The Luv Doc: Cool Mom Blues

Dear Luv Doc,

After going away to college and getting my master’s degree on the East Coast I moved back to Austin and ended up running into a guy I was friends with in high school. We started dating and now, three years later, we are engaged. Life is perfect except for one thing: his mother. I can’t stand her. Oddly enough, I have known her almost as long as my fiancé. When we were in high school, she was the “cool mom” who let the kids drink at her house. I thought she was so fun back then, but now I realize that she is a vapid, attention-craving narcissist and alcoholic who barely parented her children at all. My fiancé is her oldest and has basically taken care of his younger brother and sister since as long as he can remember. They both struggle financially, have mental health and addiction issues, and they both still live at home. He gets dragged into their drama on a regular basis and it almost always has something to do with his mother, who still regularly throws parties with random sketchy people coming over. Sometimes there are fights. Sometimes the police get called. It’s all craziness and my fiancé has to deal with it plus working a tough job and planning a wedding. I get really frustrated by how she treats him and end up saying mean things about his mother and he ends up getting upset with me. All of this leads me to wonder: Can our relationship survive her? What will she be like as a grandmother? I know it’s complicated. I’m amazed that my fiancé still loves his mother, but he is very loyal – even though he complains about her more than I do. I know. It’s complicated, but I get so mad that he lets her get away with so much. I want to protect him, but he gets angry when I try. How can I learn to just let it go?

– Cool Mom Blues

My, my, my, what a rich and interesting tableau! I think these days it’s pretty much common knowledge that cool moms … let’s not be sexist, cool parents in general … are just a bit too thirsty. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re going through a nasty divorce and you desperately want to keep your kids from abandoning you so you let them run absolutely amok whenever they’re around, but that thirstiness needs to end there. No need to get other people’s children involved. You might think you’re playing chess by getting your children’s friends to like you so your children will like you by association, but all you’re really doing is showing your children’s friends what a huge pushover you are. Pretty soon you find yourself making a late-night beer run for your daughter’s boyfriend Cody who came over “just to chill” while your daughter was away at basketball camp. What in the ACTUAL FUCK are you doing?

Don’t get me wrong, I am deeply grateful for my friends whose parents thought it was a safer move to let their kids get drunk at home rather than let them test out inebriation in the cruel, unsupervised, Lord of the Flies environment of teenage keggers. I look back fondly on the time I got so wasted I fell off a barstool in my friend Tony’s trailer with not one, but both his parents in attendance. I was just shy of 15, which makes me sound like a character from Demon Copperhead, but this was Oklahoma, which makes even rural Virginia look like a goddamned country club. Needless to say, Mickey’s Big Mouths are sort of the perfect trailer park beverage: They’re easy to get into and you get a lot of bang for your buck.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to choose our parents, and some of them are really shitty. You think Eric, Ivanka, Tiffany, Don Jr., and Barron aren’t permanently scarred? What about Elon Musk’s 30-odd bastards? No amount of billions can undouche those daddies. Some people are just born to parent their parents. When you invest that amount of caretaking and worry, it can be really traumatizing. It can also even feel like love – indistinguishably so, but here’s the deal: That’s not for you to work through. You probably hit the lottery parentwise. As hard as it may be, you need to allow your fiancé to have his feelings. He earned them. Ideally you will support him through what will undoubtedly be some tough times. Just make sure you’re up to it. Some cranky old alcoholics still manage to make it to a very ripe old age.

This article appears in June 6 • 2025.