The last thing my mom said to me was, "When I was young ..." and then she died. I had no idea what she was trying to tell me. Then I found a letter she had written to a friend saying that the man she was in love with is my actual biological father.

My dad and I were in shock with the DNA results and now I have spent countless hours trying to find out who this man is. I can't ask anyone as they are all dead and my dad said it must have been this guy who was in town for a short time while attending ammunition-inspector school in Savanna, Ill., but didn't know a name.

I hired an archival researcher and a private investigator but no one can help me. Can you help me? I found out that many people came from all over the U.S. to attend this school and all I need is a list of names from around November 1961.  Please, please help me.

Into the Past

Dear Into the Past,

I love a mystery. I'm tempted to begin investigating myself. But I can't do that. So you will have to keep at it.

It is hard to sustain a search without regular encouragement. So while I can't fly there and help you look, I can offer encouragement to keep looking. Setbacks are to be expected. It will be slow going. You have to keep moving forward.

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I am 24 years old. Sometimes I get so angry that it is hard to function. Other times I get very anxious and I feel like I am on the verge of a breakdown. I think it stems from my parents. I don't know what to do, and I need your advice.

My father is an engineer for a large oil company, and my mother works in a doctor's office. My father has always been steadily employed (although I have lived in three different states growing up because of his job). However, I feel like my family has always been struggling financially. This has deeply affected me, especially when I graduated from college in a time when jobs were difficult to find. One problem is that I am not sure why it is this way -- they live in a nice house, but definitely not one out of their means. They do not buy nice cars, and we did not go on vacations growing up. They do not eat out very often or buy anything that would be considered luxurious.

However, they have filed for bankruptcy twice.

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I recently stumbled upon your column, and have been enjoying your artfully put words of wisdom. I hope you have something similar for me.

I am a 22-year-old recent college graduate with two BAs, a member of the "overeducated and underemployed" community living and working in New York City. I came to New York after graduation in May for an internship opportunity, but mostly in order to stay near my school (where my then-boyfriend continues to attend) and my family -- I grew up in a suburb.

Cary, New York City is bringing me down. I broke up with my ex (thankfully with very little emotional scarring), and have found it easy to maintain my close relationship with my brother via Internet and phone -- he spends most of his time away at school anyway. I have rarely left the East Coast and have only left the country once, on a trip to Canada that I was too young to remember.

I have been to New York City for every field trip, family outing and special occasion.

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Tell me what to do about my child. Really. I Give Up. Here, Sgt. Friday, are the facts. My son was much wanted and loved. Here is what his father and I did: loved him, read to him, helped him get his Eagle Scout, took him to church so he wouldn't end up as bait for some wacky cult later on, set consequences, had his friends over all the time, didn't sweat the small stuff (jump on the couch? Fine. Climb on the roof? Be careful), had family dinner, went on vacations, explained the finer points of Bugs Bunny and Kubrick, got sober (yes, AA was needed), took the boy to Al-Anon, guitar lessons, obtained a psychiatrist, got the orthodontist, and were always available to talk about whatever. And loved him. OK -- so you don't need to wonder about whether he had a good home life -- he did. Not perfect, but good.

Then, in his late teens, he told us that he was transgendered and was a girl. We coped. Since this is my letter, I'll say that I accept her, though I think this is going to be a hard life. But other family members, including her dad, have been very, very accepting. Kept the psychiatrist, added in the hormone therapy under my insurance.

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Like the question "When was the last time you actually read a hard copy of a newspaper?" this kind of query reminds you of both how old you're getting and how quickly the Internet has changed the way we communicate. Such questions typically arise during your billionth boring lament about the horrors of email, texting and your constantly-buzzing smartphone (not that I have one, by the way). And, just as often, you end such conversations with an inkling (or fear, depending on your technophobia and current job) that in a few years most people will answer such rhetorical questions with puzzled looks and not-so-rhetorical ones ("What's a letter, Dad?" or "What's a newspaper, Dad?").

The thing is, though, while I truly can't remember the last time I rustled through newsprint, I can recall the last time I put pen to paper to write a letter -- and it wasn't in some bygone era. It was just one year ago, when I wrote a thank-you note for a birthday present.

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How can I mend my relationship with my father? We've been estranged for two years. The incident that forced me to close the door on him was the day he hit my 4-year-old son. Our relationship was already tense before this incident. In short, he has been married two times since he left my mom over 20 years ago. In each of his new relationships he has chosen to embrace his new wife and family at the expense of my sister and me. My sister and I have taken to calling ourselves our father's stepchildren because that's how we feel he treats us: distant, noncommittal and superfluous.

I can forgive my father for hitting my son. The problem is, I really don't know if I want a relationship with him. He has moved on and his new life is his priority. I sense he wants to be close to me but he does not have the capacity. Our interactions before the incident were perfunctory. He made grand gestures of being present for both my children's births but he is incapable of a more intimate, honest and meaningful relationship.

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Kind note from reader re: yesterday's "only connect" quote: "EM Forster. It is the epigraph to Howard's End."

Thank you for that. (More than one reader pointed this out.)

In my fever, sometimes I work without a net. Go for it. Take a chance. So thanks.

Dear Cary,

I'm having a problem dealing with feelings of bitterness, a bitterness that is drowning my every thought and making everything in life sour along with it.

My parents raised me to be independent, and so I was. They told me to support myself and work for a living. They were hard on me at times. I bore the brunt of their battles with alcoholism and depression, and I left home early. I have been working full-time since I was 17. I put myself through college, I worked hard and took menial jobs (like most). I made sacrifices and compromises, but I don't regret any. I've had a great life so far, a good job, good luck and hard work, a nice house, travel, good friends, etc.  I can't complain about my life. And to top it all off, I've managed to build a good relationship with the very family that was pretty hard on me when I was younger.

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Tomorrow morning I submit my divorce papers to the court with my husband. If I could have anything I wish, I wouldn't be doing this. We'd both be going to counseling and giving it our very best to save our marriage. But he didn't want to, so we are going to be divorced.

We don't have kids, so it's made things easier. We're not fighting about possessions or money. We're just walking away after 15 years of marriage.

We've been separated for nearly two years, and I've been going to counseling all along. He hasn't. I've changed, he hasn't. I still love him. I don't know if he ever really loved me. I've come to accept it, thanks to antidepressants and the love of my many good friends and family -- cousins, who live in a nearby country and whom I see a couple of times a year. I love my husband's big family like my own, and I've done everything to remain close to them. I know they love me and I will continue to see many of them and my nieces and nephews. I would simply die if I thought I couldn't have them in my life anymore. I love them so much. So, it sounds like I'm doing fine all things considered, doesn't it?

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I am a 65-year-old woman who has had a long and interesting life. During a particularly "interesting" time (think job loss, forced relocation, job search) I found myself estranged from my eldest child, a daughter 40 years of age, who had recently become part of a new family. Long story short, we didn't speak much, if at all, for the next three or four years.

Sadly, this all changed when her husband, my new son-in-law, became ill with a terminal cancer. At her urgent request, I moved from my home on the West Coast to their home on the East Coast in order to help during his illness and subsequent passing.

When that sad time came, I realized my daughter couldn't survive financially without my input, so I offered to stay with her until her daughter went into college (about five or six years) and she herself had been able to get a nursing degree. We share the expenses of the household and then spend our own money as we please. There hasn't been any controversy about any of this.

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I'm writing in the hope that you have some advice or perspective to offer about a problem concerning my dad's behavior around young women and girls.

Wow. Just writing that sentence makes this feel more real.

I'm not writing on behalf of myself, but maybe it's easiest to start there. My dad has always been very affectionate, very much a family man, but sometimes touchy-feely in a way that is borderline uncomfortable. Things like his hands stroking a little too far when giving backrubs. It never crossed the line for me enough to say anything about it; during backrubs, for instance, I would just shift. But when I was 11 or 12, some friends of mine staged an intervention to talk about how a couple of them felt they had been inappropriately touched by him -- tickling when they were preteens and not kids anymore, I think was the main thing -- and they wanted to know if he was abusive to me. I reacted in a way that shames me now that I understand more about surviving sexual abuse: I got angry with them and said they were blowing everything out of proportion, that my dad loved us all and our friends and would never hurt us. I lost them as friends shortly afterward. I heard later that they warned new friends of mine about coming over to my house.

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I recently received a wonderful job that gives me a company car and gas card -- all great things to have in this economy. A few months before I got the new job and company car, I bought a brand-new car. Being that my new personal car is now rarely used, I let my mother use it (she gave/loaned my younger brother her old car). These arrangements allow everyone to have a vehicle to get to work and wherever we may need to be.

Recently, my brand-new personal car, that my mother has been driving for months and will continue to drive for months, needed an oil change. She brought it to the shop and got the oil changed. Upon returning home, she asked me for reimbursement. I expressed to my mother that since she is and will be the driver of my new personal vehicle, small routine expenses like gas and oil changes are appropriate expenses for her to cover.

My mother is simply appalled by this. Am I completely wrong in expecting these routine expense payments of her? I have my fair share of student loans, car payments, bills, etc., myself and she is getting a brand-new car for free and avoiding the expense of getting my brother a car as well.

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The first goal was to help indigent people, the second to provide for the care and welfare of dogs. A year later, they said, she deleted the first goal.

So yeah, not a woman very concerned with the plight of man. Puppies, however, how can anyone hate puppies (except Leona's family)? The reason why this is an issue today is that Trouble -- the winner of that great dog lottery -- has died. And not recently, either. According to TMZ, Trouble has been dead since December of 2010. All of Trouble's remaining funds will go toward ... more dog charity.

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Schlafly is out with a new book, co-written with her niece, called "The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know -- and Men Can't Say." In writing about the book, the Los Angeles Times' Meghan Daum interviewed Schlafly's niece, Suzanne Venker. And when Daum asked Venker how Schlafly had managed it all, she surfaced a remarkable piece of information:

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I've been reading your column for quite a while, but I have yet to see any problem similar to mine. I'll get right to the point. I'm in love with a dreamer. I like to dream, too, but I also like to face facts. Neither of us are getting any younger. He's 57, I'm 55. We have known each other for over 40 years.

We dated as teens, but he was a bad boy then. To make a long story short, he went to jail, and I met and married his older half-brother. It was a huge mistake on my part. My marriage only lasted nine years. We didn't keep in touch. When he got out, he married and his lasted 25 years before it also fell apart. Last year he found me through Facebook, and asked me out, and we have been together ever since.

Before I started dating him again, I had been alone for over 10 years. I was quite used to taking care of myself and I think I'm pretty comfortable in my own skin. Other than the time he was in jail, he has never been alone, and seems to be quite uncomfortable with the very idea. He says he wants to marry me, move to a warmer climate, and get a fresh start. That is his dream, but it's not mine. I would love to spend the rest of our lives together, and I would marry him, but I don't want to move.

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I think I have a major problem I am not willing to admit. I drink myself into oblivion every night and my tolerance seems to be increasing. I am obsessed with my own aging and death. My father, a brilliant, well-loved professor who struggled with depression, took his own life when I was 17. Although I've coped with his illness too, I've promised my friends and family I will never do what he did to them.

Unfortunately, I see suicide as my only recourse. I have been a fighter and a survivor for many years. I've run multiple marathons. I've successfully graduated competitive college and graduate schools with honors (and two suicide attempts along the way). I have a great job and I seem to get more offers. The problem for me is that I can't maintain a relationship, and I can't escape this overwhelming feeling of loss. Most of all, I can't stand to be alone.

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Today Human Rights Watch released a report criticizing the U.S. for its lack of paid parental leave policies, finding that America is alone among major nations in its family-unfriendly leave policies. Paid parental leave in most countries is financed either by employers or social security.

The big numbers:

One of the most common work-family supports, paid maternity leave, is practically universal: academic research covering 190 countries shows that as of 2011, 178 countries guarantee paid maternity leave under national law. In nine of the 190 countries, the status of paid leave for new mothers was unclear. Just three countries definitively offer no legal guarantee of paid maternity leave: Papua New Guinea, Swaziland—and the United States.

Another 50+ countries also have paid paternity leave.

In the U.S. meanwhile, the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act allows workers to take unpaid parental leave. That law, though, only covers half the workforce because it exempts companies who have under 50 employees.

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"Which kid?" I said.

"You know which kid," said Doc. "Your mentally retarded kid, Mike."

"Yeah?" I said.

"And I think," Doc went on, "there should be a fence. Right here. Along here. You should build it. Because I just can't do it anymore."

"What kind of fence?" I said.

"I don't care," said Doc. "You just need to get it done! Chain-link. Picket. I don't care! Just a fence. That will stop him."

I thought about it for a few beats. I had just completed a 6-foot picket fence around my backyard. I thought this would contain my 11-year-old son, who has been diagnosed with what they call "severe and profound" mental retardation and autism. Mike was happy in the fenced-in backyard. For about a week. But then he began to search for ways to escape. And he found them. Through the house, through the garage and out. Simple enough. To actually contain him, we would need to watch him closely every minute of every day and night.

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I moved to the U.S. two years ago for a work assignment and I met a guy -- he and I were on (different teams in) the same project, and lived in the same apartment block. He was several years younger than me, and I didn't take him seriously at the start -- maybe I never took him seriously at all. He drank -- and got drunk -- a lot, and even before we were together he had black moods during which he would ignore me and pretend I didn't exist. Our stormy "courtship" lasted a few months during which I said no over and over again -- then I gave in. I thought I knew how to deal with him -- there are alcoholics in my family. I knew better than to complain about the drinking or to try and fix it.

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This is eating me up inside, mostly because I feel guilty all the time. I moved back in with my parents and a sister, and it has not been going well.

We argue all the time, scream and fight. They tell me I'm the worst daughter in the entire world. They curse me out. I curse them out. I say awful things I don't mean. They say things even worse.

Cary, I hate myself after I talk to them. I hate being around them, I hate living in their house, and I hate the way they treat me.

But Cary, I don't want to be like that anymore. I'm trying to move out of my parents' house, but even that is a problem due to finances. Also, my mother won't even let me take my "bed" (which was a gift as a teenager) or a laptop (also a gift when I had graduated high school), out of spite. She knows I can't afford those things, and knows that without them, I cannot work. My mother has been the worst. She resents me, the life I've chosen. In any circumstance, she will pick anyone else in the room over me. In a recent fight, she told me she wished I had never been born, that she didn't consider me to be a member of the family anymore, and that she hoped I'd be happy in hell.

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I'm a 26-year-old American woman living in France. I've been in love with a "perfect on paper" Turkish man (who's 31) for three years. We met in the U.S. shortly before I graduated from college, while he was working abroad. We stayed together somewhat happily through moving to different cities five times, several changes in jobs and varying distances. We've been living in the same city for a year.

I say somewhat happily because I've always felt as though he loved me, but he's always kept me at an arm's distance. I was the first to say "I love you" and waited a year for him to say the same. I asked to move in together, he refused. The excuse? His very tightknit, traditional family. He knows that they expect him to marry a woman of the same race, religion and nationality as theirs. I lose on all three counts.

It's like he lives two separate lives, the one he shares with his family and the one he shares with me. They have no idea that I exist, which bothers me because everyone in my life (family, friends) are aware of my relationship with him. He's always said that he couldn't introduce anyone to his family that he wasn't sure he was going to marry. Culturally, this was unusual for me as I've never made the habit of presenting fiancés to my parents.

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