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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Getting Along with Older Kids [1]

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Date: 2023-03-09

Just came back from coffee with an old friend and her sister at the local Starbucks. This is a woman who just a few weeks back was on the phone with me from her home in Washington state and seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown over her relationship with her older daughter. She has been in therapy for over a year now trying to find some inner peace around this relationship. It is this relationship, more than the strained one with her younger daughter, which consumes her. It has been more than 18 years since they got along.

The daughter was recently diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer and underwent surgery to have the nodule removed. At first, she wasn’t going to tell her mother at all, but then she did and was upset with how dispassionate the mother was when she heard the news. Turns out that my friend was upset with the daughter because she had sent her an email a year ago in an attempt to mend the relationship, telling her how much she loved her and wanted to try to mend the relationship. She never heard back. In turns out that the daughter had never received the email. She found it after she wrote a scathing email to her mother after the phone call. But by then it was too late. My friend was just too hurt by the things her daughter had written in the email to care.

I came home and decided to make this diary about our relationships with our children. Are they a part of our lives? Are we at peace with the way we interact? Is there some unfinished business there?

The Pragmatic Mom has a blog post offering 9 Ways to Strengthen Your Relationship With Your Adult Child, which includes such tips as manage your expectations, respect boundaries, support their decisions, and to treat them as a trusted friend.

The author writes:

Poor communication is one of the common reasons for broken parent-child relationships. Keep your lines of communication open and speak to your adult child appropriately. If they sense that you’re criticizing them, they might feel attacked and sever ties with you completely, so be mindful of your words, tone, and body language. Empathize with your grown child and acknowledge that their disposition may contradict yours. Converse with them as adults and never invalidate their feelings. Creating an environment that will encourage your adult child to actively communicate with you can help foster trust in your relationship.

In terms of my parenting, I have only one child, a daughter, who is now 38.

I’ve always had an extremely close relationship with my daughter and celebrate how her life has progressed to where it is today.

I know how fortunate I am that after all the traveling she has done throughout her life, she is currently living a mere 30 minutes from my house. And I know to cherish this time because she is not really happy with living in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s changed so much since she was a little girl growing up in Bolinas. Of all the people she has met in the world, people in the Bay Area, she says, are as a whole the most elite, and unfriendly of any group she has interacted with. I can’t say that I don’t agree with her: I find people are a lot more friendly in other places nowadays.

I feel so sorry for my friend that she is lacking intimacy with her daughter. Her therapist is supporting her in closing the door for good on the relationship. The only thing I can share with her is my own experience. How glad I am that I was able to communicate with my mother before she died. How much I regret the horrific things we said to each other. How sorry I am that our relationship was so disturbed throughout my life that I had to distance myself from her for so much of it. How I wish my mother had been healthier psychologically and not had a problem with pills and booze. How these days, despite the toxicity of the relationship, I still wish I had a mother in my life.

This afternoon I checked in with my friend’s daughter to see how she is recuperating from her surgery. I didn’t mention that her mom had been visiting the Bay Area. I didn’t bring up her mom at all nor did I mention her when I met with her mom that morning.

So how are your relationships with your kids?

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