We all make deals with ourselves when it comes to the difficult people in our lives.

There is a difference between your parents' not reporting to you everything they do and keeping secrets from you.

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

Being negative is easy. There will always be a downside to everything good, a hurdle to everything desirable, a con to every pro. The real courage is in finding the good in what you have, the opportunities in every hurdle, the pros in every con.

If the guests want to wrest the check away from the host, because the host is also the guest of honor, then the guest who volunteers has to cover the whole thing. A guest can't volunteer -all- of the guests to pay for the host/honoree.

Separation is where you see if it works better with the adults in two different homes.

A lot of support gets withheld out of fear of awkwardness and misspeaking.