My Sister-in-Law’s Reaction to My Miscarriage Was a Gut Punch. And Now It’s Time for Her Baby Shower.

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My sister-in-law, who’s 27, is expecting her first baby with her husband. She is understandably very excited. However, ever since she announced her pregnancy (at her own sister’s baby shower, which I [age 23] always understood to be a social no-no?), that’s all she can talk about. My husband thought I was kidding when I told him so, so I counted the number of times she talked about something other than her pregnancy at Thanksgiving. It was four. Over the course of eight hours. Everything was about her pregnancy. (“Does anyone want a drink?” “Well, I can’t have one, because I’m pregnant!” Or, passing through a hallway: “I hope I can squeeze through here, since I’m so pregnant!”) While I found this to be mildly amusing, if a little irksome, it didn’t really bother me.

At Thanksgiving, I was pregnant too (with our second child), but only in my first trimester. Then, five days before Christmas, I lost my baby. It was a scary, isolating experience because I had to go to the ER alone—my husband had to stay home with our son. We told my husband’s family ahead of their Christmas celebration about what had happened, so when we arrived, my sister-in-law told me, “I know EXACTLY how you feel. My baby’s heart rate was a little high at my appointment this morning, so they hooked me up to all these monitors, and I thought I was going to lose him! But I guess I just had too much apple juice.” Then she went on and on about how terrified she was to be so closely monitored, and that she was convinced she was going to lose her baby. I excused myself and tried to avoid being near her for the rest of the day, but she kept finding me and trying to talk to me about her pregnancy and “near miscarriage” for the rest of the day. I’m hoping it’s just obliviousness on her part, but I’m still really hurt. Her baby shower is in a few weeks, and I’m dreading it. I guess my questions are: Am I a bad person to be holding onto this? And would it be wrong for me to skip out on the shower? I just don’t know if I can handle a party that’s about her pregnancy when she’s already made every recent family gathering about that very topic.

—Grieving and Hurt

Dear Grieving and Hurt,

Can we untangle these two threads? You’re grieving, and your sister-in-law was oblivious to that and seems to be lacking the empathy gene. Her behavior at the Christmas gathering was dreadful: equating her experience with yours was very, very wrong. You are not a bad person because you are still upset and hurt (and angry, I should think) three weeks later. It’s understandable. Your sister-in-law showed a remarkable absence of compassion.

And perhaps this lack of compassion is tied inextricably to her self-centeredness, her cluelessness, and her failure to attend to social cues and rules. But I think it would be helpful to you in the long run if you could decouple what reads to me as casual cruelty from the delight she is taking in her own first pregnancy. That is: See if you can give yourself the space to understand her joy, even if the repetition of her performance of that joy is boring or annoying you and others. Try to do what she cannot, and empathize with her.

But perhaps not right now. I don’t think skipping her baby shower, when you have just miscarried, is a bad idea. Don’t do it to punish her (either for being so self-centeredly joyous and excited or for what happened at Christmas). Do it because (if) it will be painful for you to participate in a celebration of an impending new life right now. Write her a thoughtful note—let her know that you’re feeling too sad for any sort of party right now, and that your grief over your own baby makes it difficult to participate in a party for anyone else’s … but that this doesn’t mean you aren’t glad for her—and send a gift. (If she takes offense at this, don’t rise to the bait. It’s not your problem.) I send you my very best wishes. Take the time you need to heal.

Submit your questions to Care and Feeding here. It’s anonymous! (Questions may be edited for publication.)

Dear Care and Feeding,

For Christmas, my sister bought my 3-year-old twins three of those customizable kids’ books where they just replace the kids’ names and skin tones and minor details of appearance. She bought one book about siblings and one book for each kid. The kids don’t particularly care for the individual books but they love the book “about them” together, which mentions their names (repeatedly). The customization options were limited, so the children in the book look nothing like mine outside of having the right skin tone and hair color and wearing glasses, but the book still enthralls them. It doesn’t help that my sister insisted her gift was from Santa, so the book is super special. Both twins are obsessed with that and demand I read it to them every day. It’s pretty long, so they often get bored with it halfway through, but if I stop reading when they’ve clearly stopped listening they get upset. I like reading with them and I think it’s important to do it, but reading the same book over and over again is going to drive me insane. Is there any way to get them interested in a new book, or do we just have to stick with this until it runs its course?

—Disgruntled Dad

Dear Disgruntled Dad,

I’ve got news for you: Being the parent of kids this age means reading the same book over and over again until you’re reading it to yourself in your sleep. It’s just how it is. At 3, kids get obsessed with a particular book and want to hear it and look at its damn pictures every day (I’m shocked that they’re not asking for it more than once a day. Consider yourself lucky). The fact that this particular one claims that they themselves are the children going on the adventures described therein is gravy—it’s not a requirement for their fixation.

So here’s the good news: If you make sure your kids have lots of books on their shelves, plenty of their own and stacks of them from the library—good books, fun and funny and charming and exciting and interesting ones—and the one your sister bought them isn’t the only one you read to them, they’ll eventually move on to something else. My guess is that they get bored halfway through not only because this book is long. It probably isn’t very good, and the only thing about it that’s enthralling is that it seems to be about them (and that alone won’t carry them all the way through). Stock your house with lots of different kinds of good picture books, from Albert’s Alphabet by Leslie Tryon to Eric Carle’s Very Little books. Include some about siblings (from Alphonse, That is Not OK to Do by Daisy Hirst, to What Brothers Do Best by Laura Numeroff). You can even throw some books about twins into the mix. (And you can never go wrong with Tomie dePaola, so I’d pick up a copy of Strega Nona and the Twins for sure.)

The more books your kids have around, the more books they’re likely to get interested in. But reading the same one(s) day after day for days or weeks (or even months) at a stretch is part of parenting territory. Get comfortable in it.

· Missed earlier columns this week? Read them here.
· Discuss this column in the Slate Parenting Facebook group!

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I are expecting a baby soon and we need to talk about discipline. I just don’t know how. We were both spanked as kids, though I only know that he was because he has mentioned it in passing as if it was no big deal. To me, it is a huge deal. To me, it is not just physical but sexual abuse of a child. I know people may scoff at this and say it is attributing adult ideas to a child, but let me tell you, it is not. At 5 years old, I knew that watching other kids get spanked gave me butterflies in my stomach. By 7 or 8, I was confused as to why spankings were horrifying and at the same time felt weirdly good. It made me ashamed of my body. At 10, the butterflies moved south and I experienced my first orgasm at the hands of my parent. (I didn’t even know for five more years what an orgasm was.) I have never been able to speak about this to anyone. I am appalled, ashamed, and outraged—I feel violated down to my soul. I have blocked out as many of the memories as I possibly can, but even hearing my husband say the word “spanking” makes me want to die inside. I assume I was either born with a fetish or developed one early, but I have never explored or even spoken of it as an adult. Like many survivors of sexual trauma, I just can’t. Therefore, my husband has no idea how I feel about spanking—not as a sex act, and not as a disciplinary method. How do I get him to agree that he will never, ever do this to our child without having to rip open wounds that I cannot face even 25 years later?

—It Happened to me and I’m Not Fine in Florida

Dear It Happened to Me,

There are two separate issues here; they should be dealt with individually. Telling your husband that you will not allow physical punishment to be a part of your child’s life does not have to include disclosure of something you’re not ready to talk about. Hitting a child is indefensible. Parents who hit their kids often do so in the sincere belief that it will teach them the difference between right and wrong and thus discourage misbehavior; they may also do it impulsively, out of frustration, when a child is being “difficult.” Either way—and even if the spanking is followed up with a calm and measured lecture that purports to explain it—spanking does not teach children the difference between right and wrong but only that it’s crucial to be what their parents consider “well-behaved” when the threat of a parent’s violence is present—and, indeed, that violence is an appropriate, acceptable response to behavior one dislikes or disapproves of. And it is humiliating and deeply upsetting for children, even those who grow up, like your husband, to tell themselves it was no big deal. For some people, this is a way of coping with it. It doesn’t work for all of us, and it’s no excuse to perpetuate abuse.

There are plenty of alternatives to corporal punishment. Cornell University offers a fact sheet that lists suggestions; the Center for Parenting Education has suggestions too. I think it’s a good thing you and your husband are talking about this now. There are many parenting decisions that can be debated and worked out, and many that you’ll agree on in advance … and then change your minds about once faced with the reality of an actual child. But some should not be open for debate. This is one.

As to the question of what you have dubbed a fetish: Since you have worked hard to “block out” these memories from your childhood that planning for your own child has triggered, I would strongly suggest that you seek professional help. Not to “cure” you of a fetish, but to help you process and eventually make peace with your childhood. Ignoring it will not make it go away.  Whether you will later choose to explore (or even simply talk about) this with your husband is up to you—but it would be worth taking the time to understand and come to terms with it first, given how distressed you are.

Dear Care and Feeding,

I am in the process of adopting the toddler of a relative who died suddenly in an accident. The child’s father is uninterested in his child and is agreeable to the adoption. My partner and I already have two children. My late relative gave her baby a common name with a very unconventional spelling. When people see it written, they tend to assume it is a typo or pronounced like a different name altogether. Think along the lines of Isia pronounced as Isaiah, Jena pronounced as Jenée/Janay, or Eli pronounced as Ellie. (Online commenters, please don’t make disparaging comments about my relative as a parent based on her name choice. She was a devoted mom.)

We are debating whether we should legally change the spelling to the conventional version. I know people with unconventionally spelled names who find it annoying, and when I search online about what it’s like to have a name with a very unusual spelling, the experience reported tends to be negative. Changing the name would definitely save the child a lot of hassle over the course of their life. But on the other hand, this is the spelling their late mom chose. Are we awful for even considering this? If we change the spelling, will our adopted child someday be grateful they don’t have to constantly correct people? Or will they be upset that we severed a tie with their mother? Or won’t they care much at all? I would appreciate some feedback and perspective on this.

—Spelling Dilemma

Dear Spelling,

I don’t think you’re awful for considering it, but I also think you have bigger fish to fry. This child is starting over with a new family, with two built-in siblings and brand new parents; the child’s mother has died suddenly and unexpectedly—the father has no interest in being one. This is a lot. How to spell your child’s name is the least of it, and I’m guessing that your focus on this is a form of displacement activity.

Nevertheless, you asked the question. So here’s my thinking. This child is too young to know or care about the spelling of their name. Go ahead and change it if you’re worried that the unusual spelling will cause problems. When your child is old enough to know how to spell, you can let them know how their name used to be spelled, and also why you simplified it. As they get older still, they may choose to experiment with the alternative spelling (lord knows, most kids do experiment with various forms and spellings of their names in middle or high school). And later still, they may decide they want to honor their mother by using the spelling she chose. But that will be their choice, as I think it should be. Your job right now is to make your adopted child’s life as easy for them as possible under the circumstances—and to fill that life with love.

—Michelle

My father passed away recently after a prolonged illness. He had been sick for the entirety of my 6-year-old’s life. While he couldn’t play or be active with my son, they enjoyed talking and sharing cookies when my son would visit with my parents. I had warned my son in advance that Grampy was going to pass, and my son responded without emotion.