My Mom Is Spreading My Family’s Story as “Evidence” to Support Her Political Agenda. But She’s Got All the Facts Wrong.

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.

Dear Care and Feeding,

How do I get my mom to stop using my family as support for her political beliefs? My husband and I launched our careers during the Great Recession, and then had major career path redirection during COVID and the launch of artificial intelligence, respectively. We have two kids, and our son has a fairly expensive disability. We get practical support from friends. Our kids’ school has a hard-working special education team. Our son is eligible for some limited state programs. Still, without the financial help we’ve gotten from my in-laws during tough years in the past, we would’ve lost our home and had to make impossible choices about caring for our kids. We’re so lucky my husband’s parents are able and willing to help us.

My parents and I are not close, and they’re not involved grandparents. So, all they see is that we don’t rent, both our kids are in school, and we’ve both had periods of unemployment, but neither of us appears to be having a breakdown. My mom sees this as demonstrating that “it’s easy and not expensive to raise a special needs kid, and even two people who can’t stay employed can do it thanks to all that government assistance.” She believes support programs should be cut to lower taxes, and that we’re an example of why. She’s been using her account of our lives as a baseline for her posts on Nextdoor, in disability parent groups, and even in public letters of support she wrote for a state candidate during the last election. I had no idea of any of this until someone sent me one of her “stories.” I’m incredibly hurt and angry, for like six different reasons. How do I shut this down? I can’t claim it’s libel or anything, legally.

—Maybe It Looks Easy?

You can, and should, certainly tell your mother that it’s painful to you to see her using your family in this way; you should make it clear to her that doing so is taking such a severe toll on your relationship with her (such as it is) that it may not survive if she continues. But beyond that, I don’t think there’s any way to shut her down for good. And, like you—I imagine—I doubt that this approach will work: From what you’ve said, it seems likely that she wouldn’t care … or at least that she wouldn’t care enough to quit.

But if she won’t stop, what you need to do is stop letting her get to you. I know this is hard. No one wants to be used in this way, of course. But even more than that, being so misunderstood and misrepresented by one’s own parents cuts deep. When you experience this deep cut on top of the emotional distance between you and your parents, their lack of interest in your children, their failure to empathize, support, and otherwise evince love for you and your family, and the political gulf between you (the latter alone has torn many families asunder), finding a way to let this go will be a challenge. But you have to do it. Otherwise, it will eat away at you.

I urge you to get help from a good therapist—not because there’s something “wrong” with you, but because it’s so hard to let go of pain when it comes to our parents. But whether you work on this with the help of a professional or not, I hope you’ll start working on it right away, in whatever ways you’re able to and need to. Focus on taking care of yourself, rather than trying to figure out how to make your mother change her ways.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

My parents and my in-laws have gone to war with each other over something insane.  My husband, “Nick,” and I are expecting our first child in March. Nick’s family is Jewish, and mine is Catholic. Nick and I both walked away from our respective religions. That, however, has not stopped his parents from wanting our child raised Jewish, and my parents wanting them raised Catholic. There have been constant fights over which faith our child will be practicing (none!) and incessant lobbying from both camps over things like baptism and circumcision—decisions that aren’t even theirs to make! Attempting to reason with them has gone nowhere. What can we do, short of cutting them off, to get them to lay off?

—No Religion for Us, Thanks

Here’s the deal: If they’re at war with each other out of your earshot (and you just hear about it each time they battle, from one set of parents or another—or both), let them keep fighting. It’s a pointless war, but it’s between them, so go ahead and let them duke it out to their heart’s content. When they mention it to you, tell them flatly that you’re not interested in hearing about it. Change the subject. Hang up the phone if you need to, or leave if you’re with them in person and they refuse to stop regaling you with the details of the latest battle in the ongoing war.

If they’re having this argument in front of you, or either camp complains to you about the other’s position or makes the case yet again, to you, for theirs—well, do the same thing! Tell them you’re not interested in talking about this, period. If they keep talking, get up and walk out (if they’re in your home, go out for a walk and leave both sets of parents there without you). Keep doing this until they give up. Eventually, they will. Along the way, you’ll probably learn to tune them out.

Unless, of course, you want to cut them off? But (as I always say) estrangement needn’t be the second resort (after “reasoning with them,” which was never going to work). It can, however, be the last resort if it comes to that. I hope it doesn’t. I hope they get the message that you are not going to go along with either set of parents’ wishes, that the decision about how to raise your kids is yours and yours alone, and that if they want to keep pointlessly fighting about it, they had better take it outside.

I know I sound like a broken record, but I never tire of saying it: You can’t change what others do, no matter how much you hate it. The only thing you can control is how you respond to it. Often—and certainly in this case—not responding at all except to repeat that you are not going to engage in this debate and don’t want to hear anything about it, is a perfectly reasonable response.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

My sister “Daphne” is a drug addict. She’s a mess. My husband and I have had custody of her now-6-year-old son, “Patrick,” since he was 3. Daphne has been in and out of his life sporadically for the last three years. The day after Christmas, my mother told me she planned to take Patrick to the mall while my husband and I went to visit friends. Several hours after we parted, she sent me a frantic text: She had allowed Daphne to take Patrick to the mall instead, and now she had no idea where they were, and Daphne was not responding to calls or texts. I immediately called the police. An hour later, they contacted us to tell us that my sister and my nephew had been found. She had crashed her car into a fire hydrant (thankfully not at full speed) and was high as a kite. Patrick had gotten out of the car, and a couple driving by spotted him. He brought them back to where my sister had passed out, and they called 911.

It’s nothing short of a miracle that Patrick was unharmed, and now my sister is looking at jail time. I am furious with my mother for allowing my sister to take my nephew unsupervised, knowing how unstable she is. My mother has always had a soft spot for Daphne and tried to excuse what she had done, saying she “wanted to give her a chance to be with her son.” She doesn’t seem to understand—or refuses to acknowledge—that Patrick could have been killed. I am definitely never allowing her to spend time with him again without my being there. The question is, should I cut off her access to him at all, for good?

No, I don’t think you should, unless your true goal is to shut your mother out of your life, too. Are you angry enough at her to want that? (Have you contemplated it before now?) Is this her first offense, or the latest in a long string of dangerous steps? You don’t say, but because you allowed her to watch Patrick, I assume it’s the first.

Your mother showed poor judgment, yes, blinded by her love for her other daughter. Because she doesn’t, won’t, or can’t recognize that she made a bad decision, I’m with you on not leaving Patrick in her care for the foreseeable future, as long as you have custody of him. But don’t punish her forever for this. And don’t punish Patrick, who has already had enough loss in his young life. Let him have a grandmother.

Once your fury over this awful episode calms, see if you can dip into the well of human kindness when you think of your sister and when you speak of her to Patrick and your mom. She is in the grip of a horrific sickness. She may never recover—or she may, eventually, and want to reclaim a place in her son’s life. Either way, I promise it will do you more good in the long run to tap into your compassion than disgust will. It will certainly benefit Patrick—whose well-being is your ultimate goal.

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