River Of Life

I am very blessed to have a wonderful and kind mother-in-law. I live 2000 miles away from my family, and she has always made me feel I have a supporting family right here. However, I worry about her a great deal.

For 30 years she was a stay-at-home mother of three and took care of her husband. Four years ago he left her for another woman and moved out of the country. Because he has not paid the alimony the court decided on, she had to sell her house and buy a much smaller one. She got a job working retail, hoping to pay her bills. It’s a struggle.

Her youngest just graduated from college and moved 300 miles away. When I spoke to her tonight, she said, “My children, and now you, are my life. You are what I am living for.” This was not a melodramatic declaration, a cry for attention, or a guilt trip laid on because my husband and I are busy people and haven’t spent as much time with her as we should.

She meant it from the bottom of her heart. Her entire adult life was spent as a wife and mother, and now that she doesn’t have these things she is depressed and lonely. It simply breaks my heart to watch her look so wistful when she asks about my parents and what they are doing with their retirement.

How can I help her find something she is interested in, something to help her connect with other people?

Jo

Jo, we live our lives in the first person singular, which causes us to think things remain the same. But they never do. As the ancient writer Heraclitus observed, “We cannot step into the same river twice.” The river may be named the same, yet it is always different from the river we stepped into yesterday.

Today we are a baby, tomorrow a toddler, a student, a teen, or a young adult making our own babies. Relatives die, we change houses and jobs, our children marry. Laws, heads of state, technology, and television shows all change. Ideas and trends shift in the breeze.

Yet our life goes on, and each age of life comes with challenges. Your mother-in-law’s 30-year marriage changed, even though she didn’t notice. Now it’s not a matter of “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” It’s a matter of remaking her life to correspond to the pattern of life.

Don’t be her crutch, and don’t make her your life’s work. Your role is more like the steady hand which helps a child ride the bicycle alone. You have to know the exact moment to pull your hand away so you can celebrate her transition. Be a helping hand, not training wheels.

For starters, don’t neglect the practical. Your mother-in-law needs to talk to a lawyer. If her ex-husband ever returns, she needs to receive what she is legally entitled to. She should also continue applying for better paying jobs.

But her real task is this. Her brain has established a stance, a way of addressing the world. Yet study after study shows the brain, even in older adults, is capable of reinventing itself. Your mother-in-law needs to get out with other people doing new activities in fresh places. She needs to rediscover old interests and forge new ones.

Help her explore the concept of aging well. Consider many options to find the handful which are right for her. This takes effort but it can be exhilarating, like the pretest nervousness which enables us to excel. The process will do you both good because just as circumstances transformed her life, so your life will be surprised by the unpredictable.

We can never step in the same river twice. New water is always rushing past. Finding our poise in the midst of change is what life is about.

Wayne & Tamara

Wayne & Tamara are the authors of Cheating in a Nutshell.

The Source

I am married to a woman I love very much. I really can’t see my life without her; at the same time I can’t see my life with her anymore. She comes from a family where her father was an alcoholic and divorced her mom when she was nine. My wife is a social drinker; her older sister is addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs.

Here’s the rub. My wife displays the classic characteristics of an adult child of an alcoholic (ACoA). We fight all the time because she won’t let me into her life. She keeps me at arm’s length and will not display the love, trust, affection, appreciation, and admiration that I need and deserve in this marriage. I never thought it could be tied to her being a ACoA, until just recently.

It’s starting to make sense. The more I read the more I am starting to think it affects our relationship. We have gone through endless marriage counseling. In her mind I am always wrong and the complete source of problems in our marriage. Don’t get me wrong, I am no angel, but it takes two to tango.

I think we have a pretty good life together because I make a very good living, am very attentive to her needs, and help out around the house all the time. Every time I think I am doing something to make her happy and get her to the point where she will start loving me, she doesn’t.

I can’t find anything that will help me understand, cope, or help her break through this.

Laurence

Laurence, we want to believe if we are good, we will be rewarded. We want to believe an attentive, helpful, loving husband will receive in return the love he shows his wife. We want to believe the world is just.

Unfortunately, all of these things are only beliefs. None of them is necessarily true. If you want a visual representation of what happened to your wife, look up foot binding and view pictures of the painfully deformed feet inflicted for centuries upon hundreds of millions of girls in China.

What your wife endured was the psychological equivalent of foot binding. Often there is little physical or emotional abuse in alcoholic homes. Instead, there is complete emotional neglect. Researchers are finally coming to understand the effects of neglect are often more severe than the effects of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. Kids enduring emotional neglect may simply never bounce back.

ACoAs frequently don’t understand the link between their problems with a partner, and the alcoholic home they were raised in. Your wife built defenses as a way of handling life in her parents’ alcoholic home. The problem is, now that those defenses are no longer needed, she cannot let them go.

Only she can admit that and begin the work of recovery. The problem for ACoAs is that the field of alcoholism is controlled by people whose interest is in curing alcoholics. They typically ignore or deny the worst effect of alcoholism: child abuse. For people in this field, even the best-intentioned, the alcoholic is the center of the universe. The children have meaning only in reference to the alcoholic.

As a result, little real progress has been made in helping children of alcoholics. The term ACoA is a circumlocution. What this is about is child abuse, pure and simple. That’s why we find the books most helpful for children of alcoholics are those dealing with recovery from child abuse, especially recovery from sexual abuse. In intensity of effects, sexual abuse is what being an ACoA most resembles.

The only cure for your wife is recounting her experiences and feelings again and again until they have lost their emotional charge and become mere facts. That may not happen until after all the love you have for her is gone.

Wayne & Tamara

Whose Children?

Our firstborn adult son no longer allows us to visit at his house or see our only grandchild, now a teenager. It has been four years of being shunned for issues which he stated in a four page email and which I say did not happen.

He knows what I presented are the truthful facts; however, he continues with the emotional extortion, certainly against us, and by example to his maturing child. His wife is a health professional who earns a high income. We have known her over 20 years, since she was 14.

We don’t want to go to court to secure grandparent visitation as the judge would probably ask the child if our visits would be acceptable. We feel the grandchild may say “no” so as not to upset the parents.

We don’t know what our son has told his child about why we no longer visit. We keep in touch with cards, and still send birthday and holiday gifts. However, we have not received a thank you from either of them.

Gayle

Gayle, regular readers of the column may sometimes be shocked by a letter we print, but the truly horrific letters never make it into the column. These letters about sexual, physical, and emotional abuse–and cases of huge neglect–are in a whole different category.

Whatever your son is saying must be grave because you won’t repeat it and you won’t let it pass. Typically, when there is noteworthy abuse and the victim grows up and can voice it, the parents deny it. As proof of the denial, the parents go after the grandchildren and assert their “grandparents rights.”

While it is true an adult child’s complaint may be no stronger than “you get on my nerves,” and in some cases the adult child may be mentally ill, we balance that against the greater evil of giving abusers lifetime access to their children and their children’s children.

Serious abusers pursue the third generation as ruthlessly as they mistreated the second. There isn’t enough information in your letter for us to decide what happened, but one thing we know. This seldom happens with good parenting.

Wayne & Tamara

Clear Conscience

About a year ago I met this great guy from India who was working on contract here. We started a relationship, and I fell in love. I kept my feelings from him, and he did the same. There is a reason I am like this–before we started going out I had an intimate relationship with another man.

In India guys don’t appreciate this from girls, so I never told him. Recently he went back to his country, and all communication stopped. After months of worrying if I will ever see him again, he finally contacted me. It felt good.

I am not a liar. I was tired of keeping this from him and wanted to start a fresh life, so I decided to tell him the truth. When I did, he never replied to my email. Are we over? What should I do?

Rani

Rani, somewhere in an old file cabinet in the back of the male brain is a set of instructions on women. These directives tell a man not to accept a woman who has been intimate with another man. Biologists theorize the instructions were written by nature to ensure a man would at least take care of his own children.

Though many men don’t believe the instructions, men from cultures which reinforce them usually do. Because we are better off living in reality, we are better off being honest. But there are a few exceptions. One would be when honesty is merely cruel. Another would be a woman’s sexual history.

You will be happier with a man you can be honest with, but women should know many men will have a knee-jerk response to their intimate history.

Wayne & Tamara

Wayne & Tamara are the authors of Cheating in a Nutshell.