Mother in Law: When to be a fixer, a fighter or a therapist

I live in a house full of disputes. After 20-odd years of finding me unfathomable, my husband is now entering an era of his life in which he is finding, more and more, that both his daughters are unfathomable too. Presumably, this will get worse if I reach the perimenopause as they get deep into their teenage years. Of course, I deal with disputes all day long. We all do, right? In my experience, non-contentious clients are the worst. Hell hath no fury, for example, like a house mover. 

There have been a few disputes at home recently that I can use as examples, not only for my husband, but also for us as lawyers, in how disputes can be handled.

The first incident involved Deceptively Angelic-Looking Child (DALC) 1 and DALC 2, who, like many girls their age, are obsessed with their hair. More specifically, the obsession is that when it is tied back, it should be so smooth and slick that an onlooker can see their face reflected in it. They have various products to assist, including something that looks like a stick deodorant and something that looks like a mascara wand, but the most important is the slick back brush. They each have one, but on this occasion, DALC2 was using DALC1’s slick back brush because she couldn’t find hers. 

This was the dispute. DALC1 screamed that we should punish DALC2, who took the brush against DALC1’s clearly articulated wishes that she should not do so. DALC2 thought that perhaps DALC1 needed a lesson in sharing and should be punished for being so mean. What you should also appreciate about disputes in this house is how high-pitched they are. 

While my husband held his head in his hands, I used my encyclopedic knowledge of where every item in this house is, took slick back brush 2 to DALC2, returned slick back brush 1 to DALC1, and peace was immediately restored. In my opinion, no punishments were needed. 

Sometimes, even litigators can just resolve problems. I certainly wish more did, rather than committing to dying on hills with their clients. If you are litigating against me, I promise I will always be prepared to work with you to solve a problem as quickly and easily as possible.  

The second one involved DALC1 and a friend. Bear in mind throughout what I am about to say that DALC1 is 13. 

The friend texted DALC1 (or sent her a ‘snap’, heaven forbid they might actually talk) and asked if DALC1 could stop ‘commenting on her appearance’ because it made her feel really bad about herself. DALC1 lays on my bed most mornings while I’m getting dressed and comments aplenty, so I immediately felt for this girl, and was glad she had been honest. I told DALC1 to apologise. Obvious, right? 

Well, apparently DALC1 has commented twice on this girl’s appearance. Once to quietly tell her she had food in her teeth, and once when her glasses had smudged her concealer. DALC1 was not about to apologise for this and smelled a rat. I briefly continued to advise her to apologise, before realising that: (a) I should trust DALC1; and (b) I was really proud of her for standing up for herself. Turned out this was a power play by the girl to make DALC1 less well-liked in the friendship group. DALC1 now has a new friendship group, by choice. Standing your ground is always an option; the point is to recognise when it is and when it isn’t important to do so.

The third situation is as follows. We have had a number of occasions recently when one of our daughters has thought the world was ending. Funnily enough, one was hair-cut-related and one was friendship-related. But I’m talking World Ending. Extreme amounts of tears, not eating, and sleeping in our bed. My husband has been left flailing again, being hit with a barrage of feelings – more than he has ever expressed in his lifetime – but unable to provide solutions. Why do they keep telling him their feelings when he can’t do much about them? 

In these cases, the point is to listen and validate those feelings. That’s all they want. And that can also go a long way with clients. You might be about to tell them they don’t have a good case, but having you acknowledge that they have been through something incredibly tough, that their neighbour/employer/brother is definitely a wrong ’un, and ‘it’s not you, it’s them’ that’s the problem is enough. 

So, in life and in our jobs, we need to know when to be a fixer, a fighter or a therapist. And how do we know which one to choose? Surely that’s easy: we listen first, we fix if we can, and only after we’ve exhausted those two options do we fight.  

Some facts and identities have been altered in the above article