My daughter’s partner has left her and their seven-year-old. Since then she has wanted to be at our house every day as she cannot be alone. She often stays overnight. My husband and I are finding this exhausting, with no time to ourselves. We are in our late 60s.
We love our daughter and grandchild very much and want to support them as much as possible but the last time I spoke to my daughter about this she heard it as if we didn’t love her and we were rejecting her. Help!
Eleanor says: One thing that stands out to me about your letter is how comfortable your daughter must feel with you to want to camp out with you at the moment she feels so destroyed. You know how animals sometimes hide when they’re wounded? It’s a testament to your relationship, home, character and parenting that your daughter feels she can hide with you.
I wonder whether some of this will just be cured by Dr Time. She’s had a shock that gets to the core of her identity: spouse or life partner, co-parent, co-planner of a particular future. It’ll take time to learn the other identities: divorcee, single parent, planner of a whole different future. It would make sense if right now she wanted to go back to the identity she’s had the longest and knows the best: the identity of being your child. And as she suddenly has to get to grips with raising her child in a very different way than she had planned, she might want to go back to her own blueprint for love and family.
As those identities and upheavals become less shocking over the next little while, she may disentangle from you naturally. Totally reasonably, though, you might want to hasten that transition.
One small strategy might be to change the location. Is she coming to your place partly to avoid the house they shared together? If so, perhaps you could offer to help change the atmosphere there. Clean it out, change the furniture, make it feel like hers. Once she can stand spending time there, you could propose visiting her there instead. That way you get to call time.
Could you also put some others on the support team? In the dust clouds just after a crisis, we go to the relationships that feel maximally familiar and minimally taxing. The risk is that’s usually a fairly small number of relationships and so the whole weight of a recovery process is borne by a select few people. Could you share the load a little by surreptitiously getting some other people involved? That way she’s still being supported but you won’t be lifting the whole load. That might mean having family friends pop by while she’s at yours, enlisting professional help, or even – if your relationship permits – reaching out to friends of hers.
You may also want to ham up the display of unconditional support while you’re together so that when you do want time apart, it feels less like a frightening rejection. Small indications of abandonment – or even adjudication – are likely to feel very big right now. So now is probably not the moment to rationally solve criticisms, however fair. If she’s returning to the identity of being your kid, you might have to temporarily regress a little to meet her there, going back to the reassurances you had to use when you first taught her how to separate from you at bedtime: just because I’m out of sight, doesn’t mean I’m gone; I love you and we’ll be here in the morning.
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