Letter #1  LOL!  I couldn’t think of anything nice, either.  What can you really say?  I guess I might say, "Momma Rex, that approach used to work just fine, but imagine my shock when I went to college out in the real world and found out that the quality women I met want children to take care of later in the marriage, not at the point of engagement.  Can you imagine???  You better get to work.  I have to get to class." 

I so agree with you!  My mother is toxic.  People have probably seen similar comments from me about her.  I don’t think avoidance is the answer because he’ll still call and you’ll still get a little guilt or wistful pang.  I finally wrote my mother a letter six or so years ago when she tried, again, to invite herself out to Texas, that if she weren’t my mother I would not have someone like her in my life, and that because my parents were together, I would be polite as necessary, but was ending the relationship.  Dad could come, but she could not.  Dad never did because he was… dad, bless him.  For whatever reason, she had been operating under the delusion that regardless of our childhood, since we were all grown we could now be best friends.  That’s not how it works.  

I continued to talk to dad, but just not as much because I didn’t want to run the gauntlet of mom to get the phone to him and have her constantly kibitzing in the background.  When he had bypass surgery in 2007, I couldn’t get out to visit, but I had the best ever conversation with him when he was in rehab.  Nothing spectacular, but just he and I because mom had gone home.  And he said he understood my sparse contact and it was okay.  

He died suddenly just last November and I was as nice as I could be when I went out to the funeral, but there was mom doing her "just us girls now" and thinking we’re really going to be all buddies while she drove everyone stark raving mad with her drama seeking, as if her husband dying wasn’t enough.  I had planned to stay a few days, but I literally fled the next morning.  After she threw a fit in voicemail because I hadn’t called her back within about six hours of her first voicemail (left my phone at home), I had to get my sisters to intervene to let her know that nothing is changed and she needs to get used to the idea that we’re never going to see each other again.  There are no more calls.  Just blissful silence.  

You need to say it out loud and bluntly.  Hinting and avoiding isn’t really fair to either one. 

Count me in.  The USA is devolving into a society where the nosiest little groups are mistaken for a majority.  And the ignorance is astounding!  It ranges from the "evolution is only a theory" camp, where they obviously don’t know that the use of "theory" in science is well beyond that of a "wild guess."  And then the "I didn’t evolve from a monkey!"  No one said you did.  Someone almost as ignorant misstated it and you’re repeating it without investigation.  I said something to one of the religious ladies at work (whose pastor husband was arrested after getting caught up in TWO interest stings trying to hook up with 14-year-olds, but I digress) about Texas being so oil rich being because millions of years ago it was a swamp.  She chuffed, "I don’t think so," as if it was I who didn’t know what "fossil fuel" means.  I almost said, and wish I had, that I thank goodness the world is limited to her level of understanding.

This is what film distributors kow-tow to?  I’m finding it a little bit frightening.