Dear Margo | 09/18/2009 12:00 am

Dear Margo: I Would Make This a Deal-Breaker

I Would Make This a Deal-Breaker

Dear Margo: I would like advice on how to be treated with respect by my husband in front of his son and male friends. He is very caring, loyal and considerate when we’re with each other. However, whenever his 18-year-old son is with us, my husband always belittles me in some way. It unfolds the same way every time. I make a comment to join the conversation: He either dismisses me completely or criticizes my opinion as being uninformed or off-topic, which is not the case. I end up feeling stupid for even trying. Sometimes his son ignores me completely because he has learned this behavior from him. My stepson lost his girlfriend because she was tired of his insults. My husband also does this in front of his friends and even my father. His friends have corrected him on occasion. Also, we have two little girls who I want to grow up expecting respect from men. This behavior is hurtful and degrading and ends up causing arguments because he refuses to recognize what he is doing. What can I do to fix this problem? — Exasperated in Ohio

Dear Ex: Are you married to the Aga Kahn? This is how he treated the mother of one set of his children. They are now divorced, and friends of hers have remarked that her sons treated her with absolutely no respect at all. I don’t know if your husband is from that part of the world, but a male-superior society is not a requirement for this kind of dismissive behavior. I would, with the help of a neutral third party (a clergyman or a therapist), get him to recognize what he’s doing, why and what this model is saying to his children. Also, why is it he can be wonderful to you — in private? — Margo, unacceptably

Dealing With Aging Parents

Dear Margo: My husband and I are in the classic 50-year-old sandwich generation — kid$ in college, 80ish parents who are emotionally demanding, a 30 percent drop in retirement savings despite having made what we thought were low-risk investment choices, and while we are still both employed, we’ve taken pay cuts and there are storm clouds on the horizon for both of our industries. Just too much fun! I want advice about my mother. She’s always been fairly "high drama" in terms of being overly emotional, but it’s getting worse. She "forgets" how often my brothers and sisters and I come to see her (though she has a mind like a steel trap, so the forgetting is a complete fabrication), and my dad is always complaining about how lonely she is. No matter what any of us do, it’s never enough, and she seems to want to pit us against one another. While this makes her sound awful, she also has many good traits, and certainly no one wants to cut her out of their lives. We just want to turn down the negative noise, have her appreciate what we do for her and not constantly try to make us feel guilty for what we can’t do. Suggestions? — Frazzled

Dear Fraz: If your mother is "80ish," I wouldn’t bet the rent that she still has a steel-trap mind. In any case, why don’t you and your sibs keep a "Mom Calendar" at her house so you can mark off the days when you’ve come to visit? Then there can be no question about frequency. (And you can invite your dad to look at it, too.) You can’t, at her age, effect a personality change, so try not to let the drama queen make you nuts. Consciously do your best to ignore the unfounded negative noise. It can’t be easy being old, but neither should her age drag you down — Margo, managerially

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Dear Margo is written by Margo Howard, Ann Landers’ daughter. All letters must be sent via e-mail to dearmargo@creators.com. Due to a high volume of e-mail, not all letters will be answered. To read more about Margo Howard, click here.

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Read more about: Aging, Dear Margo, Family, Marriage, Relationships

76 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment

#1 My bets are the husbands actions are a learned trait that he finds perfectly normal and maybe a lack of common sense. Hope she convices him to talk to a neutral party and let the good guy just stay present in himself.

#2 My mom use to always have a huge wall calendar, writing absolutely EVERYTHING about the highlight of a day without fail, it was fun to visit and see what she had done also, that might have been forgotten about. She had done that since her 50’s, knowing herself well enough that at times her memory without her calendar wasn’t the best. She married my step-dad while still in her 50’s and during the first years he still liked to hit a bar. Everytime he did, she would put a huge smiley face on the day with a frown and he had to look at it, until a new month. He gave up the bars just so he would not have to see the images on the calendar. Good advice!

By Linda Myers on 09/18/2009 12:14 am

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i like linda, how just above your comment, it says, no reader comments so far … what are you chopped liver? lol, great advice to LW#2 by the way!

By Nancy Pea on 09/18/2009 12:56 am

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The mother of a friend of mine is starting to lose her memory and couldn’t remember visits. Sort of like your mom’s calendar, they put one up in her house and whoever visits signs in the square for the day. Not only does it help her mom remember that she’s being visited and then recall the visit, but it reminds the rest of the family to visit when they see too many days pass without a signature. Visual cues usually work better than nagging.

As for letter #1, at least he’s nice to her in private. I don’t think that behavior has to do with cultures from certain parts of the world. I dated a Brit whose masculine esteem was wrapped up in knowing everything and being right. Most of the time I just let him because I’m a pretty secure person, but his insecurities would pop up over the stupidest things! He needed to buy a new hard drive for his computer and we were looking at a selection that had some on sale, some with rebates, slightly different capacities. The sales guy wasn’t a lot of help, and so The Brit was trying to figure out which would be the best deal. I suggested figuring out the final price and dividing by the capacity and go by the price per GB. He shot me such a look! In the car he started in on how I made him look like a fool, that I should wait until we’re alone before I help him with something like that, I shouldn’t always try to show him up, and on and on. I wasn’t trying to show that I was smarter, I just thought of a logical approach and said it out loud. Was I supposed to whisper it in his ear and let him claim brilliance or something?

I don’t think you can get guys like this to go to third party because they are adamant in gender roles, being the brains AND the brawn, and don’t think there’s a single thing wrong with it.

By Karleen S on 09/18/2009 9:10 am

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She had her calendar and a huge corkboard I had decorated and given to her a few years before. On the corkboard she would put school pictures of family/grandkids/greatgrandkids and momentos, so she had them all in one place. On the last vist I had with her, she was showing some unusual confusion, took her to Walgreens and was sitting out front - when she came out she spotted a car that looked like hers (forgetting I had driven her to the store) and started trying to get in although two men were already in the car, they locked the doors. lol Six weeks later she was gone from this world.

By Linda Myers on 09/18/2009 9:51 am

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Hehe! Funny, but not. I understand that. Both of my grandmothers were sharp as tacks to the end at 94 and 97 respectively. Here’s hoping…

By Karleen S on 09/18/2009 12:31 pm

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When I see people with thier elderly parents, especially fathers all I can think is WOW! how lucky! Especially father’s and I wonder how mine would have looked like as a senior citizen, he left in his 50’s so I did not witness that part of my dad.

By Linda Myers on 09/18/2009 12:57 pm

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Yeah, I’m coming up on a year of my dad passing suddenly at 77 (playing PC solitaire, hand still on the mouse), but I hadn’t seen him for quite a while. Yet, talking to him on the phone I could hear the elderly man creeping in. He didn’t look like daddy when we said goodbye.

By Karleen S on 09/18/2009 3:07 pm

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Sounds like he won his game! Played life his way. My mom exited between words sitting on her couch, medical intervention kept her physically in this world a few days, but they never did determine what happened physically. Choices bigger than you and me.

By Linda Myers on 09/18/2009 4:02 pm

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Definitely. His father died same age, same month, almost the same way. He always said he wanted to go like that. Not sick, quickly. I don’t begrudge him that exit, and he earned a simple death to match his honest, simple life. I’m a little miffed at myself because I was going to call him the weekend before, but thought, "I’ll wait until his birthday," which was the following weekend, he died three days later.

By Karleen S on 09/18/2009 6:46 pm

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My Dad spent two days in the hospital in his life, one three weeks before he died when he coded on a treadmill, and the night before the heart cath which he died during. The night before, even though I knew he was being tested in the morning, I was 24 and was more interested in doing what I wanted that night, I could always talk to Dad after the testing - he would be fine. That conversation never happened.

By Linda Myers on 09/18/2009 7:33 pm

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Here’s to daddies!

By Karleen S on 09/18/2009 10:03 pm

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Cheers! Mine if he wanted a radio, tv, cb, or ham radio equipment he would buy the kits and assemble every little wire like a million piece puzzle. He would have loved the technology age we are in now!

By Linda Myers on 09/18/2009 10:28 pm

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I think that another good idea would be to, instead of just signing your name for your mother, to write a little message about how much you love her, or one nice thing about her. That way, she can look at it every day and see all of the nice things that people say about her!

By Heather Wombough on 09/18/2009 10:41 am

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I prefer cards or writings from my kids/grandkids to presents. Much easier to tuck away and pull out again, timeless. My mom did crosswords daily up to the end of her life, and always watched Jeopardy because she said it made her think and use her brain - many times memory loss is mistaken for the confusion when the electrical wiring just seems to become crossed and firing too fast! My mom died days after her 75th birthday, so waitng until they are in thier 80’s is not always the option, just do it now!

By Linda Myers on 09/18/2009 11:24 am