Dear Queenie,
My mother has never liked my wife and has always been mean to her, even telling other people bad lies about her. I have tried to get her to be polite to my wife at least, but she doesn’t listen to anything I say, she just says I don’t see the real person my wife is. Now our grownup son is getting married and my mother has told his fiancée all sorts of lies about my wife and the poor girl is already scared of her soon-to-be mother-in-law.
What’s worse is that my father is very sick and my mother doesn’t tell us how he is doing or answer our phone calls to ask about him. We only found out about it from someone else in the family long after it happened.
Queenie, my mother seems lost to us, but how can we keep in touch with my father?—Worried son
Dear Son,
Arrange with some other member(s) of your family, especially your father’s relatives, to keep you up to date on his condition, and to help you visit him if possible. They can also tell your son’s fiancée the truth about your wife.
As for your mother, there is not much, if anything, you can do about her behaviour. To be honest, she seems to be at least a little bit mentally unstable.
