Begin With A Basic Understanding
Dear Miss Manners: Am I being a fuddy-duddy, uncharitable grandfather because my 22-year-old granddaughter has come to live with me (I’m almost 70) to get a start in business?
She did not bring her own toilet articles, uses my shampoo and comb, washes in the kitchen sink, dishes there or not. Says I’m a very negative person and like things too neat. Sleeps wherever she plunks herself, is hungry when nothing is prepared and full when a decent meal comes off the stove.
I have very bad arthritis and heart problems. Why is she antagonizing her grandfather in everything she does? Am I just set in my ways, a senile man using bad manners?
Are my manners out of line when I attempt to correct her and expect her to pay for her own things? (She found a job within two weeks and bought a car.)
Gentle Reader: Now, now. You two roommates have got to figure out a way to get along. Living together could be a very nice thing for you both, emotionally as well as practically, but you must first agree on how.
Preparing such an agreement should be the first step of forming any new household, from bridal couples to computer-matched groups. (When someone enters a household through birth, its parents have to speak for the new arrival as well as themselves - as in, “All right, I’ll provide the meals, but if I give you a few weeks’ grace period, you have to promise to learn to sleep through the night.”)
Each person makes a good-faith effort to provide a maximal list of what he or she would be willing to contribute, and a minimal list of what he or she really can’t bear. Chores don’t necessarily have to be divided evenly, and requests may be idiosyncratic rather than strictly reasonable. But the terms must be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. If this turns out to be impossible, the arrangement cannot be made to work through daily quarrels.
In your case, the first rule Miss Manners would set is to ban all generational insults. (Not that there is another category of insults Miss Manners likes better. There is nothing like “You’re a negative person” for poisoning a household - unless it is “Why are you doing everything you can to antagonize me?”)
If you are getting that senile fuddy-duddy stuff from your granddaughter, you had best ask her to stop, possibly in exchange for refraining from talking about “young people today.” If you are volunteering it in anticipation - well, then, please stop. Miss Manners can’t bear to live with it.
In setting other rules, please try to explain politely what you can tolerate and what you cannot. Your granddaughter’s combing her hair in the sink over the dishes, if Miss Manners understands you properly, would be high on your annoyance list. No doubt the young lady has some requests of you.
Because you are the grandfather, and because it is your household she has entered, you do get certain extra privileges. But child rearing - attempting to impose routines, such as mealtimes, to which she has not agreed, or offering regular doses of unsolicited advice - is not among them.
Perhaps you could leave her a nice little snack for when she feels like eating, rather than preparing an entire meal she doesn’t want and being hurt when she doesn’t eat it. Then she might take you for a nice little spin in that new car - perhaps stopping off so that you can pick up the present of her very own bottle of shampoo.
xxxx
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate