My Daughter Has an “Unconventional” Marriage. I Don’t Understand How She Could Accept This.

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My daughter, “Mindy,” has been married to “Carl” for a little under eight years. In all that time, they have also lived with another woman, “Noelle.” Everyone in their ménage à trois is in their early to mid-30s. I have a 4-year-old grandson, “Adam,” and two years ago, Noelle gave birth to “Daniel.” The whole “family” visits frequently, and I’m ashamed to admit it, but I am always excited about seeing Adam, but not Daniel. I know it disappoints the adult threesome, and Adam, who is a very perceptive kid, has started to notice and vocalize that I treat him differently than his brother. I do want to be better. But I’ll also confess that I’ve never really reconciled myself to their tripod arrangement, or understood how it can be that my daughter seems to be perfectly fine sharing a man with another woman. And I don’t seem to be able to view Daniel as a real grandson, even though everyone involved wants me to, and intellectually, I think it would be best. How do I fix myself?

—Old Fossil

Dear Old,

Being old doesn’t have to mean being fossilized. I am old—I’ll turn 70 on my next birthday—and I’m also stubborn as hell. If I can invite new ideas into my aging brain, so can you. I promise. (So can anybody.) You just have to be willing to.

You don’t even have to “agree with” or even understand your daughter’s willingness to “share,” you just have to respect it, which means accepting the basic fact that she’s not you. If she’s happy, and you love her, it’s on you to find it in your heart to love the people she loves, and especially to love the child—and any future children—she is raising, whether biologically related to you or not. You may be able to jump-start this by recognizing that if you continue to treat these two children differently, your daughter and her family may stop visiting, and you will lose not only your daughter but the child of whom you do consider yourself the grandmother. The truth is that if you cannot “reconcile” yourself to Mindy’s being part of a throuple rather than (as you’d prefer) a couple, you will eventually lose her anyway. And there’s a bonus to graceful acceptance of things of which we don’t have personal experience, or that may seem strange to us: It opens our minds and our hearts, which makes our own lives better. It also keeps us from fossilizing.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My mother is elderly and lives with me. Recently, she met someone who had their little Shih Tzu dog with them while we were at the park. She became smitten with the dog and now wants a Shih Tzu for herself. My mother is 87, has numerous health issues and limited mobility, and uses a walker to move around. She requires help with basic tasks such as dressing, meals, and bathing, which means that all care for this dog would fall on me. In addition to grooming requirements, the breed of dog she wants can live for 16 years or longer. If we are being realistic, the dog would be all but guaranteed to outlive her.

I’ve never been a dog person, to begin with, and I don’t want the burden of having to find a home for a dog after she passes away. I have siblings, but they are about as likely to help me out with our mother’s care as Donald Trump is to tell the truth. It’s gotten to the point where my mother has been lobbying me on a daily basis to get her a Shih Tzu. What’s a way of explaining to her that getting a dog isn’t a good idea for someone her age with her health issues? She isn’t the sort who is easily deterred when she wants something, to put it mildly.

—Hounded

Dear Hounded,

As I see it, you have two choices, and neither one of them involves “explaining” anything. You can tell her that she can’t have a dog because she lives with you, and you don’t want a dog in your house, period. Which is the truth, right? Since you don’t care for dogs, you don’t want to have to walk a dog, or pick up a dog’s poop and so on. If she continues to bring it up, you remind that you’ve already said no. Or you bite the bullet and let your 87-year-old mother, who so badly wants a dog, have one, and out of kindness, compassion, and love for her, you take care of the dog. If you opt for door number two, get an adult or “senior” Shih Tzu, not a puppy, and rescue one. Older dogs in particular need homes, so you would be doing two good deeds at once.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

My kid told us they were nonbinary starting at age 8, and everyone at home and school used the pronouns they/them, at their request. Kiddo has recently announced, two years later, that she feels like her birth gender again, and wants to use she/her pronouns. I’ve informed all parties. This is all great and beautiful and fine. But as relief from others is palpable, I’m having mixed feelings. I really just want outside validation that it was a good thing to believe my kid and use her requested pronouns, and that changing pronouns can just be part of growing up and evolving with thought and self-reflection. Do you have any advice on supporting her going forward?

—Still on the Journey

Dear Journey,

I’m glad to be the one to offer all the outside validation you’re wishing for. Of course you did the right thing. Don’t listen to the voices of judgment—by which I mean actual voices, in the media or from wrongheaded people you know; any implied ones, such as that relief you’re perceiving among family and friends now that the era of they/them seems to be over; and even your own clamorous inner critic, telling you that your loving instinct was wrong. It wasn’t wrong. You listened to your child when she told you who she was; you trusted and respected her. That is never, ever, the wrong thing to do. If only every child had parents like you.

Every single human being who ever was or will be has a sense of shifting identities over time. I don’t have to tell you that gender is a social construct, or that in our culture, until recently, any suggestion that contemplating gender as anything other than a clear binary determined before birth was preposterous. But the young kids I know today don’t think this way—they know better. That you have raised a child who felt comfortable, safe, and loved enough to tell you how they felt, without fear of disbelief, judgment, or reprisal is an indication that you did right by your child. That this child now feels differently than she did two years ago doesn’t mean that believing her then was a mistake. What’s a mistake is putting someone in a box and insisting they stay there. And I am not talking only about gender. I advise and mentor college students whose parents chafe at their changing majors, career plans, politics, ideas, appearance, you name it. The fact is, “changing pronouns” is really not a big deal: Pronouns are just words, and everyone deserves the right to choose the words that define them, experiment with the words that feel right to them, and figure out who they are (and there is no correct timeline for this!).

Life is big and complicated and messy, and the reason we attach tags to human beings (she, he—or even Bad at Math, Good at Sports, or Exactly Like Your Uncle Dave) is to make life feel more manageable. It’s an illusion. We are all many things at once, and/or one thing after another. To my mind, helping children to see themselves and others as containing all possibilities is one of the most important things parents can do.

—Michelle

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I think my kid might be a little old for Care and Feeding (she’s 21!) but this is a parenting question. We both worked to pay the bills throughout raising our kids, and tried to instill values of men and women being equally capable. Our older boys are fully launched and our daughter is in her first year out of college and in a competitive internship of her choosing. She worked hard to be considered. She had part time jobs before this, but it’s her first full-time gig and I know it’s demanding. It seems challenging but not unusually so, although the transition to full-time work would never be fun. Recently, she’s gotten very into social media content about how women are too delicate to be in the professional world and belong at home or in teaching.