Dear Jane,
My husband and I have been in a loving marriage for over 35 years.
Before our children were born, I had a job which took me away during the week. In order to keep our romance alive, my husband and I would write letters to each other every day. Our sex life has always been fairly active, so let’s just say the letters were fairly steamy.
I kept every letter we sent each other and stashed them in my dresser, so that I can always remember that time in our lives.
Recently, my now-adult daughter went into our bedroom to fetch one of my shirts to borrow and she accidentally opened the drawer below the one I’d told her to.
Dear Jane: My adult daughter discovered something ‘twisted’ about my sex life and now she won’t let me see my grandkids.
The drawer contained all our letters, as well as our collection of toys, which there are quite a few of.
She read some of the letters then appeared downstairs, looking completely horrified.
Now, I realize that children – even those who are now 32-year-old mothers of three – don’t like the thought of their parents having a sex life, and ours is likely more active than most people our age. (You see, as retirees, we have all the time in the world to spend with each other, so we usually ‘get together’ two or three times a day.)
But my daughter now refuses to let us see our grandchildren alone, as apparently we’re ‘perverted’ and might ‘damage them’.
I really don’t know what to do or say. We love our grandchildren, and miss them terribly, but we can’t undo the letters. They’re steamy, yes, but nothing particularly weird. Although, according to her, only the most ‘twisted’ of people would indulge in the practices described in our correspondence.
I can assure you there is absolutely nothing ‘twisted’ going on, then or now.
Do you have any advice as to how to re-open the lines of communication?
International best-selling author Jane Green offers sage advice on readers’ most burning issues in her agony aunt column
From,
Young at Heart
Dear Young at Heart,
I have to confess, I’m mystified as to how your daughter has no remorse about going into your private drawers and reading your private correspondence and, further, that she now has the gall to punish you for her own transgression.
Snooping is a horrible thing.
We have all done it, but most of us soon learn that nothing good ever comes from it. We know that we can’t ask our loved ones about the messages we find, or the strange search histories that pop up on the computer, because we were not supposed to be looking in the first place.
But, really, this isn’t about your daughter’s bad behavior. What a terrible indictment of this supposedly accepting modern era that a healthy sex life between a married couple could lead to something as extreme as denying you your rights as grandparents.
Withholding your grandchildren from you is an awful thing – unless of course there is information missing here.
If it is simply the case that you and your husband have sex – and, frankly, I don’t care what kind of proclivities that may include – that should have no bearing whatsoever on anything outside of your marriage.
Unfortunately, though, the one thing I know to be absolutely true is that you cannot reason with unreasonable people.
This is a tricky one. Your rights to visitation as a grandparent vary from state to state in the US. Grandparents do not always have an enforceable right to see their grandchildren, particularly when those grandchildren are in an intact family (i.e. their mother and father are still together).
Either way, it does sound like professional intervention would be helpful here. Perhaps a first port of call might be suggesting a family therapist for you, your husband, and your daughter. If she has a partner, they ought to be involved as well.
Talking through, and most importantly, listening to how each of you feel about what has happened with a professional in the room who can navigate extreme feelings seems the right way to proceed.
You will be able to discuss how you feel about your privacy being violated. Your daughter can talk about being confronted with the inescapable fact of her parents’ sexuality and, most importantly, how she feels this will impact her children.
Sex still has far too much shame attached to it. It is wonderful that you and your husband have such a healthy sex life – I hope that you can continue to enjoy it.
And I hope, too, that you can resolve this as a family.
