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WBUR Podcasts, Boston. The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart-sick. The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears. I'm Steve Allman. I'm Cheryl Stray. This is Dear Sugars. Oh dear song, won't you please Share some little sweet days with me I check my bell box Oh and the sugar
Hello, Cheryl. Hi, Steve.
It is time. It is time. We always love rapid fire. I do, because we get to weigh in on many different things. Yes. Very quickly. Let's face it. Most of us on a daily basis are dealing with the small quibbles of life. Yes. That's what rapid fires are all about. And that's not to say we don't deal with serious issues on rapid fires, but that there are things that we're kind of like, OK, this this does have consequences.
a solution that we can articulate fairly quickly. So let's get started with a thing that sounds little, but I think actually is bigger than it sounds. Dear Sugars, we're back home after another frustrating vacation with my in-laws. My husband's very hurt because this is the second time this year that having made the long trip to his parents' house, his brother dropped off his two kids with us and left for the week.
The last time this happened, it was during spring break, and his brother stayed home with his wife to mulch their yard while my husband and I watched their kids along with our own three children for the whole week at my husband's parents' house. My niece and nephew are wonderful, and we love spending time with them, but it's difficult to be responsible for five kids. I suspect my mother-in-law encourages my brother-in-law to drop off his kids so all the kids can get together.
Before this most recent trip, we told her that it was too much and that we would like his brother and his wife to be there to watch their own kids, but she ignored our request. I can't tell her who to invite to her own house, and we, of course, do like visiting with the kids. How do we delicately make sure that this doesn't happen again? My husband is worried about his brother's reaction if we were to bring it up to him directly. Sincerely, no vacation.
Ooh, goody, goody. Here comes Cheryl. This is, you know, I understand the complexity and yet part of being a grown up is using your words correctly.
And there's just no way around this. First of all, you haven't spoken to the brother. You've told the mother-in-law, listen, we can't do all these five kids, even though we love our niece and nephew dearly. We don't want to be looking after them all week. That's a reasonable request. It was ignored by your mother-in-law. And so I think what you need to do is...
go to their father and his wife and say, listen, we'd love to visit. We'd love spending time with the kids. We want to spend time with you guys too. It's too much to have five kids in the house all week. So let's make a plan. And this question at the end, my husband is worried about his brother's reaction if we were going to bring it up directly. I understand that stress. Nobody likes conflict. But think about it this way. What about your reaction? If you don't want
this to stay the same, you're going to have to do something to make a change. And that is going to require you to be a little uncomfortable. But the end result will very likely be that you'll have a more workable vacation next time you go visit. Just golden rule this sucker. Okay, no vacation. They're off for a week mulching their yard. That's the part of it that really sends the entitlement into overload. If the brother...
and his wife had actually had the courage to say to you directly, we need time to work on our marriage. We really need this X, Y, and Z. Then you could say, well, I want to do that good turn for them, which they've honestly asked me. And I would, you know, and I hope they would do the reverse for me in order to resolve a conflict. You have to confront the conflict. This brother believes it is his right to put you in charge of his kids without directly asking you. And you're not okay with it. You shouldn't be okay with it. And again,
boy, you know, this is bullying. This is bad actors being accommodated. And it's only going to stop if you bring it above board and say it's not OK. That means you probably have to have a talk with your husband and say, I'm not OK with the family culture that I've married into because I see consent and accommodation around somebody who's being blatantly inconsiderate and entitled. It's not OK with me. It's not a good model for the kids. It's not the right way to interact with your nieces and nephews.
Right. That should be, you know, everybody, parents should take responsibility for their kids. And if they are going to try to get other people to take responsibility, there needs to be some sense of gratitude and mutual exchange.
So Golden ruled this. If your brother-in-law and his wife would take your kids for a week at the in-laws and it's not a big deal, if you wanted to mulch your yard, okay, then you shouldn't have a beef with them. But that's clearly not the circumstance. And you have to have the courage to resolve this conflict rather than avoiding it. Yeah. And if that doesn't work, if he doesn't understand that it's an undue burden on you to have five kids every time you go to visit the family, then you get to make decisions based on that information. Right.
And one of those decisions, no vacation, might be that you stop taking vacations there, that you limit your visits, that you go for a few days instead of a week. You stay in a hotel instead of at their house. But at the end of the day, you know, you get to do what you want with your life and you get to claim that and take responsibility for it. So good luck. And enjoy your vacation. And abortion and vacation, right. Okay, the next letter.
Dear Sugars, I'm writing to you because I recently had an issue come up with my best friend's husband. As I'm friends with both of them, it's not unusual for us to spend time together in some combination. While she was recently out of town, he came over to my apartment to play a game and have a drink with me. Nothing untoward happened, but he stayed late. As he left, he asked me not to tell his wife he was there late, as it would make her upset. He asked me to lie and tell her he left at a specific time much earlier in the evening.
sugars this spun me out i'm not sure how to process this situation i feel like i betrayed my best friend but i also feel betrayed i haven't seen either of them since this happened and i've been avoiding it because of how awful this interaction made me feel
I know I can't avoid them forever, but I also know that when someone gets in the middle of a couple, the couple may survive, but the friendship doesn't. I don't want that to happen. What should I do? Signed, Befuddled. Yeah, this guy, Befuddled, has enlisted you as a co-conspirator. He's asked you to lie. He's compromised your integrity, and he's forced you into a double bind. You either lie for him or risk hurting the marriage.
My take is that you need to have a conversation with him and say to him, I am not cool with this. Don't come over to my place if you can't do so without lying and then involving me in your lies. You're getting me in the middle of your mistrust and your mess, and we're not going to be friends if you ever do it again. And in this particular instance, if it does come up, I am not going to lie on your behalf.
You need to probably do some work with your spouse around your trust issues, but that's your business. And if it is going to become my business in any way, it's going to be an above board discussion in which a friend can lend support openly, not be essentially enlisted into a conspiracy. Precisely. I agree with you, Steve. I think...
A couple of things. First, befuddled. You know, I really want you to let yourself off the hook here. What you did wrong is, I think, what many people do wrong in this situation, is you were so taken aback by his request that you lie that you didn't immediately say, no, I won't lie for you. And now you've thought about it and you do know what to say. And my advice to you is, as Steve said, I do think you should talk to him and simply say,
I was really uncomfortable with you asking me to lie to your wife, and I'm not going to do that. She's my friend. I'm not going to get in between you. End of story. And...
And furthermore, I would avoid being alone with this guy. You know, he broke your trust. Clearly, your female friend feels a little threatened by the idea of her husband spending a late evening with you. There's something there. And so I think that you should avoid the situation. I think you should absolutely don't get together along with this guy anymore. That kind of friendship with him is over until he can prove otherwise. When there are these...
sudden and very subtle moral manipulations, we're absolutely frozen by them because they're so unexpected. It's a kind of moral ambush. So don't blame yourself for that. And I want to note that neither one of us has said that we think that you should talk to your female friend.
And that is because I do think that that's the territory where it does start to get dangerous when it comes to losing a friendship. The husband feels that his wife is at least enough threatened by you that he wants you to keep it a secret. And by then going to the wife, you become then party to this, you know, oh, are you jealous of me? Oh, I swear we didn't do anything wrong. You know, like, and I think that that's in some strange way, his request for you to be silent is also a
a request for you to get involved in that conflict. And I would say, don't do it. The person you confront is him alone. And you say, I'm not doing that again. It was unfair that you asked me to do it once. And I will not get together alone with you again, because I value my friendship with your wife and the two of you together too much.
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Dear Sugars, I made a mistake in anger. My daughter is 10 and has been a raging ball of hormones lately. In one of her daily "You don't understand me and how hard my life is" tantrums, I, out of sheer exhaustion, yelled something I feel shame and guilt over. I yelled, "You don't know a hard life. When I was your age, my stepdad used to touch me inappropriately and hit me, so you don't know a hard life, girl."
I regretted it immediately and left the room. I told my husband what I had said, and he thought I should talk to her about it. I did not. I chose to do what people always did to me all my life and pretend it didn't happen. I haven't stopped thinking about what I said. I know she probably thinks about it. She's only ten.
I've had my eyes wide open her whole life in the attempt to make sure what happened to me doesn't happen to her. And somehow by yelling that at her, I brought that garbage into her life anyway. Do I talk to her now? Do I wait? Do I say nothing? Thanks for your help. Signed, Mom, with foot in her mouth.
Well, first of all, Mom, I want to say you didn't bring that garbage into her life. She's not being abused the way you were. And your vigilance and love for her is going to be the thing that she knows most truly. So please don't beat yourself up about this. I think that, of course, you need to talk to her.
I think that the way that this information came out was not ideal, but I also think in the long scheme of things, this is what it's like to be a parent. This is also what it's like to be a kid. You know, I'm, I've had these kinds of interactions with my own kids. And in fact, I did the exact same thing. My kids were much younger than 10. Um, but many years ago when, when they were, you know, little, you know, four or five, six in a same angry moment, um,
I yelled at my kids and said, you don't even know what would have happened to me if I were acting like this. My father would get out a belt and beat me with it. And I felt immediately regretful that I said that. But I also...
In many ways, now that time has passed, I honestly, I don't regret it because what it did is it really opened up a conversation between me and my kids about my life and about the world. And there are ways that we can talk to our kids about things that are ugly, like abuse and physical violence and sexual violence.
That are important things for them to know about. And also to know that we ourselves as parents and as mothers are human, that we're not going to be perfect, that we can say the wrong thing in anger and then make amends. And that's what I think, you know, by modeling for your daughter how to
deal with the consequences of something you said in an angry moment is a really powerful lesson. It's one I have had to do over and over again. And mom with foot in her mouth, I bet you have too. This is probably a bigger one. It's a graver one because it is about something dark and important and difficult in your life. So please...
The really important pattern for you to break here is this one where people did not talk to you about important things. Go to your daughter and say to her,
I said something to you about my stepfather, about my life as a child. I want to talk to you about it. You can do that. You're right that she's thinking about it. You're right that she's curious about it. And you're also right it's time for her to know about it. She's 10. She's old enough to take this in. Even when my kids were younger and I told them that about my father, they listened. They understood.
And it was a conversation that hasn't ended. We've talked about it over the years. As they got older, I also told them about being sexually abused as a kid. And I think that those were essential conversations for us to have. I really strongly hope that you'll have that with your daughter, Mom. I know you can. Yeah.
You know, you sign this letter. I mean, I agree with all of that. You sign your letter, mom, with foot in her mouth as if this is a faux pas, something you've said wrong. And I want you to just try to think about yourself in another way or think about this situation in another way. Maybe you needed to tell her a part of who you are. And...
It's so important because what you're trying to do is, as you said out very eloquently, I chose to do what people always did to me all my life and pretend it didn't happen. And then you say, I want to make sure what happened to me doesn't happen to her. And you need to connect these two synapses here. You need to deal with this situation of having this very painful part of your experience come up
in a way that does not teach her that what you do with intense dark parts of yourself is suppress them. It's an even more damaging aspect of conflict avoidance because it's avoidance with the self and the inner life. And I've had nothing this extreme in my experience and in my dealing with my kids, but I've
Said a lot of things in anger and frustration to my kids. And it's not the offense that matters to kids. It's what happens afterwards. Do you attempt to repair? Do you attempt to be honest about why you got so frustrated and what was really at issue for you? Because the big mystery that kids are trying to solve is the mystery of their parents. Who are they? How did they get to be that way?
And when we hide aspects of ourselves, we don't allow them to solve that mystery. We don't allow them to understand our frustration, our anguish, our ghosts. And in that way, they become more mysterious and toxic, more remote. And they, I think, fall away from their own inner life. And this is a moment where you, an ugly episode, has given you the opportunity to break that cycle. Dear Sugars, My fiancé's grandfather died last year, and his family is still reeling from the loss.
He died at the age of 82 after battling cancer for the better part of two years. His family believes deeply in healing through faith. My fiancé believes in science and God, and does not hold with his family's evangelical beliefs on this subject. He said his goodbyes, so when his grandfather died, he did not feel anything was unresolved. His mother firmly believed up until the very end that a miracle could save her father's life, and she has not taken his death well.
She's very public with her grief and regularly makes long Facebook posts about how she is suffering, inciting people to comfort her. She expects an involved and ever-ready network of people to support her. I get it, because here's the problem, Sugars. My dad died 10 years ago, when I was 19. He died on the last day of my freshman year of college. He was going to move me out of my dorm the next day, but he had a brain aneurysm rupture and died. I never got to say goodbye,
He didn't have any opportunity to put his affairs in order. His death was sudden, traumatic, and life-altering. And because of this, my pity for my future mother-in-law is stunted. I feel deep resentment when she brings up what her father should have been here to do. In these moments, my heart goes numb. He had a long, good life and made peace with everyone in his family. Sugars, how do I navigate this? How do I stop being such a cold, hard bitch?
My fiancé's mother is aware that I lost my father very young and unexpectedly, but I'm not open with her about these feelings, that I feel my experience of loss was worse than hers. That would be cruel. I know this is not a competition, but how do I respect my own emotions while reacting to her with empathy instead of resentment? How do I respect her right to publicly grieve when I don't understand it? Signed, Heartless. Mm-hmm.
I'm always struck, Cheryl, in reading these letters, how much people, and I guess it's a lesson for us too, how much people convert their pain into self-loathing and how quickly. When I read that Heartless, you think of yourself as a cold, hard bitch, my first thought was, my God, you're in pain. Your grieving isn't over.
And the verbs you use, you know, Cheryl and I as writers are always paying attention to the verbs in language. And the verbs you use are part of the clues here. You write about how his mother is inciting people to comfort her. And I think really this is envy.
Envy, as we've talked about on the show, is a feeling of somebody else having what you don't have. What she got and is getting and is seeking out ostentatiously in your view is support, a support network and people to comfort her in her grief.
And the reason it seems ostentatious and proprietary is because I don't think you got that opportunity. I don't think you had that support. And you wouldn't resent her, I think, if you did. It's always a clue. And I would also point out that your fiancé did get a chance to say his goodbyes. And it's also not apparent of his who's died. You really are, in a sense, in the same boat as your future mother-in-law.
And what she's done is played out before your eyes, your own shock and your own sort of the paralysis of grief. And yet she's also seeking out help and support and comfort and seems to be getting everything where you got nothing.
And I think it's an effort to understand your own emotions around the loss of your father that will allow you to start to recognize that just like you, your fiancé's mother is in pain. And, you know, if you extend a little bit more of that compassion to yourself, you will, I think, be able to find a way to be more sympathetic towards her. Mm-hmm.
Heartless, I want to say first that I so relate to your letter. My mom also died suddenly, not quite as suddenly as your father, but died suddenly when I was in college. And I have had to live my adult life without her, just like you've had to live your adult life without.
Without your father. And you will continue to have to live all the days of your life without your father. And there are a lot of days. And there is a big difference between losing somebody who gets to be 82 and gets to be a grandfather and losing somebody whose kids are college students, right? I get that. Barely. You say that grief is not a competition, and you know that.
I think you know that intellectually. I don't think you feel that in your heart. I think that you feel competitive with your fiance's mother about her loss. And, you know, I think, forgive yourself for that. Even to this day, these 26 years after my mom died, I still sometimes have to check myself.
Friends of mine who still have their moms alive or friends who have lost their mom in more recent years after they got to have their mom all through their 20s and got to have all through their 30s and 40s and so forth. There is a kind of envy that rises. And I think that that's when I'm comparing experiences rather than emotions. Yeah.
Okay. So Heartless, what I want to say to you is, you know, you didn't have the same experience as your fiance's mom, but you do have the same emotion. You both know what deep loss feels like.
When you tune into that, when you think about your alignment in that regard, you're both suffering the loss of somebody who was essential to you. You're both suffering the loss of your fathers. I think that that's where that sense of competition or envy falls away. And what you plug into is your empathy, your compassion, the things you have in common. And I think that Steve's really deeply onto something here when he points...
out this fact that what it seems you're kind of jealous of is that your mother-in-law or your future mother-in-law is getting a lot of support, a lot of attention around this big loss. And I want to say that that's available to you too. And it is consoling. It is consoling. When it's my mom's birthday or the anniversary of her death or sometimes on Mother's Day, I'll put up on my social media a
A picture of my mom and a few words about her, you know, her life or how I miss her. And, you know, so many people say, oh, I'm so sorry for your loss. And I can't tell you how consoling that is. I mean, I think it's okay sometimes to ask for that kind of community rallying around you.
And, and it seems to me heartless, you're feeling a little bit like that that's a little undignified, you know, what I'm reading between the lines that you sort of look down on your, your, you know, fiance's mom for doing this, but that's what she needs in this time of her loss. You know, I also want to point out you're 10 years into this. She's still fresh for her. I think once you do, you know,
think about opening yourself up to talking to your mother-in-law about your own grief, sharing your own grief with others, what you're going to find is you're going to feel a lot of connection and compassion for this woman at this moment of her life. And in a sense, just as you were talking, Cheryl, you know, this death has reawakened for you the grieving process, that question of, did I get the support I needed at that time when I was so young and maybe less equipped to ask for support and even understand how I should grieve and
It's not a happy circumstance, but I think it's also important to talk with your fiancé because that's who you are. You had a parent who you cherish taken from you in a way that did not allow you to resolve it. So you've been carrying that around and you'll carry it into the marriage and into his family culture.
which is quite different from yours in how you conceive of death and grieving and the way, can we save somebody or not? How do we adjust and accommodate to somebody's gradual decline? These are all conversations that are deeply painful, but they're necessary to have with your fiancé because you're having all these feelings. Yeah. And I recommend, you know, reach out to the world of books to find consolation. There's a writer, Claire Bidwell-Smith, who,
who has a great book about losing both of her parents, actually, you know, in her young adulthood and what followed. And, you know, I think that there's also Hope Adleman's Motherless Daughters. I know, Heartless, you lost a father, so a lot of those things that Hope will be writing specifically about mothers are not going to be a direct fit. But a lot of that stuff is relevant to people who lost parents young. It's a very particular kind of loss. And one of the things...
that I want to say to you, Heartless, that I think is, you know, a key difference, and maybe this is what you're really feeling when you contemplate, you know, your future mother-in-law's loss, is that hers is a kind of end-of-life loss. You are
are going to have to go through so many experiences where your grief really is reignited. And maybe this is the first one of them, you know, that somebody close to you lost someone, and it's bringing up all of your grief. If and when you have kids, that grief will be reignited again. If and when you reach the age that your father was when he died, that grief will be reignited again. All of these life experiences are going to
be teachers to you. And part of what you're going to have to re-examine is that essential loss that you faced when your dad died when you were 19. And so, you know, think about this as really an opportunity to open yourself up to, I guess, a deeper understanding of what this loss means in your life, rather than something you have to kind of grin and bear it and fake your way through consoling your mother-in-law, your future mother-in-law. Oh, now Cheryl,
I want to read a letter. I think you're going to be able to answer it better than I am. The final letter? But that's generally true. So here we go. You have to do the final letter of the rapid fire. All right, here we go. Dear Sugars, I remember an episode where the two of you joked that Cheryl's fetish is dating men who adore her. I was not dating a man like that at the time and had no confidence I would meet someone who would love me like that. Luckily, I have. Yay! Yes.
I am now dating, but it's Dear Sugar, so it can't just end there. I am now dating a man who adores me. My question is for you, Cheryl. Do you ever get bored? Signed. Signed, adored, sorry. Adored. Signed, adored. Here's the deal. It only works...
in the long term if also you adore that person back in equal measure. That's what I thought. So yes, adored. If the dynamic is that you're being adored but you're kind of less like less adoring of the person who adores you then it's
It's horrible. It's like, you know, it's like, you know, sleeping with a puppy. More caviar. Nobody wants. I mean, you know, a nice thing licking you all over happily and greedily is it's fun for like 48 hours. But beyond that, you're like, OK, go back, go in the yard. Enough of this. And so it's not without conflict. It's not without him driving me insane. It's not without him getting annoyed with me. But in the end, we absolutely adore each other.
And so this is what works. So I would get bored if I were adored but didn't adore back. So that's the answer. What about you, Steve? What's your situation? I have not faced this particular crisis. You've never been adored? I adore you. Well, thank you. But I feel that the way that we're able to love other people with that kind of purity, even knowing their flaws...
is because there's something in us that is self-loving and has sort of self-forgiving enough to offer ourselves that fully and to find in somebody else's flaws things that are beautiful, that we don't just accept and tolerate, but actually recognize as integral to their selfhood. All those moments with Brian where you have that great story about the thing that he wrote on that. Tell that story again, because to me, this is adoration. We were fighting. Yes, you were. Very, you know, sort of in the kitchen. And I...
I looked at him, I said, I am going to be mad at you for the rest of my life. Something, by the way, that my three-year-old says all the time, but go ahead. And he says, oh, oh, hold on, hold on. And he grabs this little scrap of paper and he writes, I'm going to be mad at you for the rest of my life. And he puts it in quotes and writes Cheryl. And then he sticks it on the refrigerator. Yes. And...
it was so funny that, that as soon as he did it, we both started laughing. And it was on our fridge for years. And it's just, that is a great example of the way we adore each other is, is that we could in the heat even of this argument, and you know, and I was being sincere, I was
being sincere when I said, I'm going to be mad at you. Because it was like one of those things that like this thing about you that makes me absolutely crazy. You're just never going to change, which makes me even crazier because why can't he change? It's such a damn small thing. But of course, he'll never change. And I adore him and he adores me. And in the end, you just laugh at each other and there's love. And that is adoration. And you should never get bored of that. But it's a two-way street. It is.
As Cheryl's suggesting. Good luck. Good luck. All right, so we're at the end of another Rapid Fire. Dear Sugars is produced by the New York Times in partnership with WBUR. Our producer is Michelle Siegel. Our executive producer is Lisa Tobin. And our editorial director is Samantha Hennig. We record the show at Talkback Sound and Visual in Portland, Oregon. Our engineer is Josh Millman. Our theme song is by Liz Weiss. And other music is by the Portland band called Wonderly.
Find us at nytimes.com slash dearshugars. And please, we beg of you, send us your letters at dearshugars at nytimes.com. That's sugars, plural, at nytimes.com.