How can I get a packrat to stop giving me stuff?
My mother saves everything. I have spent the last decade trying to fight my own packrat tendencies. But I’m pregnant with the first grandchild, and now am receiving lots of stuff from her. Is there any graceful way to communicate that I don’t want to take on curation of a family museum? Or do I have to store it for another 30 years, until she won’t notice that I threw it out/donated it?
How do you keep the peace at joint family gatherings?
Our families are pretty different — liberal vs republican, generational differences, religious vs atheist — and once the drinks start flowing, it’s hard to manage the interactions. The whole thing makes me super anxious, and I don’t even want to have a birthday party for our kid because it will mean bringing the families together.
How do you manage different families? How do you keep the peace and still enjoy yourself at joint gatherings?
How do you tell your parents things they don’t want to hear?
For many reasons, including my religious and ethical beliefs, I feel I need to tell my parents that I am in a polyamorous relationship. I’ve previously come out to them as queer and trans, which feels different from this conversation. How do you, as an adult in your agency, tell your parents things they don’t want to hear?
How do deal with gift-giving as your families and finances change?
Now that our brothers are over 21, do we still get them presents? And how do we tell them we don’t want them to use their limited funds to get us anything? And can we not get them presents while still buying my younger siblings presents? And what about when our siblings have kids too? We can’t afford to buy 10 kids quality presents as well as all of our other people! Plus, I don’t want our kid coming home with a truckload of gifts. How have other Homies dealt with family gift giving as their families and finances have changed?
My mother walked out of my life and never looked back: How to move on from parental abandonment
I always get irrationally angry when people post pictures on Facebook with captions like, “A Mother’s Love is Forever,” and “Nothing Is Stronger Than The Bond Between Mother and Child.” What a bunch of bullshit. My mother walked out of my life years ago, and never looked back. So how do I deal with it? How does one cope with the loss of a parent not to death, but by parental abandonment? Like this…
Any non-gendered advice on meeting the parents for the first time?
I’m in my late 20s and I’ve never really done the whole “meet the parents” thing before. Most of the advice I can find online is pretty sexist (dress conservatively, offer to help in the kitchen to show that you can run a house!). Is there anything I should know that isn’t super gender stereotyped?
The Holidays are coming: We dare you to send this hilarious “holiday application form” to your family this year!
Each year, The Holiday Conversations in our extended family starts in mid-July, when our little unit begins strategizing with our in-laws, to get out ahead of the game. It’s preemptive damage control. Much like leaving a play-date en-masse, we like to present a united front when the parents-in-law begin sniffing around our holiday plans. Our plans for this year’s Thanksgiving were already solidified weeks ago, but I’d like to share it here in case anyone finds it useful. I’ve updated it for the 2015 calendar year…
What happens when your parent dies early
Understandably, in the weeks following Dad’s death, I turned to the internet for ideas and help to process what I was going through when your parent dies early, and, to be honest, I drew a bit of a blank. So, these are a few thoughts on my experience, in the hope that someone else going through a similar slightly “early” loss finds them useful…