Do You Still Talk to Grandma?: When the Problematic People in Our Lives Are the Ones We Love

Introduction

I am not the only person whose life has permanently changed since 2020. Actually, I don’t know anyone whose life has stayed the same since that fateful year. Everything stopped, slowed down, and sped up all at the same time. In this country, a summer of revolution was upon us, and after months in our homes that gave us the space and time to ask questions and have conversations that had previously (and seemingly eternally) been on the back burner, many of our individual lives mirrored the chaos and trauma of our communal life. Beyond the agony of watching America, in all of its glory, disappoint me yet again, I had to face another profoundly disappointing and disorienting reality.

In 2020, my parents decided to get divorced. Somewhere around half of all marriages take this path—a fact, I discovered, that doesn’t make it one bit easier for the people involved. My parents had been married for thirty-eight years, and as someone who grew up in the church with my parents, I saw them as models of what successful marriage looked like. They had led small groups for young married couples, mentored younger couples, spoken at marriage retreats—there was never a time when I thought divorce would be a part of my reality. And yet here I was, thirty-five years old, four years into my own marriage, and navigating this imminent, permanent, and wildly disorienting change in my family.

There were and still are many layers for me to understand and unpack. I was incredibly close to my parents. I joked that they were my roommates when I moved in with them during grad school and then again after I got engaged and was saving money for my wedding. I often referred to them as my best friends. I told them everything. I talked to my mom on the phone nearly every day, and for seven straight years my dad and I got coffee on Friday mornings. I knew them, I knew my place in their world, I knew the safety and connection that I had—and then I knew nothing. I was rattled. My inmost self, the person they had formed and loved and nurtured together, was thrown into unrest. These people I knew and loved, these people whose relationship I wanted and envied, these people I thought would never change were now changing, they were moving. I watched them as they seemed to stand on opposing sides of an impassable chasm. They said things about each other that I wouldn’t have believed they would ever say about anyone, let alone their husband or wife. It was as if my whole life I thought I was standing on solid ground, but I was actually standing on a spinning carnival ride that someone had finally switched on after thirty-five years. I was spinning and spinning, while the things I held close were ripped from my hands. I couldn’t compete with the force of this sudden movement.

By the time I found my footing, when I was finally able to get off the spinning carnival ride and look around, nothing was the same. On the walls of my mind that once held family photos, there were now blank spaces. In my calendar, the spots once reserved for time with my best friends were now available, but what could possibly fill them? I struggled to know all that I was feeling, but one thing I knew clearly, what was loudest and most palpable, was disappointment. I felt that they had let me down as a couple and as individuals. I felt that I had let myself down by allowing myself to feel secure in something unreliable.

As a strong Enneagram type seven—the Enthusiast, the person who is extroverted and optimistic, and who avoids situations of pain and loss—disappointment was not a feeling I was super familiar with, not like this. I didn’t know what to do with disappointment. Disappointment felt more personal and more intimate than anger. In retrospect, I understood why it hit so hard when my parents would tell me, I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. Well, the tables were now turned. But what was I to do with this massive disappointment that had to exist alongside massive love and care? I was disappointed, but I still loved them. I knew that they were and always would be my people, even while I also knew that things couldn’t and wouldn’t ever be the same.

I needed to learn how to live through a season of holding love and care and profound disappointment all at once. And I had no idea how to do that. I had more questions than answers, but over time (and with lots of help from my therapist), I knew a few things: I still wanted relationships with my parents, and I also needed space, needed to establish new boundaries, needed time to ask myself what the next season of my relationship with them could look like. So that’s what I did. I set boundaries, I took space, and I dove more deeply into my trauma than I would have liked. This process gave me the space to think through some big questions that I would definitely face again:

What do I do when the people I love disappoint me?

What kinds of wrongs call for cutting someone off versus setting new boundaries?

What kind of apology is acceptable, and how do I forgive?

How quickly can I expect people to change and grow?

What do I have to let go of to be in relationships with people who hurt me?

Do I truly want to let those things go?

The beauty of this situation with my family was that it was private. We were in the middle of a pandemic, people weren’t out and about, and my parents weren’t regularly on social media, so we had privacy. I was processing this experience with my wife, my siblings, and my closest friends, and I didn’t know what a gift that was until another disappointing experience not long after.

I met Rachel Hollis around 2014. We became friends long before either of us had any public professional success. Rachel and I had navigated all of the normal conversations that friends navigate. We met at the church where I was a pastor and where she and her family attended. This church was not accepting of queer people, and when I met Rachel, my wife and I (we weren’t married yet) were both pretty deep in the closet, and we knew that if we came out, we would lose whatever community we had built there. Of course, we eventually concluded that love and truth were worth the cost of whatever losses we would suffer. We came out knowing that we would lose friends, our church home, our community, and our jobs. All of that was true, but along the way, some people surprised us. Rachel was one of those people. As soon as she found out about Sami (that’s my wife) and me, she was on our side. When she found out that the church had rejected us, she and her family left that church, which was a socially and spiritually costly decision for them, so we had some solidarity. And it felt good for us to have friends on our side. Around a year after coming out and leaving the church, when we decided to get married, Rachel was at our wedding. We were with her through her time as a foster parent, and we have enjoyed many a happy hour together, gone on vacations, celebrated victories, put on events, and spent hours on phone calls and over drinks when her marriage was in trouble. We took a road trip to attend the funeral of our mutual best friend’s mom. We have been the kind of friends who do what friends do: We have lived life together. And in 2019 that life got a little more complicated. Rachel wrote a book that skyrocketed her career and fame, and a lot of things changed. Her life, including our friendship, became public. Small events in a hotel conference room turned into stadium tours, and road trips to Santa Barbara turned into private planes to New York to meet Oprah.

Then in March 2021, Rachel shared a video on social media about not wanting to be relatable. Everything about the video was a big miss, and it was clear that she was not self-aware about the meaning of her social location as a privileged, now wealthy white woman in her thirties. The video generated an enormous controversy. I saw the video before the masses had found it, and I called her and was like, Hey, what’s up with this video? It looks like you’re comparing yourself to Harriet Tubman and that’s insane. We chatted only for a moment because she was at Six Flags with her boys, so I told her to call me later. Well, by the time she left the park, shit had already hit the fan. But apart from the public nature of the scandal, for me, the reality was that I was once again facing deep disappointment in someone I loved deeply. If my recent experience with my parents had taught me anything, it was that just because there was a deep love and relationship, that didn’t mean the disappointment wasn’t real. So how to hold that tension? What was the magical equation I could use to calculate my relationships? Well, it turns out there isn’t one. I knew that as I stomped my way through the murky waters of my relationship to my parents, and now here I was again, knee-deep in murkiness with a friend. But unlike my private experience with my parents’ divorce, this disappointment also thrust me into the company of thousands of strangers who all had an opinion about what I was supposed to do.

I opened Instagram that night, and I had hundreds of direct messages—I have no idea how many because the notification just permanently said 99+ no matter how many messages I opened. It was like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole.

It was intense. Overwhelmingly, I was being pressured to make a public statement saying that what Rachel did was bad and, more specifically, that it was racist. We need to know where you stand. That’s what a lot of people were telling me, which was sort of funny. I thought, You want to know where I stand on what? On racism? I have literally spent a career creating conversations and content around understanding racism and developing an antiracist mindset. I have tons of content readily available on the Internet that would tell anyone who’s interested exactly where I stand on racism. What people were demanding of me felt like something else—it felt as if they were saying, All of us are against this person now, and if you don’t join us, you are not radical enough. I even had friends whom I hadn’t spoken to since college text me with questions like, What do you think about your friend Rachel?

It was rude. And yet, what was I supposed to think of my friend Rachel? Now, in addition to the questions I’d already been working through because of my parents, about love and disappointment and change and expectations, I was being confronted by another pressing question:

Do I have a responsibility to any of these strangers on the internet claiming to have all the right answers for me and demanding that I take action?

Of course I felt profoundly disappointed to see Rachel say and write what