What is the bare minimum, though? The mother has said that she talks to the daughter once a week. It’s her first semester at a highly competitive university. Surely a once a week check-in phone call is pretty close to what anyone would call “acceptable,” let alone “the bare minimum.”

Okay. I can cop to that error on my part.

I feel like her eyes keep throwing me off, though. They were always big, but now they look sort of manic.

She had a nose job ages ago (which I think toned down her unique face, but was still tastefully done), and she’s clearly having some botox, but yeah — it’s all really subtle.

I suspect that being a global superstar at 17 results in a less-than-well-adjusted adult.

I adore her, but does she look a little bit like Lindsay Lohan in that instagram shot to anyone else?

No — we’re picking up on clear signs within the letter itself. Put it this way: if this woman comes off like this much of a dick in a letter that she wrote trying to position herself as the tragic victim, and her daughter as the neglectful villain, then what would the other side of this story even look like?

The mother states in the letter that her daughter has indeed taken a moment to inform her that she’s in class — probably by text — and yet the mother keeps calling while she’s in class. How many times does the daughter need to text, “I’m in class right now” before the mom learns to just e-mail her daughter and ask…

The mom thinks waiting isn’t acceptable.

Thank you for “calm down”-ing a woman on a feminist blog. That’s just great.

You know, if she was willing to e-mail her daughter and say, “Look — we love you and want to support you, but we aren’t made of money and college is very expensive. Would it be okay if we considered your tuition your Christmas gift this year?” I guarantee you the kid would be fine with it.

I can pretty much guess the daughter’s side of things:

You are, as always, the voice of reason.

That’s the sad part of all of this — people with healthy parental relationships can’t understand what it’s like to have a constant sense of dread that comes with a manipulative parent.

Really? So if she beat her daughter, or emotionally abused her for years, the daughter should still bow and scrape if her mom picks up some bills?

Yep. The mother isn’t asking for advice on how to build a better relationship with her daughter, she isn’t asking to know why her daughter might be ducking her calls, she isn’t even asking how to make a good contact schedule.

Not necessarily. If she had a rough idea of when her daughter is in class, then she doesn’t risk phoning her when she can’t answer. If she was willing to work out a schedule with her daughter for contact, a lot of these problems wouldn’t be problems.

I understand your argument, but I think part of the reason people have responded so strongly to you is because you keep accusing people of “projecting” for sharing an opposing viewpoint. That’s a rude assumption all its own, and very likely to get a bad response.

But you are assuming that what’s been written is the truth, even though the mother contradicts herself numerous times in a short space of writing.

Even though the math she presents makes it clear that she does.