Growing up, Melissa Shultz sometimes felt like she had two fathers. One version of her dad, she told me, was playful and quick to laugh. He was a compelling storyteller who helped shape her career as a writer, and he gave great bear hugs. He often bought her small gifts: a pink "princess" phone when she was a teen, toys for her sons when she became a mom.
"Turns out, Steve's brother...Tony, also went to the same college as I did, and in a similar department," X writes. "Steve then jokingly asked if I've ever met Tony or hooked up with him, to which I said honestly, \"probably not, since it's a big school\" and brushed it off since his name and description didn't ring a bell."
My husband Edwin comes from a big Colombian family, which is very different from the kind of environment I grew up in, and it leads to conflict between us. I had one sibling, a brother, but he passed away in a car accident when I was nine. My mum died a couple years ago. I grew up quite detached from my parents and was never that close to my father. As a result, I'm very independent and I like my own space.
Profile Theatre's Tiger Style is the best bargain to be found right now in Portland theater. You buy a ticket to a comedy and get-as a free bonus-a dazzling array of vignettes dissecting Asian American education, life, relationships, and myths. It's giving a side eye to corporate life, showing how families break up and make up, and offering biting examples of Communist Party of China (CPC) politics. Such a deal!
The server you mentioned may need tips to survive on her sub-minimum or minimum wage income. However, a tip should never be requested, and for a server to follow your niece out of a restaurant to discuss a small tip is beyond the pale. Although some establishments suggest tips that can go as high as 35%, most customers give 15% or 20% of the total bill.
Just four months after the shocking news broke that Kidman and Urban were ending a 19-year-old marriage that was long believed to be one of Hollywood's most stable, the 58-year-old Urban has been linked to Karley Scott Collins, who is 32 years his junior and just nine years older than his oldest daughter, Sunday Rose, 17. The Daily Mail reported this week that the Australian country star is rumored to have moved on
Oh, my. It seems like who goes around comes around. It's a shame that you can't leave the past a one-night stand more than 37 years ago in the past and find the humor in this. I suspect it happens more often than you think. Please quit regarding this as a competition between you and your brother-in-law's girlfriend. Your husband chose you. End of contest. If there is cause for embarrassment, it should be hers, not yours.
He doesn't lower his voice when he asks, and then he argues about tipping the typical 20%. It was so embarrassing when we took his nephews out to dinner that one of them asked if he could leave the tip instead. When we took my son and daughter-in-law out to celebrate a milestone birthday, my husband made sure to let them know how expensive the dinner was.
"If one partner protects their creativity and rest and ambition or joy because the other partner is holding the system together, that joy is being heavily subsidized," she explains. "Not by money, but by someone else's nervous system."
I'd gently suggest that you're not helpless against the changing tide. You've noticed a pattern that seems to be in conflict with your hopes and expectations for the holiday. So, for next year, you have the opportunity to talk about it with your daughters in advance and find a solution that makes everyone happy. Every holiday meal is, of course, about the food, but its primary purpose is togetherness as a family.
Sibling estrangement is not just about not talking to your brother or sister. It has much broader ramifications, as sibling rejection can profoundly shape an individual's personality and their roles in the family. The estranged may lose the opportunity to be a sibling, in-law, aunt or uncle, and even son or daughter, as estrangement often metastasizes and family members choose sides. These shifting alliances may contribute to greater alienation.
When you're the one who organizes the family vacation, calls the plumber for your parents, and coordinates every Mother's Day gift, it's easy to feel resentful that nobody else is stepping up to help. Often, the eldest daughter is the one who notices-and in noticing, begins to believe she's responsible. Family researchers have long described this as intergenerational vigilance (Miller-Ott et al., 2017), a sense of watchfulness passed down through gendered expectations.
I go into Christmas every year with low expectations for my husband's side of the family. They are notoriously bad gift givers, so I just go into it with the knowledge that the gifts don't matter, it's about our time together as a family.
We had taken every precaution we could to avoid it. I have MS, which can react in unpredictable ways to viral exposures. My husband knows this very well, which is why I'm perplexed and furious that he thought it better to stay on the good side of our son by not allowing me to decide for myself whether I wanted to walk into a potentially deadly situation.
When she asked us where we were going, I panicked, and I told her we were invited to go skiing with friends at their chalet. (We do not know anyone with a chalet.) My dad called to tell me my mother was more upset than she let on and asked if we could "visit that damn chalet" some other time.
When I was eight years old, I was living in Dubai and desperate to experience a western Christmas. My family are Muslim, and Christmas was something we'd never celebrated but after consuming countless festive Hallmark movies, I was hooked on the dream of having turkey, tinsel and, most importantly, presents. I also had an enormous crush on Macaulay Culkin, and thought if I could experience Christmas for myself it would somehow bring me closer to him.
It's about a five-hour drive from Akron to South Bend. Things get a little tricky on the outskirts of Cleveland, but after that you just stick to I-80. I stopped for gas and a Subway sandwich and reached my brother's apartment around two in the afternoon. He lived in an old hotel, which had been dolled up and turned into residential units.
My grandmother strove for perfection, convinced that it was an attainable goal if only you worked hard enough. This meant eating less to lose weight. Food deprivation became a family bonding activity when my grandmother was on a diet. Diets lasted decades. We had marathon cleaning weekends while friends went to the mall. Play clothes were swapped out for school clothes for our rare trips to Burger King.
Everybody knows that parties are for fun and celebration. Winter holiday parties are definitely different than everyday festivities. More often than not, even with detailed plans and extra help, these holiday celebrations can be stressful and exhausting. Almost all celebrations start by making a list and then inviting your chosen guests who will be asked to respond yes or no to your invitation.
Oh, but I'm going on and on about myself. Come in, right this instant! You'll have to forgive the paltry decorations around the house. We had to cut back on some of the frivolities this year. Everything is just so expensive now! Did you know that we couldn't even afford poinsettias for the entryway? Oh I fought Grayham on it, I promise you. I told him, "Darling, what's Christmas without poinsettias?" But he held firm.
Ten years ago, I connected with Christi, a daughter I fathered with a woman I was in a relationship with for a short time decades ago. We split before I knew my girlfriend was pregnant. She didn't tell me until after the baby was born. By that time, she was married to a man Christi knew as her dad. Christi no longer acknowledges him as her father.
I am struggling with the different way my parents have treated me and my brother. My dad started a business when I was five. Now it's worth several million. My brother was invited by my dad to go into the business when he left university. I was not. By then, the business was well established and my dad stayed on as CEO. My dad gave my brother 80% of it. He will now sell the business and realise millions, meaning he can retire early.
I broke off my engagement to my beloved fiancé, "Tristan," in November. Everyone else in my family loves him. I'm pretty sure some of my aunts and uncles love him more than they love me. I told my closest people personally and sent out formal cancellations to everyone else who got a save-the-date. But I haven't seen extended family or childhood friends since I did this, and I will be going home for Christmas. I'm worried everyone's going to be really invasive and weird, especially because I'm embarrassed about the final straw that made me end it. I absolutely should have seen this earlier.
Thomas Wolfe coined the phrase, You can't go home again, for his 1940 book of that title, but you can certainly get back in the neighborhood. Families can be like trees-shivering in the metaphorical winter winds and standing tall and strong in other storms. Sometimes boughs bend and sometimes they break. The December holidays may shake a family tree until its weaker limbs drop off and get discarded, or they may further strengthen an already stable sequoia.
Christmas dinner? At home or in a restaurant? It's at this juncture of the year, with Christmas dinner hurtling towards us, that you may well find yourself muttering: Well, we could always go out! Who could blame any home cook for wanting to shove this great burden on to someone else's back, especially since every culinary TV show, magazine article and advertising break since mid-November has hammered home what a colossal faff Christmas dinner actually is.
I get it. However, she continues to be disrespectful to me and has made him choose sides in disagreements. I've always tried to be neutral in situations. We all live together, but Amber and I just don't get along. She doesn't respect her father at all. When I have tried to make him realize it or support him when she's being unruly, I am turned into the bad guy.
It's a well-known fact that women are the primary makers of holiday magic. We're the ones who do the decorating, we're the ones wrapping the gifts, we're the ones making the cookies - we've got a vision, you know? But does being in charge of holiday magic mean we should also buy our own Christmas presents? One mom on the Reddit community Mommit took to the app to ask if she's the only mom buying herself Christmas gifts, and the responses really ran the gamut.
