Dear Bruce

She writes to Dear Abby: my sister has been planning to retire and move in with my husband and me…. She is a strong anti-vax advocate and refuses to get vaccinated for COVID.

I agree with Dear Abby and your husband that it’s a definite NO unless she gets vaccinated. But there are other reasons she should not live with you even if she is vaccinated. You sound like sensible people and your sister is not. Do you really want to spend the rest of your lives arguing with her about the pseudoscience that she believes in, and the deplorable political candidates she most likely endorses? It doesn’t sound like a nice retirement to me.

Being anti-vax is not OK. Tolerating someone who is anti-vax in your home is not OK. Don’t do it.

He writes to Ask Amy as his 20-year-old daughter visits with a boyfriend: “I have indicated that I will expect him to sleep in our guest bedroom and for our daughter to sleep in her room during his visit.

Dad, your daughter is 20. That number means she’s an adult. She doesn’t live at home. You no longer have any capability of imposing your idea of morality upon her. So, what you are asking for is for her and her boyfriend to maintain the fiction that they adhere to your idea of morality while they stay in your home. A fiction only to make you feel better as your wife, daughter, her boyfriend, and anyone who happens to visit all know the truth.

The horse is already out of the barn, and to pretend that it remains there, true to the teachings of your church, seems cowardly to me. Be brave, face the fact that your daughter is an adult, and show her that you accept that by allowing them to conduct themselves as they wish.

And it’s time to give up on the idea that the Church is the bastion of morality. To get a taste of reality, start here. That page is specific to Catholic churches, but there is no shortage of similar abuse in other Christian denominations and other religions.

“California” writes to Carolyn Hax (it’s the second piece at that link):

Dear Carolyn: One of my friends has had fibromyalgia for the past year. It makes me sad, and so I like to find alternative treatments and cures and tell her about them.

Dear “California”, I live there too, and I am glad to say we have a lot of sharper knives in our state’s kitchen. The reason they are called “alternative treatements and cures” is that they aren’t treatements or cures. They are just stuff that non-doctors and non-scientists make up out of wishful thinking, and maybe someone once used one and spontaneously got better, so they say that they work!

Real treatments and cures come with years of the most careful testing, both to make sure they actually do help, and that they don’t hurt more than they help, and to determine what the right dosage is – because if it changes something in your body, too much is probably bad for you, and often deadly.

Some of that testing has been done on historic home remedies, herbal, and Ayurvedic medicine, and doctors really have recommended the ones that work: for example digitalis, otherwise known as the Foxglove plant, was a historic remedy found to actually work for heart disease at the exact right dose. Too much and it’s a lethal poison.

I have personally experienced what happens when you replace that science with hand-waving: years ago my Mom listened to a dear friend who suggested an alfalfa cure. She turned out to be allergic to alfalfa, which turned her black and blue all over her body, sending her to the hospital, and put her in such terrible pain that she asked to be put out of her misery. It was so terrible that she never told the friend, who would have felt incredibly guilty. This is what you risk with “alternative treatments and cures”.

Your friend who needs IVF to conceive a child would not appreciate your suggestion to put out bait for storks in the hope that one brings a baby. In the same way, your friend with a serious disease, who is managing it appropriately, does not appreciate your repeated suggestion that she partake of quacks and frauds.

She wrote to Dear Abby: At last, I’m independent.  How do I avoid going wild?

Dear Abby gets it: your strict upbringing deprived you of learning experiences when you were younger. But there’s hope for this young lady. Now that she’s free, she’s buying her own clothes without being perpetually at war with a parent about them. And she’s thinking about sex outside of marriage.

Dear Ms. Wondering in Missouri: The most important job of most people is to be a parent. Please don’t fail the same way your parents did in bringing you up. If you choose to have children, make sure they have the learning experiences, while you’re still around, that help them to be adults in charge of their own welfare once they’ve left the nest. You need to get those experiences – and make some mistakes on the way – because it’s critical in teaching your own kids.

Don’t look to the church for counseling. They’ll do their best to put you back in the niche where you’ve already spent most of your life. And then get you safely married to a man who will run your life for you.

Psychological counseling is a fast and safe way to get someone to discuss these things with who has the experience you don’t, and the training to help you. Get it. But ultimately you need peers, of your own age and gender, who are successfully managing their lives while experiencing them fully. Join clubs, have a hobby, go for group hikes, and in general do things that get you around people. Not the church, sorry. It’s not the influence you need right now. Watch your friends, and remember that there can be as many bad examples as good ones.

Live your life to the fullest! Allow yourself to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them. And some day, pass that on.

Carolyn Hax scolds a mom who bears deep contempt for her son’s new wife. Mom laments that the new wife didn’t like the fact that Mom has a bedbug infestation in their home, and knew about it before the son and his family visited, and didn’t tell them. Mom is outraged that the new wife moved the family to a hotel, washed all of their stuff with hot water, and threw away their suitcases. After all, Mom says, she read on the internet that bedbugs aren’t really a medical problem.

Eeeeew.

Carolyn scolds Mom for her deep contempt for the new wife. But maybe misses an issue. Mom and her husband might have some serious depression. Normal people don’t let stuff like this go on.