I Have a Big Choice to Make About Christmas. Both Options Will Leave Me Stressed and Guilty.

Care and Feeding Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Basilico Studio Stock/iStock/Getty Images Plus. Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here. Dear Care and Feeding, I live in the U.S.. My divorced parents, now in their 80s, live in another country. My mother lives alone and has had several health issues. Neither of my parents will travel to the US, which is understandable due to the uncomfortable conditions, stress, and risk of getting sick with modern air travel. I don’t want my mother to be alone for Christmas, but traveling to her means paying for a hugely expensive ticket, missing out on Christmas with my husband and kids, and adding so much stress to my life at this time of year. How can I manage the guilt and resentment I feel about this situation? —Torn in Two Dear Torn in Two, I really do understand how challenging it can be to try to balance the needs of the family that raised you with the needs of the one you’re raising. You’re the only one who can decide what feels, if not right or ideal, most tolerable for you. Start simple: Ask yourself where and with whom you want to spend this holiday, given the choices. If you want to be with your spouse and children, which is only natural, don’t beat yourself up over it (we only get so many with our children at home with us for every holiday!). If it’s important to you to try to see your mom at this time of year, perhaps your whole family could visit her together some years, and other years you could try to see her around the holiday (if not necessarily on Christmas Day itself) on your own. I do think it’s OK to generally prioritize being with your own kids for holidays; that doesn’t make you a bad daughter! Short of moving one or both parents closer to you, or moving closer to them, there’s not much you can do to avoid tough choices like this over the next several years. Self-recrimination will make it harder than it was already going to be. Try to let yourself acknowledge how hard these decisions are, and how you really feel about your slate of less-than-ideal options, without blaming or punishing yourself—it’s a heavy-enough burden without the weight of unnecessary guilt. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don’t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Care and Feeding, My daughter, 9, is so mean to me. She criticizes my clothes, my hair, the fact that I don’t wear makeup. She has asked me why I don’t just “get on the shot” to lose weight like her friends’ moms (I’m overweight but healthy). She has told me to dye my hair (I have some greys). She looks me over when I’m leaving the house and makes judgmental faces. I remember being mean to my mom when I was a teenager, but I don’t remember being cruel like this—and definitely not when I was 9! I know I’m a “safe” place for my daughter to put these feelings, and I’ve been trying to ignore her comments, but they really hurt. I don’t know that I can bear years of this. How can I get my daughter to be nicer to me? —Hurt Feelings Dear Hurt Feelings, Being a “safe” parent for your child does not equal being her punching bag! Resist the urge to try to spin this as a sign of your daughter’s supposed trust in you. She’s not saying these things in order to get some big, important feelings off her chest. She is being unkind, and you need to let her know that’s not the kind of person she should be. On the one hand, it may not matter what her “reasons” are, since her behavior can in no way be justified. On the other hand, I suppose that understanding where all this is coming from might help you talk with her about it and nip it in the bud. Since all of her rude comments are aimed at your appearance, it’s probably worth having a serious talk with her about not only basic courtesy and kindness, but also the fact that it’s never OK to mock, judge, or attack anyone based on how they look. Yes, she’s hitting puberty, and is no doubt more concerned than she once was with how she looks, but she seems to be attaching an unhealthy amount of importance to your appearance—and maybe that of others as well. I also wondered, given your daughter’s relatively young age, whether she may be following the terrible example of anyone else in your family or household. This might not be happening in your case, but I’ve seen kids give one of their parents a hard time over something the other parent (or a grandparent, or somebody else they know) is always going on about. If your daughter is picking up on some type of criticism you frequently get from someone else, even if that someone else isn’t being quite as mean, that’s something you might need to address, too—with both your child and with the original source. Whatever the cause, you need to be honest and tell your daughter that she’s hurting your feelings, and she shouldn’t want to be hurtful. She’s being unkind, and she shouldn’t want to be unkind. It’s not OK for her to treat you, or anyone, like this, and just because you’re her parent doesn’t mean you don’t have feelings that matter. If she listens and begins to change this pattern, great. If not, go ahead and set some real consequences for her treating you badly, as I hope you would if she treated anyone else badly. Make it clear that she has the freedom to express her thoughts and say and do many things, but not to hurt or be unkind to others without getting checked. —Nicole More Parenting Advice From Slate I’ve been with my husband for nearly 14 years. When we first got engaged, my mother-in-law, “Barbara,” told me to my face that she’d been having a hard time accepting that her son was marrying me. Things have never gotten better. Never miss new Slate Advice columns Get the latest from Prudie and our columnists in your inbox each weekday, plus special bonus letters on Saturdays. Advice Family Kids