Help! My Child Is Doing An Oppression On My Constitutional Rights!

Carolyn Hax, Washington Post,23 January 22:

Dear Carolyn: My daughter is a beautiful ballet dancer. She is an adult. She gets very angry if I send pictures or short videos to friends and family.

We allowed her to leave high school to follow her dream. We fully funded her dance education and living expenses. People ask me for recent pictures. She has forbidden me to send anything.

Do I have any freedom of speech? She posts on social media so it’s in the public domain, as are her performances. It’s just me that’s not allowed to share. - Proud Mom Who Can’t Share Her Joy

Dear Proud Mom,

One can only imagine a mother’s profound heartbreak at discovering her beautiful young daughter hates the United States Constitution and all of its glorious protections, such as your personal and specific right to share information about her with strangers against her express wishes.

Certainly if your daughter were less attractive, or perhaps a shitty dancer, her unpatriotic loathing for your hard-won American freedoms would be tolerable, understandable, or even excusable — but knowing that a pretty and talented person has so eschewed the entitlements secured for us by our brave servicemembers, well! America isn’t the only country on earth with a vast network of military bases operating on the soil of other sovereign nations so that you can’t send your barista 400 photos of your grown-ass child.

But putting aside your daughter’s revulsion for American values, does she not understand that child-bearing and -rearing is a transactional relationship in which parents are entitled to do anything they want forever, as long as they pay for some shit? What is a mother’s love if not the ability to steamroll another person’s boundaries forever without apology no matter what because they have to like it or else they hate you and want you to be sad on purpose?

One wonders where your daughter could possibly have picked up such a distaste for your enthusiastic, unconditional lovingkindness. There is but one way to take pride in another person’s achievements, and that is to send one’s own private photos of that person to anyone who asks. How could you ever experience a single solitary moment’s joy if your friends and family discover that your daughter has her own means of managing her personal and public information in the service of a career that is hers and hers alone? What if they begin to see your daughter as an autonomous person with whom they are free to communicate sans mother-interlocutor? What if you had to find your own interests and personality and live your life independently of your identity as a dance mom? The unthinkable horrors abound.

Of course, getting into petty interpersonal squabbles about whether your daughter is allowed to set boundaries with you — she isn’t, obviously, but here we are — will be a fool’s errand. Instead, you’re better suited to retaining quality legal representation in order to regain the freedom of speech that your daughter has denied you. There are any number of fine constitutional scholars out there who would be happy to assist you.