Anne Kathryn Killinger - A Son Is a Son Till He Gets a Wife: How Toxic Daughters-in-Law Destroy Families

A Son Is a Son Till He Gets a Wife

A Son

Is a

Son

Till He Gets a Wife

How Toxic Daughters-in-Law Destroy Families

Anne Kathryn Killinger

A Son Is a Son Till He Gets a Wife: How Toxic Daughters-in-Law Destroy Families by Anne Kathryn Killinger

The Intermundia Press, LLC

Warrenton, Virginia

2010, 2012 by Anne Kathryn Killinger. All rights reserved. Published 2012. Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN 978-1-887730-26-6

All rights reserved solely by the author. The author guarantees that all content is original and does not infringe upon the legal rights of any other person or work. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without express permission of the author.

Intermundia Press, LLC

www.intermundiapress.weebly.com

I know this is a curious title, and people who have never experienced the rejection of a son at his wifes behest wont understand it.

But those who have been through the experiencewhose sons have married and turned against them as if they were dirt after all the years of love and care the parents gave themwill rejoice at finding this book and knowing they arent alone.

Actually the desertion of parents by married sons is not uncommon. Would that it were! Almost every psychologist or counselor with whom I have talked knows of several instances in which it has happened. They speak of the great sorrow and agitation of the parents, mother and father alike, who cant understand why a child has turned on them.

They could probably understand, they say, if they had done anything to provoke the rift and separation. But they all protest that theyve done absolutely nothing, and that their sons behavior has hit them right out of the blue. Thats whats so hard about itits unwarranted and unjustifiable.

Parents Ive talked with have gone through all the stages of grief associated with the death of a loved onedoubt, denial, bargaining, anger, and acceptanceexcept that acceptance, the final step, is almost impossible for most of them. They try. But even years after the initial breaking off they find it hard to write closed to the case. Their love for their sons during their childhoods wont give up on those hardened men who say they want nothing else to do with them. They keep thinking, If only we were to do this, maybe things would change, or If only we could talk to him and his wife again, they might treat us differently.

A few days ago I heard from a mother now in her fifties who has not seen her firstborn son for ten years. They never had a quarrel. She had been a model parent. She and her husband divorced because he was an alcoholic and was physically abusive to her and the son, and she was especially careful during the worst times of the marriage and after the divorce to try to keep the son happy and help him to continue loving his father. But when the son married, his wife didnt want him to have anything more to do with his mother, and he broke off the relationship, just like that, the way one would snap a branch off a tree.

The mother had been to a ball game. A family member came up to her during an intermission and said, Did you see who my husband was talking to over there?

No, she said, I wasnt paying attention.

That was your son.

She couldnt believe it. She had seen the womans husband talking to someone, but hadnt noticed who it was.

It didnt even look like the son I remembered, she said.

Hes big and fat now, and doesnt have any hair.

The most painful part, she saidas if anything could be more painful than being rejected by a son she lovedwas that she had never seen her granddaughter, who she heard had been born six years earlier.

She had another child, a daughter, and the daughter lived near her and shared her two small sons with her. But there was still a big hole in her heart for the granddaughter she had never seen.

Most parents stories are similar. They enjoyed their sons during childhood and young adulthood. There were no serious problems. But when the sons married, everything changed. Suddenly the parents were regarded as bad persons who might interfere with the sons relationships with their wives. The sons couldnt say why they were bad. They just didnt want any more to do with them. They had their own families now, and were writing finis to the old relationships.

Thank God, not all sons behave this way and not all daughters-in-law make their husbands stop seeing their parents. In fact, most sons and daughters-in-law are normal, friendly, respectful, and eager to please both sets of in-laws.

But there seem to be an increasing number of sons who, once they get married, decide that they want nothing else to do with their parents. My own estimate is that this is the case about ten percent of the time. Ten percent may not seem a very big rate. But it would be awfully big if we said one out of ten persons now will have lymphoma or one out of ten persons will die at the hand of an assassin. In those cases, even one out of twenty would be a horrible percentage.

Mickey Spillane, the inventor of the hard-boiled detective story, once said that he wrote the kind of books he wanted to read. Ive written this book because I wanted to read one like it and couldnt find one.

I was surprised that no one had ever written anything about lost sons. But I think I know the reason. Its because most parents think their case is unique. In fact, many of them are ashamed to tell anyone that their sons wont see them or come to visit with the grandchildren because they think it makes them sound like monsters. The majority of their friends dont have this kind of problem, so they dont feel secure enough to announce that they do.

Its the same as with parents who have Downs syndrome children. Until a few years ago, many parents of Downs children quietly placed them in special homes without telling anybody. There is more openness about such things now because there has been more publicity about them. And in a few years there will be more openness about parents whose sons have forsworn them after getting married, because the evidence will show that parents are seldom responsible for this kind of behavior.

Thats part of my mission in writing this book. I want to say to parents who see the title on a bookstore counter and quietly buy a copy to read in the privacy of their homes, You dont need to be ashamed of the fact that your son treats you this way. Its a lot more common than you think. In fact, you yourselves probably know at least one or two couples whose son does this and they simply havent told you about it, for the same reason that you havent told them. Theres nothing wrong with either of you, and you didnt do anything to cause what has happened. There are a number of couples stories in this bookpeople all the way from New York to California and Michigan to Louisiana. My husband and I have known all of them personallyor at least he has. He is a minister, and has pastored a lot of churches and counseled thousands of people. Some of the people whose stories are here came to talk to him about their problem with a son. In most cases, I knew them as well. I have changed their names and jumbled occasional facts about them in order to disguise their identities, because I didnt feel really right about exposing their problem in my book. But I am confident that they would all have wanted their stories told if they believed it would help someone else who is dealing with a sim- ilar situation.

I have even changed the names of my own son and his wife and children. Close friends will of course realize who they are, for we have not made a secret of the fact that we have lived with this painful situation for several years. But I wanted to shield them as much as possible, even though I feel that they have wronged us terribly by removing themselves and our grandchildren from the nexus of our relationships.