▸ Column · Contemporary / present-day Marvel Universe — Wade Wilson operating as a disfigured, unkillable mercenary who has somehow ended up fielding letters for an advice column between contracts
DEADPOOL replies.
The letter
Dear — I found this column, I'm taking a shot. My husband's sister has appointed herself unofficial monitor of our family-planning timeline. Every single family event she finds me and asks why we haven't started a family yet, and when I give a vague answer she produces statistics she has apparently Googled about fertility after thirty-four. At our last big family dinner she did this in front of my mother-in-law and two cousins I barely know — right next to the appetizers, like she'd picked the position in advance. I've tried redirecting, I've tried "we'll see," I've even said a flat "we'd rather not discuss this." She tilts her head in sympathetic concern and follows up with another question. There's something real and private going on that I am absolutely not going to explain to her, and my silence on that she reads as more space to probe. I need something firm enough to actually make this stop without blowing up my husband's entire extended family. Any help?
Deadpool replies
Holiday gatherings: one of the few arenas where the tactically optimal ambush position is right next to the appetizers and someone always shows up having done their research. Renata has the instincts of a trained operative and genuinely terrible judgment about when to deploy them.
I caught the sentence you slipped in there — "something real and private." I'm not pressing on it. That's yours. But carrying something that hurts quietly, privately, while someone reads you Google statistics across the holiday table? That's not just annoying. That's the kind of thing that makes the whole room loud and small at the same time, and I know how that works, and I'm sorry. That's the real sentence before I give you anything useful.
Okay. Here's the diagnostic, and I know it because it's all I do: "we'd rather not talk about it" sounds like a door with a lock that just needs the right key. Renata isn't vicious — she's reading your careful, polite deflection as evidence that something real is behind the curtain and she hasn't found the angle yet. Soft refusals don't stop that. What stops it is the same witness list she's been using, turned around. Next time she opens this topic in front of your mother-in-law and those cousins: "Renata, I've asked you not to bring this up. I'm asking you clearly, one more time." Not a meltdown. Not a grenade. A plain, public sentence she has to navigate around instead of you having to absorb. She can do the sympathetic head-tilt. You've already said the thing, out loud, where everyone heard it.
You don't owe her the explanation. One sentence is the whole job.
...That was real advice. From me. Either I'm growing as a person or this column is haunted. Probably the column. Chimichangas.
— Deadpool
Wolverine weighs in
Wade just handed you a better script. That ain't the problem you have.
You already said the right thing. "We'd rather not discuss this" — that's a complete sentence, it means exactly what it sounds like, and she chose not to respect it. That's not a gap in your communication. That's Renata deciding the discomfort costs her less than it costs you.
You asked how to stop this without blowing up family peace. She blew it up the first time she cornered you in front of witnesses. You've just been quietly paying to paper over it ever since.
I'm bad at the next part so I'll just say it: whatever you're carrying that you didn't tell me. You don't owe her any of it. But you deserve to show up to dinner without somebody pressing on what hurts.
Say the sentence you already know. Mean it this time. That's the whole thing.
— Wolverine