It took about a decade of my first quarter-century with this family to smooth everybody's feathers, and "translate" my DH's volatile verbiage into sentiments that would help the rest of the family settle down around him.

He has this incredible gift of being able to p!ss people off by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, but with the best of intentions. He has a the proverbial heart of gold but had the misfortune of being raised in a family of angry, angry Mormons who would fly into rage at the drop of a hat. So, when ruffled, his default setting is rage.

I have always been able to see through this, to the truly beautiful person hiding in there, buried under layers of rubble and rage. (My grandparents met during the 1906 "Great Quake" in San Fran, in 1906. Maybe that's where this resilience comes from. I don't know.)

The older kids have been successfully launched from the family nest. The youngest, a 31-year-old perennial adolescent who is wise in many ways and hopelessly backward in others, still lives with us. She is a semester away from college graduation after a decade of academic indifference and stumbling.

She and her father are so much alike - quick-tempered, both of them. And then their gears mesh wrong, and sparks begin to fly. That's when I have to turn into the family Jiffy Lube and try to keep things running smoothly. (I can't take the flying sparks. I grew up with that kind of crap, at it is triggering.)

Daughter has YET - in her 31 years - to really succeed at anything. She has had numerous jobs, but she is incapable of tolerating (emotionally) a dominant personality like an authoritarian employer. She will tell them to go to He!!, and then quit. And then she is back in our pockets again. She has never been financially independent for a sustained period.

She is a poly-substance abuser - weed and alcohol, which she funds from her own part-time earnings. But if, when school is done, she applies for any kind of job that requires a drug test, she will fail. I truly don't believe that she is emotionally capable of settling down into a regular, 40-hour-per-week work life of predictable tedium.

For many years, it has been a joke between DH and me that we should just sneak away in the middle of the night and move into a house in Maine or Alaska or someplace off the charts (not likely, as I LOATHE cold weather), do something technically convoluted so that she can't trace our IP source, and remain hidden, so she can't find us. Without us, she would be FORCED to stand on her own two feet.

But Jeebus H. Kristofferson!! I'm old and physically impaired. Why should I have to leave the home I love, the only son I gave birth to, and a life that is comfortable for me, because this difficult daughter and her hard-headed father can't get along?

At this point, both of them are confiding to me that they never want to see the other again. And I love them both. WHY SHOULD i HAVE TO CHOOSE??

I know that we have been talking here about boundaries, and that may be part of the situation here. Right now, I am too close to the situation to get a reasonable perspective on it.

I have a decent enough pension that I could move out on my own and make a go of it. So could DH. But I don't have the physical health to do it. I can't walk a whole city block without collapsing into a heap of aches and misery. I don't WANT to leave DH, nor does he want to leave me.

I sometimes wonder if DH and I should hang in there until DD gets her diploma, and then tell her, "Congratulations, Sweet Child. You have 48 hours to find a new place, and then we are changing the locks on your apartment. YOU ARE NOW ON YOUR OWN."

I am so sick of the contention between them!

I know that there are other parents here who have been in similar situations. I would like to hear from you.

I inveigled one of daughters into joining the army. At least now she gets ex-military discounts...

She just wanted to party all the time. I don't know that the army cured her, but it didn't hurt her.

But for all I know, yelling "I quit!" at your drill sergeant really works.

Give her a choice: get a job or go to church. Smoke de 'erb in the house, you get missionary discussions. See how far she'll go to get out of church.

That's supposed to work as a stick.m

Well, I think that most of us end up supporting ourselves because that was the expectation put on us by family members, i.e. "By this date you will be supporting yourself; By this date you will be living on your own." How that happened was on us.

It sounds to me like your daughter needs counseling. She sounds emotionally immature to me. I think she also needs expectations from you and your husband. Your husband managed to figure out how to make a living despite his temper, and your daughter needs to get it figured out as well. Maybe he could talk to her about it.

I can't tell you how many days I wanted to yell, "I quit!" and walk out the door of my job. I didn't because I had rent or mortgage and bills to pay. For many years, I lived with a series of roommates to make my living expenses more affordable.

You will be doing your daughter a favor by helping her to stand on her own two feet.

Until I had retired, I never knew the the nascent headaches I experienced every work day for 30 years would STOP when I retired.

I freely admit I abused "sick leave." I thought of it as "mental health day leave." I would sip tea, write bad poetry, hike in the snow, read stuff of a higher caliber than my favorite Sue Grafton mystery du jour. I just knew that there would be no point in dragging my sorry ass to work that day. Maybe my body wasn't sick, but my soul was.

What counts, when they talley it up, is whether you talley up more work days than sick days, and when you were there, did you actually do anything worthwhile? I guess I must have, because they paid me a pension and gave me a pretty plaque with words on it. The plaque was metal, tacked to wood.

A friend of mine who retired the same day, was so proud of the plaque they gave him. He was going to hang it above his fireplace. Me, I would have sailed mine off the top of the many-storied Federal Building, just to see how far the Wind would carry it.

My friend, aghast, said, "Are you crazy? Your name is engraved on that thing. You could be arrested for hurting someone if you just throw it and it hits someone."

Funny, they thought they could steal thirty years of my life just like that, and pay me back with a stupid engraved plaque when my sentence was up.

I pried off the metal part that had my name on it, and buried it deep, in my back yard. The wooden part, I chopped into neat kindling, and it has long since been used in campfires. I got the most satisfaction out of in that way.

The only good things I got out of my job are a good pension and good benefits. I let them take lifeblood out of my veins for thirty years for pension and benefits.

Yeah, life is all about trade-offs.

Sorry. It's after four in the morning. The last few days have been immeasurably chaotic, among family members.I am very much ready to run away, but grounded by the fact that physically, I can't do it. So I write crappy, formless poetry in the wee hours and I'm grateful that somebody is there to read it.

I have a rather large bone of contention with my parents and their situation is similar to yours.

My mother threw me out the house almost as soon as she no longer needed me to babysit my younger siblings. The 'official' reasons were because I was 'influencing' my younger siblings to be argumentative and allegedly I was also breaking house rules - we still argue over whether I was breaking her rules or not, I say not, she says yes. My parents were strict with me - almost to the point of being draconian - but are no where near as strict with my younger siblings. Their response is that they are older now and do not have the energy to stand their ground like they did with myself and my elder sibling.

So we got thrown out by younger, stronger-willed parents and now my youngest sibling STILL lives at home, does NOTHING around the house; not even mow the lawn or hang out her own laundry whereas my mother stopped doing mine by the age of eighteen.

I see my youngest sibling bullying my parents into getting her own way. She gets away with behaviour I wouldn't have dared and she swans about the family home like she owns it and has more right to be there than her elder siblings or their children. My mother allows it all - my father picks up the slack and the abuse.

My parents are older now and I regularly insist to them that in 'normal' families, children that do not leave the family home are obligated to perform the tasks their parents can no longer perform due to age or infirmity. The response is always citing some event where she did some small menial task without being told or asked, so that apparently makes up for her not doing anything else but eat & watch cable. My mother refuses to talk about it; she mostly turns on me and talks about what a terrible daughter I was and am, rather than discuss my sister with me, although I know she and my sister regularly talk about me.

I have gotten to the stage where I cannot even look at my sibling and will not visit my parents when she is at home. She is in her mid thirties with no college education and has just started her third job in her entire life.

My mother pretends she wants her to move out but I can see how devious she still is since childhood - she was great at getting us older kids in trouble so she could get her own way.

Your daughter is behaving in an entitled manner and you are enabling her. She should never disrespect her father in his house and you should not allow it, you lose her respect as an authority figure when you behave the way she manipulates you into. Your other children notice, but for whatever reason have not raised the subject, or tried to and been shut down, or are planning to when they get the nerve or 'time'.

My sibling came between myself and my parents for a long time, I still have little to no respect for either of them, my mother especially because she laid the law down for me, but not for my sister.

This is just the bare bones of the story, nothing about actual incidents that have caused strife within our family, all caused by my youngest sister, imo, who tried to get my husband on her side more than once (he's far too clever for that).

Keep your daughter at home as long as you want - she will never respect authority while you do because she believes, due to her environment and upbringing, that if she pouts enough, or b*tches and moans enough she will get her way. This leads her to believe that it is okay to be a disrespectful b*tch to anyone she feels like, including potential employers.

'Tough love' works best sometimes. Worked for me as it made me determined to leave home and have no-one order me around, it taught me to stand on my own two feet. Appeasement never works longterm.

The substance abuse is an issue. She is not coping with life, even her very safe one. Perhaps counseling could be a condition for being able to stay home a bit longer.

I have heard that counseling helps the person "cure" himself/herself, but only if the person sees the need and has the requisite desire. 'Forced' counseling probably has less than stellar results.