trust you’re able to hold in him as a (former?) friend. You can’t just ignore his crime and hope and assume he’s changing, despite at least some suspicious-looking evidence to the contrary.
In the absolute best-case scenario, you still have to have a real, uncomfortable conversation with this man about the harm he’s done. You can’t just ignore the whole sordid affair and hope things go back to normal. If he’s truly committed to changing his life, then he will seek out public accountability and difficult conversations, he’ll find ways to acknowledge the crimes he’s committed in the past without attempting to forget them, and he’ll be open to hearing your concerns. And if he isn’t truly committed to that change, then you need to report him.
Q. Almost a mother: A few years ago, I started dating a widower with a young daughter. Things got serious quickly, and after a few months, I was regularly involved in her care, picking her up from school and doing homework with her. The three of us spent more and more time together, going to parks, protests, museums, weddings—you name it. After about two years, I moved in with them, and we became a family. I was preparing to adopt her. One day, a few months after I moved in, my partner told me, seemingly out of the blue, that he did not love me anymore and wanted me to move out.
I was devastated—not just to lose him, but to lose a child I was tucking in every night and saying “I love you” to. I went from being almost a mother to being alone, and it was unspeakably hard. But she told me she didn’t want to lose me like she had lost her mother, and for two years I stayed a regular presence in her life, taking her out to movies and playgrounds. I was finally coming to terms with the fact that I could have a loving relationship with this child without being her mother and looked forward to the days when she would babysit my own kids.
Then, a few months ago, my ex told me—again, out of the blue—that he no longer wanted me in his daughter’s life. He didn’t give me a reason. He just told me he didn’t want me to see her anymore. I thought I would be OK, but … I’m not. I think about her every day and dream about her many nights. To go from almost being her mother to never seeing her again is almost too awful for me to contemplate, and yet I do, a lot. My family, friends, and current boyfriend don’t seem to realize how this is affecting me. How do I move forward?
A: This is absolutely devastating, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you’re in this position. I don’t want to put too much faith in an uncertain future, but my hope is that when this girl is old enough to make her own decisions about whom she wants to talk to, the two of you will be able to reconnect and build a new kind of relationship. It may be, however, that you can’t live in that kind of hopefulness without constantly reopening old wounds. I hope your family and friends and current boyfriend are at least curious to learn more about how this is affecting you and how they might better support you; if they seem bored or indifferent or convinced you should just “get over it” because she’s not related to you by blood, I hope you’re able to find other people to talk to who realize the depth and gravity of your loss. If you haven’t spoken to a therapist yet, that might prove helpful; I don’t think this is something you can just forget about, and even though I believe you’ll be able to go on to have a lovely, loving life, this is a serious, long-term loss you’ll have to incorporate into it. You need to be able to talk about it.
Q. What to do when a parent misremembers: Over the past few decades, my now-elderly mother has emerged as a truly committed activist, diving into work with causes that support marriage equality, diversity, nuclear disarmament, and many other social justice issues. I am thrilled that, unlike so many other parents I know, she has become more, not less, of a liberal firebrand as she’s gotten older. The problem is the ways in which she remembers—really, misremembers—her own past. There is a significant age gap between me and my siblings, and they have told me stories about my parents in the ’70s. It was pretty bad. They didn’t just vote for Nixon—they were the chairpeople of the local Republican town committee.
According to my siblings, my parents spent much of that decade spouting the kind of racism, sexism, and homophobia that were (and remain) so popular amongst upper-middle-class white folks. Though Mom and Dad had both started changing when I was a teenager, I still have vivid memories of intolerant things they said. Recently, I brought up how disappointed I was as a young adult that the people in our small town were so close-minded. She became furious and told me that our community was actually a very accepting place and that it had always been that way.
I was so shocked that I couldn’t think of what to say—and since we were in the car together, I didn’t want to start an argument. I realize that everyone has a right to change, and I’m not holding my mom’s past views against her. I realize that, very often, fear can show itself as anger—and that, as they age, our parents become more afraid. I realize that my currently progressive mother is probably embarrassed by and ashamed of her behavior. I have no desire to make her feel guilty. I have no desire to hurt her. On the contrary—I love her very much and am proud of the person she’s become. I suppose what I’m seeing here is a kind of unintentional gaslighting. But how can I kindly and lovingly interrogate her when she rewrites history like this? And knowing that she won’t be around forever, is it even worth it to do so?
A: I realize I’m fighting a losing battle here, but I think a more appropriate phrase than “a kind of unintentional gaslighting” is just “bullshit,” or even lying. You don’t say that your mom has otherwise been acting so erratically or unlike herself that you’re worried about dementia or some other medical condition, so I’m going to write assuming her health isn’t a factor here. It’s not “holding [your mother’s] past views against her” to acknowledge them. Nor does it in some way repudiate her “right to change.” I understand being stunned in the moment by her total denial of reality and not wanting to get into a fight while she’s driving the car, but you’re doing empathy backbends right now in order to talk yourself out of saying something as straightforward as “Hey, Mom, remember when you used to be a Republican chairwoman? I’m curious to know what’s changed your views over the years.”
If she becomes furious, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve said something inappropriate or treated her badly; it just means her newfound progressivism rests on a shallower foundation than she’d like to admit. You’re not looking to get her thrown off of her committees or trying to invalidate the work she’s doing now. You’re trying, as her daughter, to talk honestly about how her past behavior affected you when you were growing up in her house. You can kindly and lovingly interrogate her no matter how she responds. Please don’t talk yourself out of discussing important issues with your mother just because, like every other human being on the planet, she is mortal. She’s currently alive and healthy enough to drive and yell at you.
Q. Girlfriend’s unrefined eating habits: My girlfriend does not have the most refined eating habits, and it is driving me crazy. It varies depending on what we are eating and how hungry she is, but she often eats very loudly and smacks her lips as she eats. It bothers me less when we’re in a noisy restaurant, but a quiet dinner at home is hard for me to get through. From what I can tell, her parents took care to bring her up with manners, but I know that they were also indulgent. She once told me that if they had no company over, she would pick meat up from her plate with her hands to eat it (her dad would resign himself to at least cutting the steak into cubes then). I’m more sensitive than most to chewing noises, but it’s at a level where I think others notice. I’m just unfortunately exposed to it fairly often. An interesting twist is that we know another lip-smacker, and I’ve heard my girlfriend comment multiple times on how gross she finds it and how this person needs to improve his manners! Granted, he is much worse than she is, but you would still expect some recognition on her end. All that said, she’s a super sensitive soul who does not respond well to criticism. Is there a way for me to broach this in a productive way? Or should I pick my battles and make peace with this one?
A: Be polite and kind, but leave it to your girlfriend to learn how to respond well to criticism. You can’t do that part for her. As sensitive as she may be, she’s at least partially aware that the table manners she was raised with won’t cut it out in society, which is why she no longer tears steak out of her hands with her teeth. But the next time you’re eating, just say something like “Honey, could you chew a little more quietly? Thanks.” It doesn’t have to be a whole production or come-to-Jesus moment—just politely let her know when she’s smacking and ask her to stop. If she gets flustered or self-conscious or angry, you can pause and have a conversation about how she’s feeling and be supportive, but you don’t have to pretend this doesn’t bother you just because she hasn’t yet learned how to say “Thanks for letting me know. I’m sorry.”
Q. Re: Passive-aggressive Christmas ornaments: This is definitely not a hill worth dying on. I think a compromise of a tabletop tree for the non-beach-themed ornaments is a lovely idea. Or make the bottom row of branches available for other stuff. If you have young children, sooner or later they will be making ornaments at school, no? Are you going to forbid them from putting their ornaments on the tree? There’s definitely room for compromise here, especially when children are involved!
A: A couple of other commenters also wanted to know how the kids felt about these ornaments from Grandma, and I agree that as the kids get older and bring home more and more weird-but-endearing art projects, the grand Christmas seascape vision is probably going to have to flex a little to make room. You can incorporate a few homemade or otherwise off-brand ornaments throughout the design of the tree without either destroying the overall effect or setting up an obvious Shame Square where all the unwanted ornaments have to hide.
Daniel Mallory Ortberg: Thanks, everyone! See you next week.
If you missed Part 1 of this week’s chat, click here to read it.
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From How to Do It
Q. I found out my wife cheated on me. Do I have to bring it up? A few weeks ago, I discovered my wife cheated on me. (I won’t say how I found out, but you’d tell me I shouldn’t have done it. I had a suspicion, and I confirmed it.) The weird thing is, now that I know, I’m not sure how to bring it up, or if I should. I know through the same means I discovered the affair that it’s over, and she feels guilty about it. I noticed an uptick in our sex life around the time I now know her affair ended, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. I keep waiting to snap and tell her, but even when we got drunk together one night, it just wasn’t front of mind. I told my best friend, and he said he’d have totally lost it, but I’ve “always been weird about this kind of stuff.” I’d honestly rather just forget it, let my wife work through her guilt on her own, and hopefully learn her lesson. Is that possible if I say nothing? Read what Stoya had to say.
