It was 2:30 on a sunny Friday afternoon in 2024. I was finished with my last client session and looking forward to Mother’s Day weekend. As I was getting ready to leave my office, I received a phone message from Claire, a client I had seen a few times about problems with her daughters-in-law. Claire was weeping and her message was barely coherent. I knew that she had been looking forward to a beautiful Mother’s Day weekend. Her grown son Jeff, who lived out of state, was taking Claire and her husband Bill to a beach resort on the California coast, not far from where Claire and Bill lived.
“What’s wrong?” I asked Claire when she answered the phone. I could hardly hear her through her tears as she told me, “Ashley sabotaged Mother’s Day weekend. Jeff said he had to cancel so he could stay home and take care of Ashley. Ashley was deeply depressed over something I had said 4 years ago. Honestly, I don’t even remember saying it. I’m sure I didn’t. My other daughter-in-law called Ashley and told her that I had said something deeply hurtful about her. She hadn’t even heard me say it first-hand and she deliberately misinterpreted it to Ashley. I feel like this just another way of cutting our son off from us. It’s cruel. “
I knew that Claire had been looking forward to time with Jeff, and I recognized her deep pain. Since Jeff had married Ashley 8 years ago, he had become more and more estranged from his parents. He did call them on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and on their birthdays, but otherwise seemed to have little interest in them. Since their family had been tight-knit during the years Jeff and his younger brother were growing up, the estrangement caused Claire and Bill a great deal of pain. This was the reason that Claire had first consulted me.
Surprisingly, this scenario is fairly common. When an adult son marries a woman who is deeply insecure or emotionally troubled, she feels threated by his love for his family and insidiously encourages detachment from them. She wants all his love for herself, and often for her own family as well. Psychologist Joshua Coleman, author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children cut ties and How to Heal the Conflict, has important insights on this topic. In his research, he found that men are more vulnerable to being manipulated by their spouses because their wives are their best friends, if not their only friends. Moreover, supporting a wife’s wishes can be an important expression of masculinity: His wife can manipulate him with claims that he’s a “mama’s boy.”
Men, as relationship researcher John Gottman has shown, are also more likely to shut down communication as a way to avoid feeling overwhelmed with emotion. Men are more likely to avoid conflict even if it means having less contact with their family.
Claire and Bill’s situation was even more complicated. Both their sons had married women with deep insecurities who tried over the years to estrange their husbands from their family of origin. Often, the wives colluded on the phone in apparent efforts to cut their husbands off from Claire on holidays.
Fortunately, Claire’s sons were not totally susceptible to these manipulations: They visited their parents annually and called them on birthdays and holidays.
Through the years, Claire consistently sent her daughters-in-law gifts for Christmas and birthdays, despite receiving no acknowledgment or reciprocation. Still, she kept trying to be a good mother-in-law. The week before Mother’s Day, she had sent Ashley a birthday gift after consulting with Jeff about what she would like most. That’s partly why Claire was so taken aback when Jeff cancelled the weekend plan; she had hoped that finally Ashley was feeling secure enough to allow Jeff to spend Mother’s Day with her. Sadly, the old pattern had not changed. “This will be the saddest Mothers Day I’ve ever had,” Claire said at the end of our phone conversation.