Dear Prudence,
I love my wife, but the minute she gets around her two sisters, they all turn into the heckling harpies bitching about the same old grievances. They will complain about their brother’s first wife and the woman who has been dead for a decade.
This is very hard on our daughter. She is amazing. She graduated early from high school, worked as an EMT, and has spent four years doing everything from wildlife conservation to volunteering to knitting beanies for newborns. But she hasn’t gone to college yet. She has a limited college fund and she wants to find out what she wants in life before pursuing it.
Everyone else loves her. Her aunts think she is wasting her potential. My daughter has successfully delivered a baby. My wife never defends our daughter to her sisters or even lets her speak when they are all in the same room. We had a short vacation all together and I just watched our daughter deflate every time she tried to speak up or tell a story or ask a question and get bulldozed over by her aunts.
When I tried to intervene by telling my sisters-in-law to stop interjecting, my wife would tap my arm and tell me I was being rude. My daughter announced three times that she got a student- work visa for New Zealand and would be leaving in September. My wife and her sisters never heard a word. Our daughter left but told me to not make it a big deal. Well, now it is.
A family friend asked my wife about the trip and she was dumbfounded. She accused my daughter and me of setting her up, and I told her our daughter announced it three times during the vacation. She wasn’t paying attention and this has been a long pattern. Our daughter is sick of it and asked me not to “remind” her mom. I told my wife the truth that she fails our daughter the minute her sisters come around. They don’t want a genuine conversation, they want to bitch and moan over crap that happened 30 years ago.
My wife accused us of ganging up on her and I snapped that our daughter and I have been talking about this since her middle school years. Our daughter is very social and likes talking to people. Her aunts treat her questions like an annoying bug. I’m very sorry your niece wants to know about when you went hiking in California during college.
This has been a long boiling pot that has now boiled over. My wife went to her sisters and all of them left ugly voice mails to our daughter and she blocked them. My daughter told me she doesn’t want me in the middle, but I love my wife and I love my daughter and this pattern has been going on for too long. How to get it through to my wife? Talking does nothing.