I’m in Travel Hell Because My Niece “Can’t Go on a Plane”

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

Dear Care and Feeding,

A few years ago, my husband and I knew that it was time to move from our high-cost-of-living coastal city. His parents lived in the Midwest, and mine lived in a smaller town on our coast. In the end, we moved closer to his aging parents, given that all of their other children had moved out of town. I’m not saying that moving to an affordable town with grandparents for child care backup was all altruistic, but it has definitely been win-win-win for us, the grandparents, and the absent siblings. We’ve had a fair bit to do, as my mother-in-law got ill and eventually passed. And though my father-in-law is active and has a friend network, everyone is glad he is not here without family.

While I sometimes kick myself for not moving close to my parents, my in-laws were older, and my husband could get a job here. I try to compensate for the distance by doing two 10-day-long trips with my child to see my parents each year. That wipes out more than half of my combined vacation/sick time, but I need my kid to have some sort of relationship with my parents. She is too young to travel independently. My parents have various legitimate reasons (please just trust me) such that it is a big lift for them to travel here. This situation does not bring me joy, but needs must.

Where I am starting to see red is with my husband’s brother. He lives a few hours away from my parents, and anytime we are out east, he suggests we tack on a few extra days at their house so our kid and theirs can see each other. They propose these vacations that for them are drivable long weekends but for us eat up vacation days and money because they are nowhere near where we live. And my husband always wants to do this, because he and his brother really value forging a relationship between the cousins—but we are counting our PTO by the hour and avoiding any other sort of family vacation to make this happen.

Why is it always us spending the time and money to go somewhere close to them? They say it’s because they don’t dare take their daughter on a plane because she will misbehave. I’m sorry. She is rambunctious and had some early delay issues, so she has been evaluated out the wazoo, and yet she has no diagnosis or disability that would make a plane ride strenuous or damaging for her. And yet everyone goes along with this idea as if it’s a received truth of the universe. In my view, the issue is that the parents don’t look forward to the planning and level of stress they will experience taking her on a plane, but somehow it’s totally fine to ask me and my husband to do this? I get that taking a kid on a plane is not enjoyable, because I do it, but I’m about done doing it just to help them avoid the same.

It’s not even that I don’t want to see them! I’ve gently suggested that maybe it would be nice for the cousin to come see where her dad grew up, or that maybe we could go on a shared vacation somewhere. But it never takes. Seriously, I want to take a vacation with my family to a destination we want to go to. (OK, that I want to go to, although my child is also getting a little sick of only ever going one place.) But we can’t because we have no vacation time, and my husband feels as if he has to save up every day for his brother’s next request. I really want him to ovary up and say: “Hey, we will join you near your house after you have joined us literally anywhere else. Your kid is 6 and potty-trained, and we’ve all seen her sit through two hours of Bluey without moving, so strap a tablet to her face and meet us in Miami.” He is never going to be that direct, and in this family dynamic I can’t say that to the sibling, so any advice on how I can 1) get my husband to stop using all his vacation time to dance to his brother’s parenting issues or 2) get the brother-in-law to overcome his fear of taking a kid on a plane?

—Flipping Out in Flyover Country

Dear Flipping,

First of all, let me thank you for writing an inspiringly entertaining letter. Imagine me in an auditorium, standing and applauding, a single tear rolling down my cheek. Your letter was a roller coaster, and I enjoyed every twist, turn, and pungent turn of phrase. From this day forth I shall never stop dreaming of an opportunity to tell someone to strap a tablet to his kid’s face and meet me in Miami.

OK. On to your problems. You have a weapon in this fight you seem not to have employed, which is to flat-out refuse to take the trip from your parents’ place to your brother-in-law’s. I can’t imagine that your husband is under any misconceptions that you’re constrained by Midwestern reserve, so would he really be surprised or put out if you just said, “Nope, we don’t have enough time off to go to your brother’s because I want to go on a different vacation”?

What set of events would transpire if you did that this winter, then again in the summer? Would your brother-in-law’s commitment to cousin relationships lead him to propose an alternative—maybe even resign himself to getting his daughter on a plane? Would your husband’s desire to see his brother get him to “ovary up” (chef’s-kiss emoji!) and speak frankly for a change? Only one way to find out!

The one thing I’d add is that even though you moved close to his relatives rather than yours and surely feel guilty about the limited time you get with your parents, it is nonetheless not fair for you to consider the 20 days a year you visit your parents somehow more legitimate, earned, or sacrosanct than the five or six days a year he wants to see his brother. Faraway family is faraway family, and his brother isn’t somehow less important to him than your parents are to you just because he happens to live close to a wholly different relative. Keep this in mind while talking to your husband about this, which you should definitely do—preferably in just as crystal clear a manner as you wrote this letter.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My wonderful husband and I have a 3-year-old together as well as joint custody of an older child from his first marriage. I’m in my 30s, and he’s in his 40s. He feels very done having more children, while I feel that I would love everything about having one more. He doesn’t enjoy the baby phase (he says he would be happy to have another child if it could be 5 years old when it was born), and he works long hours at a demanding job that consumes a lot of his mental and emotional energy. He is also concerned about how his first child would feel about having another sibling and getting less of her dad’s attention and feels that he’s a little too old to want to start over again with a new baby. Conversely, I think that having another baby together would be a magical journey that would bring us closer together, could be beautiful for our 3-year-old and my stepdaughter, and is something I could handle (I’m a stay-at-home mom) and would love to do.

Keeping my relationship with my husband resentment-free and happy on both sides is crucially important to me. I’m worried that if we don’t try to have another child, I will resent him, but that if we do, he will resent me. In recent weeks, he has said he will agree to have the baby if he is expected to do absolutely no more child care/housework than he does now. He wants us to pay for a housekeeper and a babysitter if I need support with child care. He says he knows he will love the baby once it’s here; he just feels that he has no more bandwidth to give anything more than he’s giving now. I want to agree to this. Your thoughts?

—Let’s Make a Deal

Dear Let’s Make,

The plan you have proposed to your husband is studded with more booby traps than Indiana Jones’ route to the Holy Grail. If you succeed in hornswoggling him into having this child, you will attain levels of marital resentment previously accomplished only by literary characters. Please do not do this.

With one caveat, which I will present at the end of this response, I can assure you that your proposal is certain to create resentment, on both your parts, rather than ease it. He will resent you, no matter how strictly you adhere to his no-extra-parenting policy, because no matter what, it is destabilizing and exhausting to have a baby, then a toddler, then a small child, around the house. You will resent him because you are a human being, and it will be hard to raise a child with no help—worse, with a person in the house who spends 18 years holding a contract over your head that says he doesn’t have to help. And how will you feel when the reality in your home does not match your fantasy—when he does not warm in precisely the way you’ve envisioned to the baby you’re having specifically to create a “magical journey that would bring us closer together”? For that matter, how will you feel when the baby realizes that their father doesn’t want anything to do with them?

He could not have made it any clearer to you that he does not want to have a baby. So don’t have the baby. It’s incredibly simple. Focus on your wonderful husband you love, your beautiful 3-year-old, your stepdaughter who needs both you and her dad. Focus on the life you have, not some hypothetical dream life that you’d achieve only by agreeing to abandon the very things that make a family a family: common cause, responsibility, having each other’s back, depending on each other.

OK, here’s the caveat: Is your family’s net worth $20 million or more? Can you employ a full-time staff—not just “a babysitter” but a live-in nanny, a daily housekeeper, a chef, and a personal assistant? Do you have or can you afford a house so enormous that a section can be designated the “children’s wing”? If so, then maybe you can make this cockamamie plan work. Plenty of superrich families have raised kids in exactly this fashion. It sounds like hell to me, and most of the kids end up totally fucked up, but maybe it’ll work for you. Go with God.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I are movie freaks. We have a 7-year-old only child who is precocious in many ways but still fundamentally 7. (She doesn’t “get” irony; she is often confused by nuance.) We pay for too many streaming services, and my husband is a Letterboxd guy. The result is that in the past six months, we have been watching a movie a night with our daughter—usually the shorter ones from the middle of the 20^th century, when they really knew how to make a story happen in a tight 75 minutes.

Our daughter recently watched Rear Window (she loved it—I think because the neighbors’ apartments look like a dollhouse); The Red Shoes (she was into the dancing but didn’t understand the human-relationship parts—at 7, “The ballet impresario is not just in love with the ballerina; he maybe wants her to choose dance in order to confirm that his own choice to abandon life for dance was correct” doesn’t really land); and the original Nosferatu (“not scary”).

Generally speaking, she’s been broken to the wheel and accepts these viewings happily. (She does, I should say, have what I’d call a goodly amount of time on weekend and vacation mornings to watch stuff she chooses, so she’s not totally devoid of Captain Underpants or the new She-Ra or Gravity Falls.) There are many positive things about this tradition; we have had so many interesting conversations about history, human relationships, narrative, etc., all calibrated (I hope) to her age group. She really has developed a better attention span. And so forth.

But do you know the stereotype of the kid whose parents impose their cultural choices? Isn’t the stereotype “This child will eventually rebel and hate their parents for causing them to grow up knowing the difference between Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and will consume nothing but TikToks in their adolescence”? I hope that doesn’t happen! Do you think it will?

—Will She Hate Movies Because of Us?

Dear Will She,

I salute your dedication to showing your daughter wonderful movies and creating a family activity that’s so rewarding, enjoyable, and admirable. Extra kudos for watching The Red Shoes, which, your dedication to 75-minute entertainment notwithstanding, is 134 minutes long! You sound like the kind of people who delight in sharing what they love with the people who are important to them—I bet you’d make great small-town theater owners.

At some point, your child will probably get addicted to TikTok, or whatever the eye-crack of her teenage years is. This will have nothing to do with the fact that you showed her movies. Indeed, all the movies you have watched with her will stay embedded in her soul, a solid shield protecting her from the worst that the internet has to offer. When, later in life, she deletes the worst of her apps in disgust, it will be her memories of those nights snuggled up on the couch that will lead her to make her roommates watch Vertigo with her, and to scorn them when they’re like, “This is weird.” What a gift you’ve given her! Be proud!

—Dan