Is the dementia, or the eyesight, bad enough that a hands-free magnifier won't be useful?

That makes sense, bookbard. IIRC, either Ben or Jerry was born without a sense of smell, and that's why so many of their ice creams have stuff in them.

Your son is 16. I would not make a rule for a 16 year old that I need to ask other people to help me justify. I feel like this sort of thing just undermines my own authority. I certainly didn't respect people who made rules like that and expected me to follow them when I was that age!

The term "woman" is both acceptable and in use. If you check the google ngram viewer, you will see that the terms "pregnant woman" and "pregnant women" vastly outnumber "pregnant person" and "pregnant people". https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=pregnant+woman%2C+pregnant+women%2C+pregnant+person%2C+pregnant+people&year_start=1980&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cpregnant woman%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cpregnant women%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cpregnant person%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cpregnant people%3B%2Cc0 There is no need to lie. This is also a lie, and you know it. Nobody in your life has ever told you that you are not allowed to be called a woman. As for the other weird arguments, if you feel that the only thing special about you is your body parts, I suggest that you should take up a hobby. Perhaps learn a musical instrument, or plant a garden, or learn a new language. You can be special for who you are, not the body in which you happen to live.

If you feel dehumanized at being called a person, then that sounds like a you problem. I suggest therapy.

You are engaging in mendacious speech. It's simply untrue that celebrities and comics who engage in hateful speech and call it "jokes" or "truth" are likely to be "banned" in any meaningful sense. It IS true that there has been an enormous upswing in sincere efforts to intimidate and defund teachers and librarians who stock a diverse library or classroom bookshelf, especially if they include books that include LGBTQ+ viewpoints. One of these two things is actually happening.

Indeed. I believe we all agree that if you are a human, and can get pregnant, you are also a person. There is no possibly valid objection to this phrasing.

If Dave Chapelle is being "censored", that's news to me. There is censorship going on in the USA, Chris. It's mostly being directed *by* the right-wing *against* LGBTQ-inclusive media - not the other way around.

I'm not sure how, exactly, this is different from eating meat or making buttons etc. out of bone, but yes, this is a dystopian timeline. When I find out who stepped on that butterfly, believe me, we are gonna have *words*.

If you don't know something, you learn about it, or you decide not to. You don't say dismissive things like "She's quirky, but I would never have thought autism!" And if you don't know why that's insulting, I really can't explain it to you. Just believe me - it's not an okay thing to say. Some opinions, you keep to yourself.

Putting the specifics of narcissism etc aside, that's just false. I can think of dozens of people who were definitely full of it, and quite obviously, who still were quite happy fleecing most of the people they met. How do you think abusive people, and con artists, and scammers, and cult leaders, all find their victims? They are not, in fact, as transparent as you think. Maybe they all really are transparent to *you* - but it's just as likely that you're only fooling yourself. I'm sure it's comforting to think that nobody is really fooled by these folks, or that only a few suckers are - but it's just not true.

Ah, I see we've moved from the "no armchair diagnoses!" part of the convo to the "those doctors are quacks" part. It's either not the case that literally every other adult woman you know is being medicated for ADHD and/or depression, or you simply know a lot of people with ADHD and/or depression. Either way, I'm sure they don't really want to hear your opinions on their own mental health. I know I definitely didn't.

Your mother needs to go to the doctor. Lots of short-term medical conditions, such as UTIs or bladder infections, can cause the appearance of dementia symptoms in seniors who are otherwise fine, mentally. Do not do anything else until she has seen a doctor.

So make new plans right now that don't involve her. Seriously, that's the solution. I know you don't want to do that solution, nobody does, but that's the solution. Take the wind right out of her sails by planning to take a weekend trip somewhere, or to have a quiet holiday at home with no guests. Her participation can be limited to a ten minute phone call.

The correct way for Saraha's mother to set this boundary in her own home is to call up her other daughter and say "It looks like I've developed an allergy to animals, so just so you know, you can't bring them to my house on Thanksgiving" or "Your animals are just too much for me to handle, so you can't visit with them anymore". Or, if she wants to set this at somebody else's home, which may or may not be reasonable, to call up Saraha and say "I'm letting you know that I can't come to your house this Thanksgiving if your sister's pets are going to be there. I'll let her know too" and then accept, with good grace, whatever Saraha decides to do. If that's "Yes, I'd rather see Sis and her dogs than you, Mom!" then, well, that's that. It is not correct or appropriate to drop a lot of vague hints to Saraha and not, as I think may be the case, telling Sister directly. Doing it this way is creating drama by not giving Sister a chance to find a pet sitter or kennel in time.

skimomma, while it's conventional wisdom that narcissists will virtually never go to a shrink willingly, my understanding is that there is a small but significant percentage that *will* - either because they want a chance to talk uninterrupted and get a socially acceptable diagnosis to excuse their bad behavior, or because they really want to go with a family member in order to better badger that family member, or, occasionally, because they've harmed themselves SO MUCH with their behavior that they're finally willing to try ANYTHING. (And some will go because a friend or a family member who really is important to them sets a firm ultimatum - therapy or no relationship. That's not quite "willing", though.) However, many of them will stop going if they're subject to too much scrutiny, and even if they're genuinely committed to the effort the odds of them getting a shrink with enough experience with NPD to accurately diagnose them, much less help them are... well, they're not good odds.

If she brings it up around Thanksgiving, say "Well, so sorry we won't be seeing you!" and hang up the phone. I mean, really, do you genuinely *want* her at your Thanksgiving table? I'd think that if she stays home out of petulance you'll have something to be thankful for! Though if you want to feel like you've "played fair" then the next time she brings up the allergies you should say "Oh, have you told Sis?" and then let it drop. I really think it's a bad idea to get into the habit of carrying messages, or to pick it up again if you've started to stop doing that.

Correct amount of bathing is culturally determined. So long as your child is not visibly dirty or stinky, it's really nobody's business if they're getting as many baths as some other person's child.

Way up at the start of this thread, Quill, you asked for opinions and here is mine: If you don't actually know all the people in question, you probably ought to keep your thoughts and doubts to yourself. Maybe you're in a weird little cluster. Maybe all your co-workers are just throwing around buzzwords. Who knows? Who cares? You don't know their soon-to-be-exes, or their mothers, or their neighbors, so you probably are better off focusing on your work. Yeah, sure, none of those people's problematic relations have formal diagnoses. Whether or not they merit those diagnoses, I think we can agree it'd be an uphill battle to get them in to be diagnosed in the first place.

Scarlett, when you say things like "She's quirky, but I would never have dreamed she was on the spectrum", what I hear is that you don't know much about autism. I hear this thing quite often about me from people who don't know anything about autism. It's a little insulting, honestly! But people who *do* know about autism, who work with autistics or have autistic family members, or are themselves autistic? None of that. They have me pegged within minutes of meeting me. Moving on from that, you've spent this entire thread downplaying your grandson's needs. Why is that? He has less than half the words you'd expect from a child this age, and it doesn't sound like he's started combining them into pairs and trios yet. This is a big concern, but you keep saying you don't think this evaluation is necessary! Why are you saying this? A two year old child who has only a dozen words DOES need an evaluation. And while it's possible he's not getting enough sleep, lack of sleep is not delaying his speech. Not even if he's only getting ten hours of sleep a night. (You do know that it's hours of sleep that matter, not what time the kid actually hits the sack, right?)

I was nearly 30 when I realized that soy sauce contains soybeans. And, a bit more embarrassing but I was younger - when I was a child, I thought the correct way to eat ice cream cones was from the bottom up. I was a messy eater regardless, but that did NOT help!

TravelingChris, if the co2 levels in your house were high enough to kill roaches, they'd be plenty high enough to hurt you. I promise, that's not what's going on here.

I would not recommend routinely pouring bleach, lye, or other harsh chemicals down your drain. This will ultimately ruin the pipes - a much more expensive hassle than a few fruit flies! Try pouring boiling water down the drain instead. It'll kill them just as much, but it won't kill your pipes and it won't create a toxic hazard for the plumbers when they come to fix them.

You just did not read what I posted, did you. I hate to break it to you, but kindness IS superficial if you don't actually use it to make changes to the system that causes some people to have more than others. And in order to make those changes, you have to start by acknowledging that the system did not accidentally arise this way, and that it actually IS a system. You can do that without being friends with literally anybody, if you like. As for "seeing people as having the image of God", you know who did that? Mother Theresa. And here's some more news for you - she was a monster who thought the image of God was that it's beautiful when poor people suffer. Those are her words, not mind - that the suffering of the poor is beautiful. She was "kind" too. But her image of God did not involve actually fixing the system that makes some people suffer.

I don't think you're wrong to point out the advantage of dumb luck - but for me, we spend a lot of time in this family talking about systematic inequalities. Wealthy people want to stay wealthy. Powerful people want to stay powerful. For SOME REASON, wealth and power tend to correlate, and boy, those people do what they can to maintain their advantages, all while carefully pretending to themselves that everything is fair and just in this, the best of all possible worlds. And of course, THAT means they're blind to all those advantages that were already set up in generations past, thinking "that's just the way it is"... and they're not the only ones. Lots of people who aren't wealthy or powerful at all believe the stories they pump out. Like, you mention him being "lucky enough" to be in a good school district. You don't mention that it's inherently unjust that there are "good" and "bad" schools in the first place. Why is it like this? It does not have to be this way. It only IS this way because some people prefer it like that. Oh, they won't say they prefer it like that, probably not even in the privacy of their own heads - but they like it that some people (them) have access to "good schools" and other people (disproportionately poor and minorities) do not. If they didn't like it, you can bet they'd squawk!