Dear Amy: Six years ago, my two adult stepdaughters confronted us with their “concerns” that their mother and I knew that our 17-year-old son smoked marijuana.

We did know about his pot use and clearly explained the steps we were already undertaking in getting him the help he had recently requested.

Our stepdaughters immediately alerted DCFS.

A conviction would have destroyed our professional careers and seriously damaged our family’s future.

Agonizing months later, our case was dismissed, and the charges were characterized as unfounded.

This betrayal led to familial estrangement from the stepdaughters.

Our now 23-year-old son is doing well, and my wife understandably wants her offspring back in our lives.

I have encouraged my wife to pursue reconciliation. I do not share this interest. (Independently, neither does our son).

My wife is pressuring me to partake in the perilous voyage of reconciling with her daughters. I would prefer being keelhauled.

Please share your reflections on this possible mission impossible.

– Dismayed

Dear Dismayed: Alerting DCFS set in motion a very serious set of circumstances for your family. From your narrative, this choice to “hotline” you seems extremely overblown; I wonder what else your stepdaughters might have seen or perceived that doesn’t fit into your narrative, and if your son was taking risks that are genuinely more alarming than that of a teenager smoking pot.

The only way to find out about their motivations and to describe the impact on you and your family is to communicate with these women.

People do sometimes issue false reports to DCFS in order to punish family members; this is a very serious issue in that it breaks apart families, and also absorbs time and resources that would better be used to investigate actual situations that involve at-risk children.

I hope that in this case your adult stepdaughters were overreacting and naïve about the impact of their choice.

It’s good that you are encouraging your wife to reconcile with her daughters; she should not force you to join her immediately, but I hope you would be open to a gradual thaw. Much of what happens next rests on the behavior of these women; obviously they owe you an apology and an understanding and sincere reckoning concerning the impact of what they set in motion.

You can email Amy Dickinson at [email protected] or send a letter to Ask Amy, P.O. Box 194, Freeville, NY 13068.