Dear Eric: My 35-year-old niece married a 45-year-old man with two teenage kids in a small ceremony. I have always been close with her. My sister and my niece have had a somewhat up-and-down relationship. They are each strong-willed.
But over the past 18 months since my niece met her now-husband, she has pretty much turned her back on her family who have always been there for her. While my relationship with my niece has always been great, lately it has just been OK. There is an underlying tension within the family that she is creating.
She is not an easy person to discuss things with. For a wedding gift I gave them a check for $3,500. I still have yet to receive a written thank-you note. To my knowledge, none of the other 50 or so wedding guests have received thank-you notes, either.
I know they are busy, but between the two of them, they should be able to take a couple of hours to send out this small number of thank you cards if they truly appreciate their friends and family.
I am not a person who gets his feelings hurt easily. If I do not receive a note from them before Christmas, would I be wrong to not give them any Christmas gifts this year? I hate to make the situation worse, but I also don’t want to be made to feel like a fool going forward.
— A Hurt Uncle
Dear Uncle: Here’s my quarterly exhortation to the universe: thank-you notes are not a lost art. Send a note, a text, a card — something. Even if it’s later than you wanted it to be. Communication! It matters to people.
Now, that said, I think you have two courses of action with regard to your niece. First, try to find a way to talk about the state of your relationship. “I love you and I care about you. I feel we’ve grown distant in the following ways. [Give one or two examples.] I’d like to be closer again, if that’s something you want. [Make one or two suggestions.]”
Your objective is clearer communication with your niece, something that, when achieved, can make questions about the family distance or the thank-you notes easier to answer.
The second course of action: send a Christmas card in lieu of a gift. Sometimes we use gifts to express our love and appreciation. And they can be great at doing so. But in a situation where a few wires seem to be getting crossed, it’s best to save yourself more frustration and find a simpler, more cost-effective way of sending your love.
Dear Eric: I’m a big fan of your column and really enjoy hearing your responses to readers. (Here it comes, though.) I do feel that you missed something with “Grandma On Hold”, who was frustrated that her son and daughter-in-law let their children interrupt adult conversations. When children visit someone’s house, it’s a really good time to instill that they need to be polite and respect the rules of others. When you’re at home it’s totally different and you can expect to be much more relaxed, but when going to Grandma’s, or a restaurant, or the grocery store, it’s a great time to reel it in and practice our social skills.
Our mother would give us a brief talk on the way to our destination about manners and my brother and I found it to be valuable, because we learned social skills that made people like us and want to invite us back.
I think you underscored Grandma’s feeling of being undervalued by telling her to sit back and allow the kids to interrupt. Thank you for your time.
— Manners Matter
Dear Manners: Many readers agreed with you. And I do, too (for the most part). I was raised not to interrupt adults, and I think it’s served me very well in life. If the letter had come from the son and daughter-in-law, my response would have been different. But often with these questions I think a lot about what power, if any, we have to compel others to change.
The letter writer had expressed her displeasure to her son about their parenting in this regard, but the son didn’t change. How do we make peace with other people’s decisions even when we disagree with them? Sometimes we have to choose our battles.
No grandparent wants their grandchildren to grow up to be rude. But this phase — of parenting and of childhood — is not forever. I could write that the son and daughter-in-law were doing it wrong, but that doesn’t mean anything will change. The letter writer may find she gets better results from continuing to set a good example and holding her grandchildren to a more polite standard.
(Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.)
R. Eric Thomas
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