Dear Prudence,

I am 19 years old, and a few months ago I came out to my parents and siblings. Everyone has been very accepting and loving. The problem is this: My younger sister told my uncle and aunt that I am a lesbian. (It was not done maliciously.) They’re top-of-the-line homophobes. They told my grandmother, who is now banning me from Christmas festivities that we celebrate every year.

I told my parents to just go without me and, while reluctant, they would like to go just to smooth things over. As we get closer to Christmas, I am getting depressed at the thought of being alone for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I could go to my friend’s house, but that seems pathetic. Please help!

A new survey has found that dads might be taking a lot more time for themselves than moms in heterosexual households.

Conducted by online retailer Zulily, the survey found that 68 percent of moms only take one to five hours per week of "me time" while, according to Parents, results showed that dads take six hours or more.

Parents also noted that an earlier study from Zulily found that moms were reporting 31 percent less time to themselves since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

"Often, moms carry the mental load of doing the 'extra' tasks at work and at home," Lindsay C. Malloy, Ph.D., told Parents. "Maybe others rely on you because you always say 'yes,' and now might be a good time to try to change this pattern by putting your foot down."

My parents are currently trying to “help” my 29-year-old brother by allowing him to move out to their new beach house and subsidizing his rent so he can get a fresh start in life.

My parents have always seemed to favor my brother, and I was finally able to heal and move on from the hurt a few years ago. I am two years younger and my husband and I have our own house, own two new cars, and have two stable incomes.

I have worked for everything that I have in life, and I am grateful for how I was raised because being forced to earn everything, including my parents affection, has allowed me to have the life I do now

My parents have always supported my brother emotionally and financially. They currently pay for his phone plan, his cell phone, his car loan — after he totalled his last car two weeks ago — and now his rent.

He depends on them for almost everything in life. They are encouraging him to move to get a fresh start on their dime instead of taking a leap and getting an apartment. They are doing this because they didn’t want him to have a mortgage.

Meanwhile, I am finishing my accounting degree before sitting for the CPA (my husband and I are paying 100%), and my parents are encouraging me to NOT get my master’s degree because it’s useless and would make my brother feel worse. They say that we are already married and have a house so why do we need more.

Minnesota’s major hospitals and healthcare systems are stepping up their urgency ahead of Thanksgiving this week with a messaging campaign that declares “There’s no more time to be ‘Minnesota Nice.'”

The campaign is called “Fight COVID MN.”

“We need to pull this lever, which is a little bit more in your face,” said Dr. Rahul Koranne, the president and CEO of the Minnesota Hospital Association.

One of the first two posters shows a healthcare worker in PPE with text that says, “We’re not the front line. You are. We’re your last chance.”

The other reads, “We’re sure it’s good, but is Grandma’s pumpkin pie really to die for?”

“I think it’s time to get pretty aggressive,” said Dr. Omobosola Akinsete, HealthPartners’s chair of infectious diseases.

Throughout my life, ever since my earliest memory, I have never even spared a single, solitary thought on the idea that I was in any way unequal to a man. It never crossed my mind that I would not have my own career, be in any way financially dependent on a wallet with testicles. It never occurred to me that a woman could not run the country (I was born under Thatcher), that a woman could not be a boss (my mum was one) that a woman could not shoot, ride and fight like a man (yes, I may have watched a lot of Calamity Jane and Buffy growing up).

Gender inequality? It was a systemic issue to be toppled, sure, but not a lived reality for me.

And yet now, at 31, I find myself wrestling with a belated and thoroughly unpleasant notion.

We are not equal.

Why? Because I’m in that decade, the one where marriage and babies becomes, not a ‘one day’ concern, but an approaching reality. And yet- should I be lucky enough to have a baby- the idea of having one fills me with an absolute, vicelike dread. Because it may take two to bonk that baby into existence, but after the fun part’s over; it’s all on me.

Wearing a mask is important. For you and those around you. For elected officials? Not so much.

Actually, all the COVID rules are for us, not them. COVID-19, and the accompanying lockdowns, have made it painfully clear: We plebes have to follow the rules; the elites do not.

Start with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who last week groveled for forgiveness after being caught attending a large birthday dinner at The French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley. When pictures from the event surfaced, the hypocrisy was glaring: The governor was seen with his wife at a large table full of maskless lobbyists, all sitting in close proximity.

But, hey: You’re not the governor — so if you want to celebrate Thanksgiving in his state, remember: “No more than three households, including your own,” at the gathering, and keep your distance.

Newsom isn’t the only one to live it up while everyone suffers. Gov. Cuomo, for example, is rarely seen in a mask, yet his Twitter feed never stops harassing you to “mask up.” (And, by the way, he’s just thrilled with himself over his handling of the COVID-19 crisis, even though it resulted in more deaths than any other state and, according to The New York Times, seeded the virus throughout the country.)

As the nation cracks down on group activities so close to the Thanksgiving holiday, Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, has told Oregon's residents to call the cops if they see coronavirus violations.

“This is no different than what happens if there's a party down the street and it's keeping everyone awake,” Brown said in an interview Friday. “What do neighbors do [in that case]? They call law enforcement because it's too noisy. This is just like that. It's like a violation of a noise ordinance.”

“Oregon is on a steep and stark slope of rising coronavirus cases,” said Patrick Allen, director of the health department. “But we aren’t powerless in the face of this virus. Because it depends on us to slow the spread. Your choices make a difference.”

Millions of Americans are carrying on with their travel plans ahead of Thanksgiving weekend despite the CDC's urgent warnings to stay home as the number of daily cases and hospitalizations in the country continue to hit record highs.

Confirmed cases in the U.S. for the disease topped 12 million on Saturday as more than 193,000 new infections were recorded in the US on Friday. This broke the previous record for the largest single-day spike on Thursday - and over 82,000 patients are now hospitalized across the country.

Daily deaths also skyrocketed to 2,015, the highest number of fatalities per day since May during the initial peak of the virus, according to health data from Johns Hopkins University.

The alarming surge shows the nation is facing a second wave of the coronavirus this winter that could be more dangerous and widespread than the initial outbreak earlier this year.

'When you look at what's happening now, the rate of rise is dramatically different,' White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator, Dr Deborah Birx told CNN. 'This is faster. It's broader. And what worries me, it could be longer.'

It has also sparked fears among health experts that Thanksgiving travel and holiday gatherings next week will only fuel the spread of the virus and prolong the length of the pandemic.

My husband and I have been together for four years and married for one. I love him immensely and would do just about anything for him—except have kids. We discussed this before getting married, and I was indifferent. I pushed past not wanting to get married, so I thought I’d be able to push past how I felt about raising children.

Then I came up with a solution that may be extremely harmful to us or may be the answer to our prayers. I’ve suggested he co-parents with someone local, with whom he can have shared custody. He would be able to interact with his child every day—nurture, love, and raise them. The child can live with us occasionally, and I could be like an aunt: caring but ultimately not responsible. My husband did not initially like this idea. He saw it as intentionally having an “outside” child and felt he’d be painted the unfaithful partner whose wife was gracious enough to accept his infidelity. He argued that no one would believe that it was my choice. After the nth conversation, I think he realized that what was indifference from me has turned into an actual no. So now he’s come around.

But now a new problem has arisen: Hearing him talk about this potential child and opportunity and how he would spend hours a day away so he could get maximum time with this child has made me … jealous? I’m not even sure what this feeling is, because I can’t identify it. I don’t even recognize myself—I’ve turned into a monster who is threatened by a nonexistent child. I actually feel ashamed. Now I’m stuck. On one hand, if we negotiate a co-parenting situation, he could be satisfied and even happy. Yet this feeling I’m having is starting to get worse. I’m thinking about all the possible ways it could go wrong: custody battles, garnished wages, him leaving me for this woman he will be co-parenting with, and (shamefully) my feelings being hurt. I don’t know if we’d survive, and I feel he’d blame me if it went awry. On the other hand, he wants kids, and there’s a very real possibility he could leave. There’s a part of me that says I could just have his kids and solve this problem, but then I’d be the miserable one. Is there a solution somewhere that I’m not seeing?

—His and Not Hers

Sandy Kretschmer imagines her son Henry returning home from college, dropping his bags and then giving her a big hug. But she knows the reality of this homecoming may be a lot different.

"I'll probably have a mask on, and he'll have a mask on when I hug him," she says.

Henry plans to take a COVID-19 test a few days before he leaves Iowa State University where he's a junior, and he'll self-quarantine until he heads home to Chicago.

"There are students who are choosing to stay in the dorms because they have family members who are high risk," she says.

She recommends students take another test when they get home, and in the meantime, they should stay masked up after they return home and keep 6 feet away from other family members.

Scientists have developed a new interactive map that shows the risk of contracting coronavirus anywhere in the US in real-time.

The COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool tells Americans their odds of encountering at least one person with the virus in every county at an event with a crowd size ranging from 10 people to 5,000 people.

This means you can assess the risk of one coronavirus-positive individual being at a 10-person dinner party, a Thanksgiving gathering with 25 guests, a 100-person wedding or a concert with 1,000 attendees.

Public health experts are sounding the alarm about the trajectory of the pandemic in the United States as the coronavirus spreads through the country largely unabated and officials muse aloud about the possibility of fresh lockdowns.

“Our hospitals are full,” Megan Ranney, an emergency medicine professor at Brown University, said in an interview. “Our workers are getting sick. And it is simply overwhelming the system.”

The rapid rise in hospitalizations could foreshadow a long period of rising deaths, said Scott Gottlieb, former director of the Food and Drug Administration. Although improvements in care have pushed the mortality rate below 1 percent in the United States, 1,549 people died of the virus Wednesday, the highest toll since April.

Frieden tweeted that the United States has entered “the exponential phase” of virus spread and that the situation will worsen significantly before it improves. But he emphasized that policy decisions have an impact, and throwing in the towel is the wrong solution.

“If people on the whole just go to the store one less time a week, you could substantially reduce spread,” Gottlieb said on “Squawk Box.”

The holiday season, meanwhile, is a looming danger that Ranney expects will lead to a “deadly” spike in infections. The virus’s prevalence across the country means that this is the worst time for people to increase their risk of transmission by attending family-centric celebrations, she said.

An education watchdog in the U.K. found that some children have regressed due to COVID-19-related school closures and restrictions. A report from Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, says some kids have fallen back in basic skills – and some who were greatly impacted have even forgotten how to use a fork and knife.

One is the "hardest hit" group of young kids. This group has suffered from time out of school and has gone backwards on words and numbers. This group has also reverted to diapers after being potty-trained or lost "basic skills" such as using a knife and fork.

The majority of children are in the middle group and "have slipped back in their learning to varying degrees since schools were closed to most children and movement restricted." According to Spielman, the "lost learning is unarguable, but it is hard to assess."

The Ofsted inspectors said older children have lost their "stamina" for reading. The watchdog also warned that older kids might show loss of concentration when returning to school, noting that fights on social media started during the lockdown are now "being played out in the classroom."

My husband and I have been together for seven years and married for three. We have a 1-year-old daughter together.

It took me a long time to get into a relationship; I wanted to find someone I could get along with, but also in-laws I could get along with, because I grew up watching my parents fight about their parents all the time. When my husband and I first met, his family was very kind to me. In fact, his family and I often joke that I married him because his family was so awesome.

After I gave birth to our daughter, everything changed. I am suddenly being judged for not being a good mom, for not having a job, for not losing my pregnancy weight fast enough. My husband does not want to be stuck in the middle, and even though he’ll speak to his parents about this, nothing gets resolved, because he doesn’t push them for any kind of resolution. He basically tells them something they did wasn’t nice, they acknowledge it and sometimes apologize, and then they make more unnecessary comments.

My in-laws purchased a home for us after the birth of our baby. I realize now that this purchase came with a lot of strings attached. They want to see their granddaughter whenever it is convenient for them—not for us or when it’s best for our daughter. They don’t practice social distancing. When I bring this up to my husband, he tells me that we need to be accommodating to his parents because they purchased the home for us and we’d be considered ungrateful. I tell him that I’d be happy to move and rent if I would have more control over my life and my daughter’s. He says his parents would view this as a “slap in the face.”

As much as I love my husband, I feel like the relationship I have with my in-laws is making this marriage difficult, because at the end of the day, he’ll choose his parents’ feelings over mine.

I don’t want my daughter growing up to see us fighting about her grandparents, as I did with my parents. Many times I’ve found myself holding my tongue to keep the peace. I want to set clear boundaries with my in-laws but also have a great relationship with them.

Do you have any insight for me?

Anonymous
Toronto

Q. My husband’s “Likes”: We have close family friends with a beautiful and charming 19-year-old daughter. She is like a niece to us. My husband has made her uncomfortable twice by remarking, “Mmm! Look at Kelly!” when she’s entered a room dressed up for an outing or work. (The “Mmm!” being the sort of sound one makes in appreciation of a delicious-looking food, for example.) Her discomfort was clear—she turned red and exited the room both times.

He now is following her on Instagram and “likes” EVERY single post she puts up. (And she posts frequently!) I’ve spoken to him about not commenting on her appearance, especially with the loud, “Mmm!” noise. He seemed slightly mortified. Do I need to suggest he stop with all the Instagram attention? It seems kinda creepy to me, but perhaps I am seeing something that isn’t even an issue. I remember receiving unwanted attention from middle-aged men in my teen years, so I could be projecting here.