The Invisible Counterpoint

Dear Cary, I follow your column off and on, and I appreciate the way you handle questions from all ages and types of people. I am a 56-year-old man, married with a teenage son. I live in the town close to where my parents grew up. I have relatives here that I mostly avoid, even though I was close to some of them when I was younger. My father died about 20 years ago from complications of alcoholism. He was living in another state (unintentional pun), and his family brought him back here to die. I am pretty sure that they expected me to take care of him, but I refused. He had left us years before, and maintained very little contact. When I told his family I wasn't going to be around to help, this created a lot of hard feelings, and they set me up as a villain, even telling the story to other people, their version of course. I basically wrote them off, but have kept up marginal contact with some of them. I don't really have many friends here and would have left years ago, bu...

I didn't want the world to define her; I wanted her to define her world. I didn't understand then just how challenging this would be, not only vis-à-vis my daughter, but vis-à-vis me. Like many other women, when I got pregnant I was determined to establish a reasonable balance between my work life and my family. My goal while Julia was small was to take care of her as well as write my first book. This equilibrium sounded good in theory — and in e-mails to my friends — but in truth I had a hard time actually doing it, actually ensuring that I had both a child and my own life. I believed in balance on paper but never felt truly entitled to it. [. . .] We had been together 10 years before we had children, and they had been lived as equals. Suddenly, this was no longer the case. Suddenly, we had very little time together, and most of it was spent talking about his work and life. My future, my career plans and goals, felt sidelined by fatigue and logistics. The "flexibi...

@imnobody: Good on you for having the strength to move 9000 kms away. Says that you got enough nurturance from her to surrect sufficient self-respect, self-will, to do what you had to do to become independent. My mom had/has all kinds of psychosomatic stuff she tries to use as a tool to manage the rest of us, extend her control OVER us -- a change in tactics, now that adulthood has brought with it a change in terms. It means she feels empowered and in control, but also kind of lonely: it gives birth to passive-aggressive but very real anger, in those that end up tending to her. I saw what was happening, and have none of it. I let her know that, one, I won't be bullied, and two, that the kind of relationship she most wants -- one of real respect, substantial love, is available to her, but only if we interact on wholly different terms than we did during my teen years. It kind of works. This said, I'm moving across the country, possibly in part, because I sense that, like you,...