All in the family

If my children have doubts about matrimony, the reason might well lie in the family

Just when you thought the only problem you are likely to face vis-à-vis your parents is their old age care and health, my parents dropped a bomb on us. “We are separating,” said my mother. They’d had a misunderstanding and my mother’s patience was running thin. We couldn’t get my father’s version of things, since he doesn’t hear well—or at all—over the phone, and so had to accept my mother’s account of the strain in their relationship. He wasn’t eating, she said, so she was starving too. He’d moved out of their bedroom and was sleeping in the lounge (though