I think there are a LOT of people who mistake "honesty" for oversharing. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that sane parents are really NOT interested in the gory details of their kids’ sex lives, for example. I see a lot of letters from people asking if they should tell a spouse/significant other every screaming detail about their past connections and I guarantee that NO ONE wants to know where that mole was or about the time you did it on a carousel at the kiddie fair.

The tattoo is precisely the same thing. If someone is going to be harmed or upset with what you feel the need to share, then shut up about it already. The only people who need to know about the LWs ink are the ones that see her naked. Mom doesn’t qualify. 

Why advise her to tell? Are you saying that she should be punished for her ink by losing all contact with her mother permanently? There are some things that parents just don’t need to know, and that pretty much includes utterly harmless things like tattoos that are only visible when the person is naked. 

I bought myself a spectacular tattoo for my 45th birthday. It covers the lower part of my back below the shoulder blades and it’s gorgeous. Everyone who has seen it agrees. But then the people who I’ve chosen to be my family aren’t inclined to shove their views on my body.

I feel sorry for your niece if you’re still lecturing her about this when she’s almost 30. It’s past time she should tell you to get your attitude off her body.

"Why are people so gung-ho about global destruction anyway?

I actually have a good answer for that. A lot of people use it to deflect from the fact that they’ve chosen not to cope with their own lives. It’s much more romantic to bellow about the End Of The World than tell people that you have no retirement savings and you never bothered to try and earn more.

Others lead such boring lives that it makes them feel important to say such things in the hopes that others like them will actually listen to them - because no one else will.

Clap Clap Clap! Best piece of satire on the subject I’ve seen yet. 

 Oh, not trying for satire? It’s still hilarious.  

Hmm. I didn’t see where she was putting down women in general. I guess I could be wrong, but if saying that Wailin’ Palin isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer and seeing her as a generally foul and hypocritical example for all women is "against women" then I’m guessing you’re the one with the problem. 

Where did the notion come from that all women are angels and perfect and too fragile to face legitimate criticism? That sounds curiously Victorian to me. If you try acknowledging that words like "jerk" and "twit" are gender-neutral and can be universally applied and you MIGHT be closer to seeing equality in the status of women. 

I think Sarah can relax about book sales. It was on the bestseller lists before it even came out because of mass orders by the faithful, and no matter how you slice it, discount sales are not going to impact her, just the publisher. Even if those mounds of pre-sold books are dumped off in some warehouse to be abandoned and mildewed, she’ll make her ten million and hopefully take it shopping for a long, long time. 

As for the movie, it is indeed a renter. Thank goodness for Netflix, or I’d never see any movies.  

Oh no, no way indeed! My own mother is like this. She’s a vampire - every day she’d be on the phone rehashing her sad little life, dwelling on stuff that’s 50 years in the past and every day I would be miserable for the rest of the day because her "solution" to all of her problems was for me to somehow force my husband to move to her tiddlywink small town and serve her. She takes no ownership of her own problems and was using me as a therapist. Everything was fine when I agreed with her on everything she said, the instant I stopped doing that, she was furious with me.

I know a LOT of women like this. The ONLY thing that motivated any of them to change their lives was to have their kids tell them that they were sorry about all of those problems, but rather than talk about it ad nauseum, they would sooner have their mothers do something about it. "I’m sorry you feel that way. Have you spoken to your doctor?" is the normal and correct response for an adult child to make in that situation.

Not until those "discussions" (whine and rant sessions) were completely cut off did any of these women start to take care of themselves. 

This whole business of somehow "owing" a parent just because they did their jobs like ALL parents are supposed to do anyway is nonsense. The goal of raising children is to make yourself obsolete. When children are adults they’re supposed to leave and live their own lives. This whinging and squawking routine is simply unacceptable behavior at any age. In a normal family, parents and kids are friends, but they are NOT joined at the hip and both of them make their own, separate lives.

It’s extremely twisted to try and force an adult child to listen to, "Look at what I’ve done for you", for the rest of their lives. "Mom" is a parent. She didn’t do anything special, she only did what she was supposed to do in the first place. Yes, she was also a single parent. Not an easy proposition, but nothing that MILLIONS of parents aren’t doing every single day. Somehow most of them manage not to try and monopolize their adult children’s lives.

My mother pushed it to the point where she and I have not spoken on the phone since June of 2006. She hung up on me one day, and that was the end of it. We communicate by e-mail and snail mail, have lovely "conversations" that way, and that’s it. After that, my stress level dropped to normal, I feel terrific, and I’m finally living and enjoying my life. My husband and friends all tell me that I’m a much happier and healthier person now than I was when I was listening to that viper spit poison in my ear every day.

Hopefully the LW will wise up faster than I did. She has to understand that she is NOT responsible for her mother’s feelings. It wasn’t until I was 43 that I realized just how self-centered this behavior is. 

I have to disagree with you on LW #2. It is not the job of a child to be a therapist. She has a life of her own now, and if her mother really is as needy as she sounds, then the situation would probably become so toxic that eventually she’ll have to cut Mom off completely. 

As the LW says, now that she’s out of that house, she’s discovering that her mother is not a very nice person in general. In fact, she’s downright unpleasant to people and is trying to use her daughter to compensate for the fact that no one else wants to be around her. I would guess she’s done this for years, too, when the daughter was growing up. It’s easier for Mom to pretend to be a martyr than deal with the real reasons she’s been alone for all these years.

Mom sounds jealous, grasping, and angry. Her daughter has the life that she never bothered to even try and get for herself. The neediness that she’s projecting now is her way of trying to take control of her daughter and get back her excuse for not living. Somehow the LW managed to grow up without picking up any of those traits.

The only thing the LW can do is tell her mother to see a doctor and deal with her issues. If the mother pushes, nags, whines etc., then the LW should hang up the phone. Her mother is only 50. That is young - in fact, she won’t even be retiring for another 15 years! We aren’t talking about a doddering granny here, but a 50-year-old woman who has a job and hasn’t been living in a cave for the last 30 years. She’s a grownup. She needs to learn how to act like one.

The LW has to realize that limiting contact with her mother may be necessary for awhile. She needs to make it clear the she will continue to live her own life on her own terms and is not at her mother’s beck and call. Parents who use their children as an excuse not to have a life are just bad parents. 

Oh, good. It’s the risk that scares me when people make these decisions. If your life was not at risk when you made the decision, then you made the right decision. Especially at five months. I couldn’t have gone there either.

What I find irritating is that some women (and I knew one) who  stop their cancer treatments when they know darn well that in doing so they could easily die. THAT in my mind IS selfish. Nothing is gained by having a baby and leaving him/her motherless on purpose. I don’t see how that can possibly be "noble". What’s more "noble"? To have a child and die or to wait until the woman is healthy and have a child that will know her?

The truth is that people have kids or don’t have them based on selfishness all the time. There are different reasons for either decision, and truthfully most of them are based on their effects on OUR lives. We choose our lives, and whether they include children or not, that’s our decision to make as adults. There’s no "good" or "bad" about it. It just is. 

I meant meaningless in the sense that as a matter of statistical significance, it is an anomaly that cannot be counted as a real reason to ban abortion. You took a risk, which in my opinion was essentially selfish. YOU wanted to have a baby and the fact that you could have died before he was born or while he was tiny because you chose not to treat your disease is a selfish act. You risked your son’s future.

The fact that it all came out nicely in the end does not mean that the original choice was necessarily correct. 

I see. So you don’t have any problem using your tax money for social services once the kids are actually HERE, but you would cavil at the much lower cost of allowing women to make their own decisions. Right. Gotcha. And you also not so neatly avoided my comment about kids as young as 11 or 12 who are risking their lives giving birth because people like you don’t see them as human beings, just stupid creatures who are only good for spreading their legs - in your own words.

These kids can’t even legally consent to have sex in the first place. By definition, they have been raped. But you are above all that, right? After all, why shouldn’t they have the nice middle-class life that you take for granted? After all, YOU got it, so how hard can it be?

It’s easy to be complacent when you’re sitting in a suburban house knowing that there’s food in the fridge, the gas bill is paid and you get 500 channels worth of cable. These people aren’t even real to you, are they? They’re just faces in the newspaper, they don’t matter. Correct me if I’m wrong, but are you really claiming that human beings are only important to you when they can’t talk?