You can't make people like you under the best of circumstances, and you certainly can't make them like you while you're actively badgering them on what you perceive to be their failures of conscience.

Being highly invested and preoccupied by an emotionally consuming mission tends to steal resources from other aspects of your emotional life.

When you fail to see something, that doesn't mean I'm hiding it.

It's hard to send your baby off on a plane without you, though that's less reasonable, because sending him off in a car is statistically a bigger risk.

Instead of talking at each other about the non-business-related contact, talk to each other about your concerns about marriage. Listen a lot, too.

The sudden death of a partner while expecting a child is so universally understood as awful that I don't think anyone with any other weight to carry is going to get to same kind of sympathy - except perhaps people who lose a child.

Your parents' views are, by current standards, out there. Getting in their faces about it would be needlessly disrespectful, but there's no reason for you to tiptoe through their delusional little terrarium as if you can't bend even one blade of grass.