#4 Grandparents won't let me meet my dad / 14-year-old needs counseling
DEAR ABBY: I am a 14-year-old girl. When I was only 18 months old, I lost my mom. She was killed in a motorcycle accident. My father isn’t around, so I live with my grandparents. They don’t want me to see my dad, but I wouldn’t mind seeing him once in a while.
Grandma and Grandpa say my dad’s a bad guy—but he’s still my dad. And I love him.
Do you have any suggestions about what I should do, Abby? Should I wait until I’m older to understand this better or what? NEEDING GUIDANCE IN INDIANA
DEAR NEEDING: At age, 14 you are old enough to learn the truth about your father. If you cannot make your grandparents understand that, perhaps another adult could intercede on your behalf.
Dad may not turn out to be the person you would hope—but you’re not a little girl anymore, and you have a right to find out if he’s worthy of your love. ——ABBY
Gabby's Reply
Hi Needing: Two things come to mind.
1) You need to hear and get that losing your mother and the subsequent estrangement from your father are both equally traumatic events. You have obviously very maturely accepted things, however, please do not assume that you are complete. These incompletes are effecting your outcomes daily.
2) You need some counseling. Just as adult survivors of 9/11 victims need therapy so too does a young person who has lost loved ones. Do not let your mind, or others, convince you otherwise. Not that there is something wrong with you but that there are hundreds of conversations that you were supposed to have had with your parents which you have yet to have. A counselor or therapist can create them for you, it’s called re-scripting, creating/re-creating conversations, the things you need/want to hear in order to be whole and complete. Else, and here’s the biggie, you will drag your incompleteness into your personal relationships and cause all sorts of drama. Worse yet, you will attract an equally incomplete man, quite possibly an enabling helper.
You are fortunate because children also need to have specific conversations with their grandmothers and grandfathers in order to be whole and complete (including thousands of nonverbal communications that come from simply spending time with them). You, having lived with your grandparents, have insights and experiences far above the norm.
Why is counseling important? Until you have had twenty-five 50-minute sessions with a therapist or a counselor you will not be complete. By that I mean that for the rest of your life you will have no choice (it's an automatic programmed thing) but to tell everyone your story, your drama. Look at poor broken-family me. Notice that you begin stating your problem with your drama, your story, whereas someone who was complete would begin it with, "I don’t know how to get my grandparents to tell me the truth." In other words, you unconsciously and covertly blame your parents, and now your grandparents, for your inability to create mutually satisfying communication, therefore you have not correctly identified the problem.
What’s so is you have fear in your relationship with your grandparents. The conversation of a young person who is whole and complete would go something like this:
Girl: "Gramps, I want to meet my dad. How do I go about contacting him?"
Gramps: "Well sweetheart, we’d prefer that you don’t contact him."
Girl: "How come?"
Gramps: "Well, your Grandma and I think he’s not a person you should interact with."
Girl: "What happened that you don’t like him?"
Gramps: "I don’t want to gossip about him. Suffice it to say, we don’t think it would be good for you to see him. You’re going to have to trust us."
Girl: "Gramps, you've already badmouthed him, and now I’m confused. Notice that you didn’t answer my question, 'What happened that you don’t like him?' I’d like to know what you did to destroy your relationship with him. Is it possible that you're carrying some resentment towards him because you think that if he hadn't introduced motorcycles into Mom's life that she'd still be alive, that you simply don't like the life-style of bikers?"
You can tell that this young girl has no fear and is intent on knowing the truth so that she can make up her own mind. She also has a working knowledge of responsibility. She knows that in her Gramp's universe he's responsible for the estrangement.
One solution might be for Gramps to say, "I'll contact him and invite him over for dinner. Just as we have always insisted on you bringing all your friends to the house, so too do we want to be present with you and your dad. You will learn a lot from our conversations with him."
You would do well to look and see what thoughts you have been withholding from your grandparents. Your question reveals there are some things about each that you do not trust or respect. I suspect that you would not bring a date with certain character traits/beliefs home to meet them because you know they would not approve of him/her. So, the sneakiness (the withholding of certain thoughts and things) would escalate. A daughter who is in loving supportive communication with her parents trusts and respects them implicitly. She would never entertain the idea of dating someone that would not like and be liked by her parents.
You are wonderfully healthy and exceptionally mature to experience having love for your dad regardless of what's happened. Now you must commit yourself to healing the relationship between him and your grandparents. Determine which of them needs therapy and insist upon it as a condition of them being able to interact with you. Unless you insist you will be at effect of abuse for life. For example: If, after meeting your dad you find that your grandparent's assessment was correct, you would say to him, "Dad, I don’t want to interact with you at until you have completed fifty 50-minutes sessions with a therapist." On the other hand, if you find out that they are all equally prejudiced, biased, self-righteous, and abusive then get yourself into therapy and stay there until you can leave your grandparents.
Your letter doesn't say if your grandparents are your mom's parents. If they are, it's possible they are in denial about the effects their leadership-communication skills had on their daughter, your mom. If they are your mom's parents then it was they who trained her to attract (bring into the family via marriage) someone they most likely didn't "approve" of from the start. Mom thwarted her parents desires and aspirations. Dad represents all that mom was trying to communicate to her parents, perhaps even punish them for if you will, "Here, take this. Watch me marry someone you detest. Someone you and I know to be no good for me. Can you get how much I want to hurt you, so much so that I'll destroy my own life just to make a point?" Thanks for the great letter, Gabby