THE TRICKY BALANCE OF SUPPORTING YOUR PARTNER WHILE PROTECTING YOURSELF
My husband didn’t tell me his mother had referred to me as a “fat Jew” until months after she said it. I remember standing in the kitchen of my old apartment split in two. One part of me was furious, hurt and worried about my weight. The other felt awful that John had been carrying this secret on his own to protect me.
The whole point of being partnered is having someone else to help you hold your pain and amplify your joy. I knew his parents had a pattern of causing him turmoil. I wanted to step up so he wouldn’t feel so alone in the struggle. What I didn’t fully realize was how much damage doing so would cause me.
Before meeting John, it never occurred to me that my in-laws would hate me. Despite some risqué brand deals over the years, I present as a good candidate for a daughter-in-law. I value family, have an interesting career and always remember birthdays. I didn’t assume I’d get along as well with another family as I did with my own, but I certainly didn’t expect my partner to get a flurry of emails begging him not to marry me. Or a long message less than two months after my mother died bashing me and how I was raised. (Something I have since been told I need to get over because my mother-in-law insists she apologized for that. And therefore, I no longer have any right to be offended.) The vitriol that has been leveled at me over the last four years, in between periods of tenuous peace, has been destabilizing and, I’m embarrassed to admit, rage-inducing. Even worse than anything launched at me was witnessing what has been happening to my lovely husband his entire life. The two people who were supposed to be his safe place are anything but. And there is nothing I could do to fix it.
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Being thrust into this complicated family dynamic has alternatively brought out the best and the worst in me. Meeting John later in life and with a background in psychology allowed me to not view everything so personally. I was able to take (most of) the insults in stride and encouraged John to maintain a relationship with his parents because estrangement is never the first, or easy, choice. I didn’t want to be the reason he lost his family. Even if that meant the people who had been meanest to me in my entire life were also honored guests at our wedding. For years, I felt proud that despite their vocal assumptions of the opposite, I never pressured him to cut them out.
But underneath these moments of understanding, something else was brewing inside of me. I developed a need for my mistreatment to be recognized by the other people in my life. I would rant about it to my parents and friends, wanting—demanding—them to be enraged on my behalf. For all my talk of keeping the peace, it pissed me off that my parents could go to a cordial dinner with my in-laws and not slam their fists down, shouting how dare you talk about my daughter like that! I wanted others to defend me because I felt unable to defend myself. I got wrapped up in fantasies of all the things I would say if I thought saying them would do any good. These periods of obsession turned my brain into something ugly and dark. I worried that they were right about me. I feared I was losing the capacity to fake it if I had to see them in person again (something that hasn’t happened since December 2023 despite them living one hour away).
For people I so rarely interacted with, they took up a disproportate amount of my thoughts because their damage was deeply rooted in our home and my husband. Although John went no-contact with them in November, it didn’t feel like a true reprieve because I assumed the channels of communication would reopen at some point like they had in the past. A few months later, we made the decision to tell them I was pregnant so they wouldn’t find out from social media and that brought us back into a limited form of contact. Only this time, after another barrage of attacks, I suddenly felt like I couldn’t handle it anymore. I would never prevent John from having a relationship with them, but I had reached my limit.
This made me feel like a terrible partner. But it also brought me an immense amount of relief.
From the beginning of my relationship with John, it has been obvious that any of my suffering in this area pales in comparison to what he goes through. I do not know what it is like for a mother to be so hot and cold. To cruelly and strategically lash out and then demand not forgiveness, which would be hard enough, but a new reality where that never happened or, if it did, it was completely justified. Gaslighting was a term I learned about from TV and movies. John learned about it from repeated first-hand experience. These are the only parents he has. I know he would do anything to be able to have a functional relationship with them. There is immeasurable grief in realizing that likely isn’t possible. I never lose sight of the pain he carries. But I think I have reached a place where it is no longer sustainable for me to ignore my own.
When John handed me a rough draft of his first Substack essay a few weeks ago, I was shocked. One of the first rules of our relationship has been that I am never to mention his complicated family situation publicly. Agreeing to this was a no-brainer—even though it felt uncomfortable to have to keep such a massive part of my life private. I use my writing to help me process my pain and connect with others in similar situations and for years that familiar resource has been (understandably) cut off when it comes to all of this. But now the rules have changed.
After much deliberation and conversation, John decided to go public about his estrangement. He no longer feels like there is anything worth protecting with his silence. He has also given me permission to do the same. Being able to write about this feels like another significant step in me prioritizing myself while remaining supportive of John. I will never publish anything on this topic without his approval first, but the fact that I can be open and honest about what has happened has already helped me begin to heal.
There is no perfect way to handle something as messy as parental estrangement, but remembering that we are in this together, feels like an important framework. I am John’s family now and he is mine. Our child might not have two full sets of grandparents, but he will have us. And we promise not to send him a bunch of nasty emails no matter who he dates.
xoxo,
Allison
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