She is quite traditional. She likely dreams of a perfect match for her son that stays home every day cooking divine organic meals, cleaning the house from top to bottom, shopping for clothes for her son and getting the best possible deals.

I love her son unconditionally. It’s interesting that I have been referring to him as “her son.” In a way, that may be why I hate her. Nothing about my life with my husband seems truly to be mine or even ours. She wants to live every moment of it for us.

She shows up on a whim and stays for weeks at a time, no matter what else we may have planned. She stays with us and makes passive-aggressive, critical comments about every morsel I eat, how I clean, how the furniture is configured, what I need to buy, how often I am away, how I exercise, how I should exercise more, or less. She does everything she can to make me feel powerless and like a failure in my home. She is brash and opinionated with a veneer of “Oh, bless your heart! I love how laid-back you are that the floors are so dusty! That would drive me insane, but you just go on about your life as though nothing is wrong!” “I can’t imagine ever eating anything so rich! You are so blessed to have such a strong stomach and to care so little about your figure!” Every time I try to establish some boundaries about her involvement, she breaks through them.  Every time I try to simply appease her by, say, taking her advice, she is dissatisfied with the result. Every time she gives me those “compliments,” I choke out a “thank you” all the while feeling that there is simply no appropriate response.

She does whatever she can to register her disapproval of everything I am, and I am so, so resentful of her no matter how I try to tell myself that I should view putting up with her as an act of love for my husband. I am having a harder and harder time being civil to her when she makes disrespectful comments. My husband is a fiercely loyal son and bristles at any mention that she may be treating me inappropriately. I feel trapped. I cannot escape her. I am terrified that this anger, this hatred will cost me someone I love when I inevitably say something rude as a retort to one of her jabs. I know that is coming and I dread it. I know that in that case I will be very much in the wrong and will likely confirm what she has expected all along.

Please, you are such a lovely writer. I would love your insight.

How can I stop hating my mother-in-law?

Dear Mother-in-Law Hater,

Wow.

You are dealing with someone who has a rare black belt in the art of putdown-fu. She is a trained master of tai-shit-on-you.

She’s a badass. That comment about you not caring about your figure is deep black magic.

This is a woman who, when she meditates, the Buddha looks nervous.

It’s not that you are holding a grudge, or that she’s your mother-in-law. It’s that she’s a difficult person.

You need counter-moves.

The good news: There’s help. The bad news: There’s help.

I mean, if there’s that much help, there must be that many difficult people.

Scary.

I wish I could say I’m an expert but I’m not. My one counter-move involves taking a deep breath, counting to three and running out the door.

But you can’t run. You have to stand and take it.

So get some help.

Google “difficult people” and see what I mean.

Here are some of the less-annoying and almost-helpful sites imho:

Think Simple Now has a few good ideas.

So does www.dealingwithdifficultpeople.com.

There is a ton of other advice out there on how to deal with this and much of it is useful and good … if you can put it into practice.

That’s the key. If you have a friend who is great at handling difficult people, spend some time with her. Do you know anyone like that? Think hard. Difficult people thrive in certain businesses and lifestyles. Fashion, the arts and entertainment businesses, as well as fast-paced, high-risk businesses such as high finance  … wherever difficult people thrive, you will find also the people who are good at handling difficult people.

So seeking informal help among your set of friends is one good solution. Talking it out and learning from people who deal with this a lot may help.

Here is another thought. It’s hard to put into words. But I have seen people do it. To me, it seems like they have hit on a tone, a magical tone that they use on the difficult person. Or a way of positioning themselves psychologically. Perhaps it is partly physical posture, too. I know this is vague. It’s like … a center of strength. Find yours.

And the other thing, which I know I suggest a lot — because it’s so often needed! — is to find a therapist with whom you can work on ways, strategies to cope with her. There are so many problem-solving techniques, ways to limit your contact with her, setting boundaries, stuff like that, but they are hard to implement without somebody to talk them over with. If a therapist is not available, then use this friend of yours you’ve identified as your local difficult-person expert.

You just need some help dealing with a difficult person, and the Secret Service is unfortunately not in your employ.

Wow, wouldn’t that be something — sleek guys in suits with earpieces.

But no. No such luck.

Perhaps she wouldn’t have called her daughters in tears, over and over, about him and his disregard for her property, her reputation in the neighborhood, and her marriage. Perhaps the cycle would have been broken by her refusal to participate in it, or instead of breaking his promises, he would have stopped collecting broken-down cars and parking them closer and closer to her; he would have paid rent, or at least utilities, for his use of the property; he would at least have given the mange treatments and vitamins to the dog he couldn’t take to the vet himself, leaving his sister to watch the veterinarian use his hands to read the story of the Chihuahua’s broken teeth and mysterious back fractures. He would have cleared up the area around his motor home, washed his piles of untreated laundry, gotten mouse traps, stopped dumping his sewage tanks in the creek behind her home.

Perhaps he would have made it possible for her to talk about his drinking and abuse of prescription narcotics, to express her support, suggest a treatment program, do something about it without fearing his anger and insanity. In this imaginary family, when he sat at the table and made sparkling conversation on holidays, or when he charmed her friends with tales of his latest trip to an exotic locale, his niece could be full of admiration every year, never going through the disillusionment of knowing he would never change and that her mother would never stop tearing herself apart expecting him to do so.

Our family not being this average family, my uncle continues to use and drink, has never stopped taking emotional and financial advantage of my mother, and he has just had his second heart attack since March. His uncontrolled diabetes has damaged his foot, which is now infected with MRSA, and it looks like there is finally nothing she can do to prevent him from killing himself this time. He always threatened suicide in a roundabout way whenever she tried to make him leave her property (he came for a visit in the late 1980s and got sucked into the family web of enabling and abuse). Somehow it got written into their relationship that his job was to destroy himself, and her job was to do everything possible to stop him from doing that, often at great personal cost. She is already devastated, and of course she will be after his death, and she will probably want to continue to call and lament with me for hours at a time about this sad loss.

My question is, I’ve always resisted her attempts to make me pretend he is a father figure to me (she used to nag me about sending him a Father’s Day card), but what can I do to help them heal once he is gone? There’s no longer any benefit to me in refusing to play the family game, but I’m strangely attached to my role as the “Don’t let him take advantage of you, and you’ll both be healthier” jerk in the family. Would it be better for me to act like my sister? When Code Enforcement laid down the law about the abandoned vehicles, cargo container and general litter on my parents’ property, she offered to take my uncle in, which we all know would have been a 30-year commitment, even though all of the junk was his and would probably come with him. Sometimes I feel like we’re living in a Faulkner novel. Are we?

Well, hopefully you can show me the way forward so that we don’t end up hating each other. (“Dad” is likely to say some pretty uncharitable, but true, things, and I’ll be willing to bite my tongue if it helps everyone hang on.)

Thanks for your help and good luck with this one!

Anse Bundren’s Niece

Dear Niece,

“I’m strangely attached to my role,” you say. And that, I would say, is the place for you to start unraveling the knotted ropes that bind you.

No matter the circumstance and history, no matter the right and wrong of it, no matter the promises made: You are more important than this postage stamp of land you come from; your mission is larger, your spirit is fresher, your purpose here on earth far different from this collection of characters. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to become unattached to your role.

This means, in a sense, becoming naked; it means walking away from everything that clothes you in pity and self-denial, in self-righteousness and toughness, in being the knowing one, in being the one who broke the chain or led the family out of its chaos or rescued her mother. It means stepping out of the narrative, if you will. The narrative is powerful, but it is not everything. It is not the spirit. You have a mission apart from your involvement in this family. I suggest you turn your attention to your own personal mission.

I often suggest to people not that they change their lives wholesale but that they make small adjustments in emphasis. I do this because I have observed that change is a slow process. We are like huge ocean liners at cruising speed; we cannot turn on a dime. When we commit to making changes, we find many, many ongoing processes resist the change. We are like factories or cities; there is a lot going on behind the scenes. We meet resistance. We are like presidents who would like to decree and find their decrees obeyed. There are entrenched forces, committees, whole armies working silently against us when we decide to change. So it does not happen fast. So we begin by shifting our emphasis.

I suggest you shift your emphasis from what to do about your family, and how to do it, to what to do. Ask yourself what you want to do. Not what must be done or should be done but what do you want to do. What is it that’s been nagging at you? And you might even ask yourself what great but daunting task or adventure you have been using your family to avoid. If your family went away, what would you do with your time? Find this thing, or if you know what it is already, then simply admit it to yourself wholeheartedly: This is the thing that gives me happiness and meaning! This is the thing I was put here to do!

Then do that thing. Accept the torment and brokenhearted outrage that your movement out of the stifling circle of family dependence will spark. Move out of this cycle of violent degradation. Accept that you cannot fix these people or change these people or rescue these people. Accept that life goes on. Find your path and walk it.

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The findings suggest that there are hundreds of deaths and many more costly illnesses each year from health problems that breast-feeding may help prevent. These include stomach viruses, ear infections, asthma, juvenile diabetes, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and even childhood leukemia.

The magnitude of health benefits linked to breast-feeding is vastly underappreciated, said lead author Dr. Melissa Bartick, an internist and instructor at Harvard Medical School. Breast-feeding is sometimes considered a lifestyle choice, but Bartick calls it a public health issue.

Among the benefits: Breast milk contains antibodies that help babies fight infections; it also can affect insulin levels in the blood, which may make breast-fed babies less likely to develop diabetes and obesity.

The analysis studied the prevalence of 10 common childhood illnesses, costs of treating those diseases, including hospitalization, and the level of disease protection other studies have linked with breast-feeding.

The $13 billion in estimated losses due to the low breast-feeding rate includes an economists’ calculation partly based on lost potential lifetime wages — $10.56 million per death.

The methods were similar to a widely cited 2001 government report that said $3.6 billion could be saved each year if 50 percent of mothers breast-fed their babies for six months. Medical costs have climbed since then and breast-feeding rates have increased only slightly.

About 43 percent of U.S. mothers do at least some breast-feeding for six months, but only 12 percent follow government guidelines recommending that babies receive only breast milk for six months.

Dr. Larry Gray, a University of Chicago pediatrician, called the analysis compelling and said it’s reasonable to strive for 90 percent compliance.

But he also said mothers who don’t breast-feed for six months shouldn’t be blamed or made to feel guilty, because their jobs and other demands often make it impossible to do so.

“We’d all love as pediatricians to be able to carry this information into the boardrooms by saying we all gain by small changes at the workplace” that encourage breast-feeding, Gray said.

Bartick said there are some encouraging signs. The government’s new health care overhaul requires large employers to provide private places for working mothers to pump breast milk. And under a provision enacted April 1 by the Joint Commission, a hospital accrediting agency, hospitals may be evaluated on their efforts to ensure that newborns are fed only breast milk before they’re sent home.

The pediatrics academy says babies should be given a chance to start breast-feeding immediately after birth. Bartick said that often doesn’t happen, and at many hospitals newborns are offered formula even when their mothers intend to breast-feed.

“Hospital practices need to change to be more in line with evidence-based care,” Bartick said. “We really shouldn’t be blaming mothers for this.”

Bong Joon-ho, the young Korean director whose international hit “The Host” offered a strange blend of monster movie, slapstick comedy and emotional family drama, may be just about ready to join Park on the world stage. (Bong, Park and Hong Sang-soo, who makes shambling, indie-ish character comedies, are drinking buddies and often presented as the three leading figures on the ambitious edge of Korean cinema.) Bong’s new “Mother” –  which has already played the Cannes, Toronto and New York festivals — lacks the zany pop impact of “The Host” and probably isn’t destined to be a big smash, but it’s a slippery, marvelously crafted drama that suggests the psychological thrillers of Hitchcock or Henri-Georges Clouzot transposed to present-day Korea.

At the core of “Mother” is the complicated relationship between a simple, perhaps mildly disabled young man named Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) and his unnamed mother (played by Korean TV legend Kim Hye-ja), the widowed proprietor of a small flower shop. Both actors were previously unknown to me, but even as the plot of “Mother” spirals from normal domestic drama into nightmare, they portray the haunted nuance of the mother-son bond with extraordinary complexity and compassion. Do-joon’s mother has grown prematurely old with worry, literally tormented by the thought that something terrible could befall him. (And so, of course, it does.)

As for Do-joon, he may be a socially maladroit, lovable-looking mop top who lacks an adult-level intellect, but that doesn’t mean he’s mindless or stupid. If Kim Hye-ja’s wounded, scheming, half-mad performance is the showstopper here, running the gamut from Medea to Miss Marple to Lady Macbeth, Won Bin’s may be even better. One of the keys to “Mother” is that Do-joon knows and understands more than he lets on, the whole way through the story, and feels the same conflicted emotions toward his mom — love and loathing, intense yearning and a desire for independence — as does any other post-adolescent male.

At this point in Bong’s career, he seems to specialize in taking well-established narrative formulas — the monster movie in “The Host,” the police procedural in “Memories of Murder” — and pulling them apart at the seams. This one you might call the wrong-man thriller. “Mother” has a slow and relatively genial opening, but a muttering, ominous undertone runs beneath it the whole time. Do-joon and his no-account best friend, Jin-tae (Jin Goo), get in trouble for attacking a group of rich and prominent golfers after a traffic accident, but the incident is only a comic preview of the tragedy to come. When a local schoolgirl is found dead — the first murder local cops can remember — Do-joon becomes an easy target. He was wandering the neighborhood drunk and alone, has no alibi, and walked right past the girl minutes before her death. He can’t even remember how he got home, and when the police ask him to sign a confession, he does. Case closed.

Do-joon’s mother is of course the only person in town who believes he is innocent, and in the face of public indifference and ridicule must turn gumshoe, defense attorney and shrink in her efforts to free him. Entirely alone, she must hunt down Jin-tae — who seems to have disappeared, perhaps after framing Do-joon — hire thugs, pursue missing witnesses and investigate the dead girl’s family, which has secrets of its own. More important still, she must shake Do-joon from his prison lethargy and somehow jog his memory, since the evidence suggests he was very near the murder scene.

You could certainly describe “Mother” as an impeccably realized murder mystery, whose clues are so cleverly woven into the story that you won’t see them until they all click into place. But Bong is pushing past the constraints of the genre into claustrophobic psychological portraiture: Kim’s increasingly disheveled and obsessive character is both hero and monster, protector and destroyer. She is driven by the most basic of human emotions — a parent’s unconditional love for her child — and also blinded by it, to the point that she barely notices her own amoral and ruthless behavior.

This is a radically different kind of movie from “The Host,” which was constructed around a lovable if ridiculous group of central characters. Bong never allows us to fully understand Do-joon and his mother, let alone like them, and he preys on the misguided assumptions we’re likely to make. Some viewers will find “Mother” a cold or mannered film by comparison, and I guess it is. But its combination of dazzling cinematic craft, psychological insight and black humor make this one of the year’s moviegoing musts — and even or especially at her most deranged, Kim Hye-ja’s amazing mother is profoundly, passionately human.

“Mother” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It opens March 19 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Washington; March 26 in Austin, Texas, Hartford, Conn., Honolulu, New Haven, Conn., Phoenix, Portland, Ore., Sacramento, Calif., and Santa Cruz, Calif.; and April 2 in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Monterey, Calif., Nashville, Salt Lake City and San Antonio, Texas, with more cities to follow.