agonyaunt | (no subject)

Dear Eric: My son and my niece had been friends since childhood but had a falling out about a decade ago. She confessed to him that she was cheating on her husband and thinking of leaving him and their 6-year-old daughter. My son suggested she talk to a professional before making a rash decision. She then bad-mouthed him to everyone else in the family and stopped talking to him for years.

Her husband was also cruel to my son at the time, though he didn't know about the affair.

After a few very awkward family holiday dinners, my son started to stay away if she was going to be there. This really upsets me, and I keep asking him to attend. I’ve also been asking him for years to reconcile with her, which just seems to make him more stubborn. It’s the only thing we fight about. What can I do to make him let this go?

— Caught in the Middle

Middle: Why should he be the one to let this go? I don’t see anything in your letter about your niece or her husband trying to make amends for what they did to your son. And, from your telling, your son didn’t do anything wrong. So, when you press him to come to these awkward dinners, it probably sounds to him like you’re taking your niece’s side. I’m curious why that is.

I’d strongly encourage you to see things from his perspective and extend compassion to him. The awkwardness of these dinners is not his fault. Your niece stopped talking to him for years; her husband was cruel. I wouldn’t want to eat with these people either.

With all this past unhappiness, the worst outcome would be for this disagreement to poison your relationship with your son, too. So, please stop bringing it up. If you want to mend things, tell him that you shouldn’t have been pressuring him and you’re sorry.

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Wow. Just, fucking wow.

Taking your niece's side over your son's when your niece is the one wholly in the wrong is a whole new thing.

I'm really curious - is OP hosting these family dinners? In which case, she could consider inviting him and specially not the niece/husband.

I think that with the information she has, the correct answer is to prioritize her son.

Am I a little skeptical that this second- and in places third-hand information is the entirety of the story? A little, sure. But it is not controversial to not invite two people who are aggressively not speaking to each other to the same event--or even two people one of whom is aggressively not speaking to the other. Niece should not be surprised to hear, "I'm sorry that things have been so rocky in your relationship with Son. I can't continue to host that unpleasantness, so I hope we can have brunch the week before Holiday or something similar so that I can still see you despite that."

If there's more to the story--if Son actually stole Niece's cat or groped her bestie or something that is not what LW has heard--Niece can say something about it at the time. Or not, because LW remains that person's mom, and you do not expect to "win" someone's mom in a dispute even when that person is super-wrong.

So yeah, I agree with the other people who have said that this is very weird behavior on LW's part.

And yeah, if she's not the host, telling her son that he has to go to Auncle Host's house and deal with Cousin Silent Treatment is not going to fly. Niece is old enough to have a 16yo daughter from a marriage; even if she started at 18, that means that the middle generation in this story would at least be in their thirties. It's a time when a lot of people see less of their cousins, unless they specifically get along well with them. Having a holiday dinner with LW's branch of the family and the people who are speaking to them--whether it's family or friends--would be totally normal.

What does the niece have over LW, that LW seems to favour her over their own son? The Missing Reasons is strong with this one, and I wonder what else LW doesn't know/is unwilling to admit.

Right? And he's not even the one in the wrong by this telling, not by a long shot!

While that's certainly possible, my suspicion is that it's simpler than that.

"We're One Big Happy Family, Dammit!"

The niece and her husband think themselves blameless and enthusiastically attend all family events. The son is left to suck it up, play nice, don't rock the boat, be the better man, rise above, pretend nothing ever happened and We're All One Big Happy Family (tm), etc., etc. ... or to self-exclude.

And since even self-exclusion breaks the narrative, the LW "has to" bully him out of that. Because everything would be perfect if he would just stop being a problem with his petty ... refusal to pretend there was never a problem.

I fully agree with you. LW needs to realize their "one big happy family" fantasy is just that, a fantasy. LW and their son live in reality. LW needs to face and accept that reality if they want him to stay in their life.