My Ex Just Pulled a Move That Could Make Me the Ultimate Villain With My Kids. I Can’t Let Him Win.

Dear Prudence Is he serious with this stunt? 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? Aug 27, 20266:00 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by AndreyPopov/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, My ex and I were a great couple for a decade, and bonded over many things. As former corporate lawyers, one was our borderline hatred of corporate power and the ever-presentness of various corporations in our lives. One of these, or at least the avatar of these companies as a group, was Disney. In each of our families we had several “Disney addicts” or “Disney fanatics,” including at least one on each side who had gone into significant amounts of Disney Debt (credit cards and personal loans) to take vacations at properties owned by that demonic mouse. We amicably divorced last year. Or so I thought. As soon as we split, my ex began hanging out more with the Disney people in his family, and has now contacted me to say that he is taking our two daughters to Disneyworld for seven days during his vacation right before school starts. He said my share of the costs for this vacation is $3,200 if I join them and $3,700 if I do not, as there are deals for larger groups. He has been watching Disney videos and YouTube travelogues with our girls and they are beyond excited. He has told them that if I don’t go or pay my part, the vacation can’t happen. When the girls are with me this has become a constant conversation, and it feels like they are turning on me as the mean parent given my anti-corporate stance. I want to tell everyone to go to hell, but I worry about this becoming a long-term problem. I have the money, but just barely.What should I do? My ex is non-responsive on this subject, though he’s a fine co-parent otherwise. —Wicked Witch Dear Wicked, What your ex is doing is dead wrong, deeply manipulative and, I’d even say, borderline emotional abusive. It doesn’t matter how you feel about Disney. He doesn’t get to send you a bill for a vacation he planned! That is just Being Divorced 101. If he wanted to split travel costs, he should have worked harder to stay married. It also doesn’t matter whether you can afford to pay for half of the trip, can barely afford it, or can’t afford it at all. I know for a fact that there is something else in your life that brings you joy or that provides stability for you and your children that the cash could be better used for. Even if you had endless disposable income, I’d tell you not to fall for this plan. By giving in to the guilt, you’ll be encouraging your ex to continue setting you up to subsidize his desires without so much as consulting you before sharing the plans with the girls. Worse, you’ll be confirming that all he has to do is paint you to be the bad guy in their eyes and he can make you do anything he wants. It is really unfortunate that this is all too much for children to absorb and that you wouldn’t want to burden them with the details of the conflict. It is sad that your ex might in fact convince them that you are mean and that’s why they can’t go to Disneyland. I know that will be really tough. You could say something like, “There was a misunderstanding and it turned out that Disney is too expensive” is probably the best you can do in terms of an explanation, and I know it won’t be completely satisfying. Like many divorced people with difficult spouses, you are going to have to play the long game—being a steady, fair, emotionally balanced presence for your girls, and not disparaging their father even when he deserves it. At some point when they’re older, they’re going to look back and have a better sense of the dynamics between you and their dad who you say is a “fine” coparent but I suspect is being held to a pretty low standard, maybe one that compares him to the kind of husband he was. Until then, having a confident mom who’s sure of herself and her decisions will benefit them more than any vacation could. 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, My husband, who is in his 40s, has a very formal relationship with his parents. It is respectful but not emotionally close. He speaks to them once a week on the phone for 10 minutes, and we see them once a year at Christmas time for a short visit. (They live several hours away by plane.) This visit is not terribly fun for me, though I do like his parents. But it’s never more than two nights and my husband feels obligated to go, so I go to support him. Here’s the problem. My mother-in-law has dementia. It has been progressing steadily, and last Christmas it was clear she doesn’t really know where she is or who she is anymore. My father-in-law is doing everything for her, including personal care. This has been clear to us for the past several years. But his father refuses to talk about it. My husband has spoken to him once about this, and he admitted that his mother has a memory problem and her doctor was aware and she was on medication for it. And that was the end of the conversation. During our last visit, a neighbor approached my husband while we were on a walk and said that she has now twice found my mother-in-law out wandering at night. My husband asked my father-in-law about it while my mother-in-law was taking a nap, and he promised he had taken steps so it wouldn’t happen again, and ended the conversation. I feel very strongly that my husband needs to intervene somehow and make his dad get his mother more care. But my husband says that there is nothing he can do. He says he has told his dad he thinks he needs more support and his father has refused to talk about it. I am very frustrated by this situation. What can I do? —Just the Daughter-in-Law Dear DIL, This is indeed super frustrating. However, I think your husband’s situation is really common and understandable. It’s so hard for many adults to come to terms with the fact that it’s time for them to take responsibility for the well-being of their aging parents. This represents a huge and often depressing shift, and it can be a hard thing to get your head around (not to mention, demanding in terms of time and energy and money). Plus, many seniors don’t exactly welcome being told that they’re no longer making good decisions and need someone else to be in charge. I suspect that part of the resistance to your command to “make his dad get his mother more care” is that he’s uncomfortable with the idea of making his dad do anything. It probably feels especially overwhelming because nobody is sure what form this care would take, or how it would be paid for. If you have a sense of the family’s budget, why don’t you make a few concrete suggestions for what this extra support could look like. Write down the number of hours per week you’re proposing, the kind of help you suggest, the agency or person who might be able to provide it, and the cost per week and month. If Medicaid will play a part in this, you can be the one to do the headache-inducing task of investigating how to make that happen. Worst case scenario, you could look into local nonprofits and volunteer groups who might be able to deploy someone to check in once a week. Present this list to your husband, with all the associated phone numbers, and let him know what you suggest. At that point, you’ll have to accept that this is in his hands and unfortunately, any reluctance at this point may mean that he’s simply not going to engage more with his parents’ care until an emergency of some kind demands it. (This probably means you should go ahead and start another document with assisted living and memory care facilities that fit the family’s budget, just so it’s there when everyone is ready.) If he’s not willing to act right now, urge him to at least get his dad’s permission to send a handyman over to install a special door lock (which you might find by looking up childproofing solutions or “dementia locks for elderly”). This isn’t a complete, long-term solution, but it could decrease the chances that his mom ends up in danger in the near future. Please limit yourself to doing background research and resist getting further involved and becoming the person who communicates with your in-laws’ doctors, or arranges and monitors their care. Providing assistance that isn’t requested for people who are not your parents and not even that close to your husband is almost guaranteed to be a thankless task that will create resentment and risk chipping away at your marriage. If you think you’re frustrated now, just imagine how you’d feel if you were working an unpaid part time job to solve this problem. Want more Prudie? Slate Plus members get an additional column each week. Sign up for Slate Plus now. Dear Prudence, I am in my early 30s and only see my parents every year or two. A year ago, I visited for a relative’s birthday party. On the last day of the visit, my parents started making negative comments about my recent weight gain. For example, my mom said that everyone was judging me and no one would hire me because they’d think I’m pregnant. I reminded her about my history of anorexia (six years prior) and told her how her 20-year history of berating me any time I gained even a small amount of weight had hurt me. She was unsympathetic and denied that she ever said those things. My dad claimed he was just concerned for my health and made unsolicited offers to pay for a GLP-1. My mother, who is not a medical professional, claimed that the chronic illness I’d recently developed was probably due to my weight. When I told her that no medical professionals had ever mentioned my weight, she dismissed their expertise. And I wasn’t even very fat! At the time, I was only about 40 pounds overweight. A few months later, I was triggered by a stranger thinking I was pregnant, and started eating a very low-calorie diet. I have lost 50 pounds and am now at a healthy BMI, but I know there is a specific weight above which my mom will berate me, and I still need to lose about 12 pounds before I am below that. When I told my mom about the mental health issues this was causing for me and that I felt like my parents don’t love me because of my weight, she sent back only a few sentences where she claimed they still love me and care about my mental health. However, they still keep bringing up GLP-1s even though I have told them I am no longer overweight, and neither of them have apologized. I want them to apologize, but I don’t want to ask for an apology because I feel like if I have to ask them for it, then they’re not really sorry. What should I do? — I Want an Apology Dear Apology, I’m really sorry. Your parents’ absolute cluelessness and backward approach to expressing what I’m sure is real love for you is absolutely jarring. I wish they would apologize to you and pay attention to the facts (medical professionals say you’re fine) and what you’ve told them about your feelings (the way they’re antagonizing you about weight, making you miserable and straining your relationship) but I’m afraid they won’t—at least not anytime soon. That is the bad news. The good news is that their behavior is pointing to an issue that’s bigger than both of them: our society’s twisted views on weight. Everything they’ve said embodies the widely accepted view that having a smaller body is the most important thing in the world, that everyone should try to shrink, that this is more important than mental health, and now that GLP-1s exist, that weight loss is available to everyone who is able to take them and therefore fair game for pressure and harassment. These are the ideas that likely contributed to you and so many other people developing eating disorders, to that stranger’s assumption that the only explanation for your size was pregnancy, the way you were triggered by that misunderstanding, and to the choices of many people who are turning to weight loss drugs in the hope that losing weight will finally earn then the respect and love and decent treatment of people like your parents. While you can’t force your parents to apologize (or to feel sorry, or to listen to what you’re telling them, or even to just shut up), you can work to distance yourself from all of that—not just their comments. This is, of course, where therapy comes in. A professional who has expertise in family systems as well as eating disorders and body image issues could work with you to heal your many years of suffering around weight and process the pain your parents have caused. Assuming this is the one sticking point in your relationship and not part of a broader pattern of mistreatment that makes you want to consider pulling back from them, this work could slowly decrease your sense that you need an apology from them before you feel OK. My theory is that the more solid you feel in your belief that the size of your body doesn’t define you, the sturdier you’ll feel in the face of misguided remarks from your parents, strangers, and the media. It would be great to get to a place where your reaction to their GLP-1 campaign feels similar to the one you have when they send you a video of an AI video of a baby in diapers skillfully break-dancing (with its six-toed feet), totally believing it’s real. “Sigh, here they go again, they’re confused” with a side of amusement would feel so much better than desperately needing them to apologize. The ultimate goal would be for this peace to extend to unsolicited comments about your body from any source, for the rest of your life. More Advice From Slate My son, who just turned 5, has a friend from his previous school, who just turned 4. She’s cute, but demanding, spoiled, and hard to have around. The mom asks me for play dates regularly, and I typically say yes, because the mom is a lovely person who would give you the shirt off her back. This kid is obsessed with my son. When a play date ends at my house, she weeps, goes limp, kicks off her shoes, calls out to him, and has to be dragged out. When a play date ends at their house, she keens and wails and calls his name from the end of their driveway, sobbing, ready to rend her clothing, and I have to just drive away. At first I tried to make her feel better, but she’s not my kid, and the mother doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with this. When it comes up, she says, “She loves A. so much! It’s like an adult kind of love!” Except they’re not adults. They’re 4 and 5. Advice Dear Prudence