Yes, you can have it all. Right now I have two healthy, well-adjusted kids in college, I've had a fulfilling career throughout their years at home, and I'm still very happily married to their father. But let's not pretend that it's easy. Time is a finite commodity, and the time any parent, female or male, spends at work is not spent with the children and vice versa. "Having it all" doesn't include attending a cocktail party and a youth soccer game at the same time. We all have to prioritize, and I don't think we do women any favors by implying that if they're having trouble with the juggling, they just must not have the right attitude.

I married a man whose family was very much like that. We moved away from the rural area where we'd both grown up, acquired good educations and good professional positions and have raised our now-grown children to be completely different from their grandparents. Sure, we had to spend the ride back from some childhood visits unpacking words like "nigger," but as Cary said, that's how they learned that such words and the ideas behind them didn't fit into their world. We're all descended from cave dwellers; in each branch of the family tree, someone had to be the first to break the "old" rules.

I love to cook and I love to eat, but I have a full-time job and busy kids. This doesn't diminish the quality of the food or the love that goes into it, but it means I don't have to spend precious time shopping, slicing and dicing. Where's the problem?

"I only cook five-course meals on weekends."

"Huzzah for you. I earned in the mid six figures last year."

"BFD. I haven't bought a cake mix in years."

"Did that get your kid into Princeton? Mine's there now."

And so it goes. Meanwhile, there are *real* problems in the world. Perhaps if we could get past this one-upsmanship we could solve a few of them.

I'm not convinced all this Moral Majority name-calling is intended to be helpful. I hope you all feel better now. ;)

I'm also not convinced this relationship cannot be salvaged and turned into something wholly positive if both are committed to doing that. It takes a considerable amount of moral strength, but it can be done. It seems to me like over the years they've done most things right. They may have wandered pretty close to the boundaries a few times, but they've tried pretty hard not to cross them. That's real life. We aren't always perfect, and sometimes relationships that are important to us don't fit neatly into socially acceptable categories.

If Adam can say to his wife, "This is a person I've known for a long time, and she's been a good thing in my life, but we're not having an affair and we're not going to," and if LW can say to him (and to herself), "I value this friendship to the degree I will not jeopardise it by letting it be something hurtful to anyone," I think it's possible.

When I've had people in my life to whom I've felt sexually attracted, e.g. coworkers with whom I do have to spend considerable time — something that's going to happen even if we all pretend otherwise — my most successful strategy for defusing that situation is to take them home to meet the spouse and set the parameters for a different kind of relationship. That requires a good marriage, and it requires everyone to act like responsible adults — which admittedly hasn't been the pattern so far, but I don't see either of these people as being beyond redemption. People can grow up and behave better when given the opportunity and the motivation, and not losing touch with someone important is pretty good motivation.

All that, of course, presumes that LW *wants* a healthy adult friendship.

But did anyone notice that the NYPost story had, in the first paragraph, a description of what she was wearing? Like, if it had been a short skirt and tight blouse this whole business would have been ok? Will we EVER get beyond that?

I suppose every problem you have is partially you. All we've got is us, after all.

But surely the needs of a child should come before the need for a boyfriend, and surely that child can be expected to have been affected by her childhood. Nowhere is it written that we have to love our mothers. Honour them, yes. You can't torture her in her nursing home bed. But love? Do we really have any right to tell LW whom to love? Do we have any ability to tell her how?

Or do some of just enjoy feeling superior to a 17-year old?