She Abandoned Her Daughter to Find True Love

In the best of all possible worlds you will be living your true love and fulfilling all of your adult responsibilities. You will never feel torn between the two because everything always works out for the best. In the best of all possible worlds you will have it all and will not make any compromises.

But, what if you do not live in an adolescent fantasy? What if you do not have a tenuous hold on reality? What if one day you have to choose between true love and adult responsibilities? Then what?

True love or parental responsibility? Choose one. You cannot have both.

Of course it does happen. In fact, it happened to Lady Diana Spencer, aka Princess Diana. When she was six years old Diana’s mother ran off with her true love, abandoning home and hearth and family. You can ask yourself how that one worked out for her daughter Diana… who later suffered from borderline personality disorder, one of whose primary characteristics is an exaggerated fear of abandonment. And yet, when you are a six-year-old girl and your mother abandons you, it isn't an exaggeration.

To be more timely, take the case of a married mother of an eight-year-old daughter. One day she falls in love with a man who is not her husband. It does happen. And let’s imagine that the price of finding true love in this new relationship is not merely abandoning her husband, but also abandoning her daughter. She has fallen in love who does not want the young girl around. What should she do? In this case she runs away with her true love... and is haunted with shame. 

Now, the young girl is grown up and her mother’s family wants to be in touch with her. The woman writes to Carolyn Hax at the Washington Post.

Here is the letter, from Anonymous:

When I was 8, my mom left my dad and me and married another man. That man didn't want me around, and so I saw my mom only three times between ages 8 and 18. I also very rarely saw aunts, uncles and cousins on my mom's side of the family.

Now that I'm an adult, I'm beginning to develop relationships with my relatives on my mom's side, but it's difficult because they seem so insistent on my forgiving my mom. For instance, I mentioned to my aunt that it was difficult not having my mom around, and she said, "You should be happy that your mom found a man who made her happy."

Do you think it's worth my pursuing relationships with my mom's side of the family? Or is it pointless when they act like my mom abandoning me at age 8 was a perfectly acceptable thing to do?

Consider it a moral dilemma. Should Anonymous forgive her mother? Should she act as though the behavior was acceptable? Which is more important, finding a man who made her happy or fulfilling her responsibility to a minor child?

Hax is properly outraged by it all and largely correct in her assessment.

I’m sorry, that’s just mind-blowing. You were 8!

The mama bear in me wants to tell you, no, it’s not worth pursuing relationships with people this bloody myopic. And cruel.

However, pointing out the absurdity of what they’re suggesting is worth a shot: “I want to be sure I have this right. I hear you say that I should be happy my mom traded me, at 8 years old, for a man. Is that what you meant?” Go into anthropologist mode, because you want this data.

So, Hax offers a few words that Anonymous might throw in the face of her mother’s relatives. One assumes, naturally, that these relatives have been put up to it by her guilt-ridden mother. And yet, forgiving what the British would call a bolter is not a job for Anonymous. 

You cannot undo child abandonment and neglect by pretending that it was alright to seek true love. And besides, one assumes that her father shouldered the task of bring her up by himself. Doesn’t she own him her loyalty? We would have liked to know what he thinks of this. 

Hax continues:

Remember, too: Your mom’s family might carry a lot of guilt around about this. Your mom is the one who left you, yes, but in doing so she forced all of her family to respond to her in some way — to deplore her actions, to distance themselves from her, to stay in touch with you on their own . . . or to welcome the new guy in all of his child-rejecting horror and act as if nothing was wrong. If they chose the last one, then you can expect they’ll spend a lot of their time with you trying to justify their own moral lapses — and what’s the weapon of choice for such people? 

These are not, in other words, good people. They are not only seeking absolution for the mother’s moral failings, but also for their own. Haven't they been going along with it for yo these many years? Now they seek absolution. They seek forgiveness, a forgiveness that Anonymous ought not to be offering at this stage. More so when these relations want Anonymous to act as though what her mother did was perfectly normal, thus, perfectly moral.

They are looking to salve their guilty consciences, and Hax is quite correct. An abandoned daughter is not responsible for pretending that her mother's moral dereliction was the right thing to do.