I Was Added to My Husband’s Family Group Chat. Then I Searched for My Name. It Was Brutal.

Dear Prudence I had a hunch. Advice by Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Jenée Desmond-Harris? Oct 07, 20266:00 AM Photo ilustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here. Dear Prudence, I was recently added to my husband’s family’s social media group. I checked in after an ugly comment about me from my mother-in-law and immediately responded, “This is untrue. How could you say such a thing?” On a hunch, I then searched for my name in the messages and found more than a dozen hateful messages from her with spiteful responses from the group. I responded to all of them with variations of “This is a lie”; “How could you?”; “I thought we were friends!”; and “You should be ashamed of yourself.” Unsurprisingly, it triggered a huge family storm. My mother-in-law left the group because she “is being attacked.” Some family members have apologized to me (though none will give me all the previous messages so I can know what has been said), while others accuse me of overreacting. The breaking point came when my husband, who was never part of the group, criticized me for upsetting his mother because “she’s old and not going to change.” I told him I needed time away from a husband and family who will not support me and are happy to abuse me behind my back like cowards. We’re not talking right now. Was I wrong? Is this relationship salvageable, and if so, is it up to me to salvage it? —Ouch, My Back Dear Ouch, I’m happy to read that your husband wasn’t part of the original group and didn’t read or co-sign the nasty things your mother-in-lawsaid about you! I do think your relationship with him is salvageable. He definitely shouldn’t have criticized you for your very fair response to his mom, and I wish he’d been more supportive, but it sounds like he’s already living by the motto “She’s old and not going to change,” by distancing himself from her. I’m sure he avoided the family chat for a reason. You should have followed his lead. As a general rule, you probably never want to be closer to your spouse’s family than they are. They know these people better than you do! I’m sorry you had to read these insults, and that you didn’t get the apology you deserve. Time away from family members who obviously don’t like you very much and haven’t fully owned their behavior makes sense. And feel free to have a little break from your husband, too. He was, after all, kind of a jerk about this. But I do think you should eventually return to him, explain how hurt you were, and tell him exactly what you’d like him to do to make things better. If you open up a conversation about his experience with his mother and relatives, you might get a fuller picture of his place in a family in which harsh criticism is strewn around freely and where efforts to hold people accountable are twisted into attacks. I’m sure it messed him up, and this has something to do with his shutting down when confronted with the latest instance. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don’t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Prudence, Our opposite sex twins are at the age for sleepovers. The problem is that the area where it happens is an open-air loft looking over the living room/kitchen. It echoes. Our room is right at the end of the space underneath. The girls are pretty good at, if not lights out, then playing quietly and watching TV on low. The boys played video games and ended up screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. My husband does shift work and needs sleep. We already had several instances where I had to physically remove the console because the boys refused to settle down or listen. Putting them in the bedrooms doesn’t work, as we have an older child and had to halve the third bedroom into two for the twins. They each have their own space, but it is tight. Right now, we have a ban on sleepovers, but my daughter complains that it isn’t fair because she and her friends are good and don’t do anything wrong. She is right, but her brother will throw up a fit if she gets to have friends over and he doesn’t. They have always been competitive. I am exhausted by this, and I know my husband is too. We host so much because we live in a very attractive area (park and a pool and splash pad less than a mile away), and we are in a carpool where we don’t drive because of our work schedules. We like the other parents, but we owe them a lot as well. —Keep It Down Dear Keep It Down, Please rest assured that you don’t owe the other parents sleepovers to compensate them for the carpool. Watching their kids during the day on a weekend once in a while is more than enough. Add some gas money if you want. There’s no way they feel entitled to a 12-hour break for letting your children hop into the backseat each day. But if you enjoy hosting and want to try to do it again, for your kids’ sake, there’s a fair way to do it—or at least to try. Gather the family for a meeting and make this announcement: You guys know we’ve had a ban on sleepovers for a while because there were a few times when things got too noisy, and Dad couldn’t sleep. But we want you to have this experience, and we are willing to try again. So, each of you can invite a friend to spend the night one night this month. And as long as we don’t have to ask you to be quiet more than once, you can have another one next month. If we do have to ask more than once, we’ll take another long break until Dad and I are ready to try again. This applies to each of you separately—meaning if one person’s sleepover gets too noisy, that doesn’t affect the other person’s right to host. We’d really like this to work, so should we all talk about how to enjoy having friends over while not being so loud that no one can sleep? Let’s all throw out some ideas: Maybe choose friends who tend to be quieter? Maybe watch a movie instead of playing exciting games after bedtime? We could even hang a sign in the loft as a reminder. Let me know what you think. Now, as practice, why don’t you two go up there and make noise, and I’ll tell you when I can hear it from my bed so you know what I mean when I say I need you to keep things quiet. The setup of our house makes this harder than it would be if we could close a door on the sleepover area, but I think we can do it. If it turns out that your son and his friends are loud and your daughter and her friends aren’t, at least now you’ll know he understood the plan and was treated fairly. Plus, not much is lost by allowing kids to come over, play video games all they want, and get picked up at 10 p.m. Classic Prudie My husband and I went into our marriage last year essentially on the same page about kids—he definitely wanted them (ideally three to four), and I was about 80 percent sure I did (ideally two of them). We’re in our early 30s. We did actively try for six months, but yesterday he told me he no longer wants to, only to “not-not try and see if it happens,” which for us, for a number of biological reasons, means we’d be very unlikely to ever have a kid… Advice Dear Prudence Family Marriage