Hi, Hester. It’s Aiyana again. Can I just say that you have one of the most craziest family stories I ever read in my lifetime? I swear to God, I’m not judging you. But usually this happens to me. When I have a bad day, and I get into one of my moods, I usually think I have all these problems on how I’ll never have a boyfriend, no one will accept me for who I am, yadda yadda yadda. Please understand that I do have great self-esteem: I go to the museum and library in my hometown more often, I have made more friends ( I still have one or two close friends in my life, but that could be due to me being an introvert), and I’ve never been happier. What I’m trying to tell you is that once I hear or read about someone else’s problems, then I say to myself, “Okay, this person is more off the deep end than I am.” “Deep end” is my own way of saying that they’re going crazy with their issues, or their issues are more bad than my own. I’m not putting in any implications that you’re mentally ill. That is NOT the case at all.

Aside from that, I hope you can get along better with your father in law. If it makes you feel any better, my own relationship with my father was and is complicated. Sometimes we get along, sometimes we don’t. On top of that, Father’s Day is in two weeks and I still haven’t gotten a card not only for him, but my mother’s boyfriend, my grandfather, and my uncle. I can get along with them. Which leads me to this piece of advice: Try spending more time with people who bring you up than bring you down. Same thing to your husband. Maybe he needs to go out more with his buddies and do things that guys usually do: go to sports bars, play basketball together, watch action movies, whatever guys do these days.

To Inky: THANK YOU! Your advice completely blew me out of the water. I agree with you when I say that maybe Hester should go to a higher power, whether it’s meditation, prayer, or even psychotherapy. Who knows? And Hester, your name reminds me of the woman from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. She has the same name as you, only she’s fictional, and her name is Hester Prynne. I’m positive that you get this reference a lot from random strangers a heh. So I guess that’s all I have to say. Live, laugh, love. Aiyana.