Parents have to push a bit. There are just too many distractions for parents not to at least try to influence their children by exposing them to healthy and rewarding pursuits, like music. However. As a parent of a child with more musical talent than discipline, who has admittedly suffered a few pangs of jealousy at the "advanced" musical ability shown by other same age kids at recitals, let me say this: Why is it that so many kiddie musicians don't grow up to appreciate music? Because music is pursued the way sports and math are -- as a competitive occupation with a series of hurdles (swim times, SAT scores, number of AP courses) that MUST BE GOTTEN THROUGH. What Suzuki book are you in? Did you get a certificate of achievement in honors orchestra? And when you reach your peak you are encouraged subtly or otherwise to "give up" the pursuit entirely -- because you'll never be a professional athlete, musician, mathematician, physicist or whatever. But music is more like love than math -- it's something that can be pursued because life is better with than without it. Even going to my daughter's lessons has made me appreciate music more.

At a minimum, the daughter's piano teacher should be tailoring lessons to the daughter's interest -- perhaps slackening up on the technique in favor of letting the daughter pick some music she wants to learn, or playing and analyzing the music that she is singing on the piano. Truth is, the teacher probably has a lot of insight into different kinds of music. Opening up the lessons and giving the daughter some of that insight might be the very thing that keeps daughter interested.

Is that once LW has her mother in a safe place, to ask her mother what she wants. The fact that the mother is borrowing money is a bad sign; she could be doing this under pressure from her relatives. However, her evasiveness might also relate to her not wanting to give LW an excuse to obtain a power of attorney, and she might be more fearful of that outcome than she is of her crazy relatives. So LW should try to the extent possible to reassure her mother that she is not interested in "taking over" her mother's affairs, but that she can't continue loaning money and she wants to do whatever is possible to put an end to what appears to be overreaching on the part of the sister and her sister's coterie of unsavory relatives. And if her mother can't explain or doesn't remember or the explanation makes no sense, then she can review her options, but the best outcome seems to me to be one that preserves the mother's autonomy as much as possible. I second paying bills and buying groceries rather than providing cash that will be misused by others.

1964 flick with Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen with approximately the same storyline as KU -- confronts abortion (illegal) head on -- and is really quite a good and subtle movie about relationships that are hatched in a hothouse of bad circumstances. The most amusing scenes in the movie are the incredulity of all the men (brother, priest, father) that Natalie Wood, an Italian Catholic girl, isn't celebrating her good fortune that the would be dad is willing to marry her, because her expectations for herself were higher, if improbable. Although it has a "happy" ending with a reunion of the couple, it makes it fairly clear that this is a relationship that will always be full of tension over its beginning as something other than voluntary. Since this wasn't exactly an uncommon problem in the 1950s and 60s ('til birth control became accessible) I have to believe that the authors had a much better grasp on the reality of the situation.

What's really a little disturbing is that, light comedy notwithstanding, there is a whole set of the population that wants to believe that true love or at least happiness should be a function of luck notwithstanding a zillion bad choices. Does anybody really believe that it's anything more than a remote possibility that people who are thrown together as parents or spouses by circumstances will be united as a couple simply because they have a baby together?

Or that the guy in the picture won't retort -- at least once if not all the time -- anytime mommy asks him to step up because of her job or just to help more with the baby, "Hey, what do you want? I married you didn't I?" And that slow drip of reality that withers relationships and ends in divorce is always tucked neatly away off screen.

If LW had written to say that GF really wanted a baby and he didn't because he already had two nearly grown kids with his ex-wife or GF, then Cary's advice would ring true to the majority of Salon readers: LW and his GF are not on the same track; their lives have intersected but their wants and needs based on lived and apparently not yet lived enough experience are fast diverging. And what the heck does a 28 year old think that she's going to gain from drug use? Is it just possible that she chose LW as her boyfriend because he thought he would enable her? This is not a good situation. LW should trust his instincts, tell his GF what he thinks of her plan and then move on, with or without her, but definitely without enabling her drug related aspirations.