I love my mother dearly, but (there's always a But!), she frustrates the CRAP out of me.
She and I had an extremely rough patch in our relationship - there were about 6 months my junior year in college when, after a nasty blowout, we didn't really communicate (though we did, icily, speak to each other), and it took us well over a year after that period to get back to friendly terms again. Things got much better, eventually, but I can't say that I will ever forget how painful and difficult that time was.

Things have been coming up again - not anything towards me, but her and my dad's handling of situations - that have really got me bang my head against the wall. Poor J, he gets such an earful after I get off the phone with her. His response is, "Yeah, you talk tough after hanging up with her - why don't you tell her what you're telling me? She needs to hear some tough love." And yes, maybe I should say these things. But I'm scared of the repercussions. I already had to have a Come-To-Jesus (so to speak) intervention-type conversation with my parents, and even though I knew it was for their own good, and even though they reacted positively, I was so terrified of things going awry, and it fracturing the relationship again. My dad would be much less defensive, and much more forgiving, than my mom would be. But it's something that they would both need to hear, and neither would be happy about.

I'm just not sure how to structure my current opinions into an, "I love you and I'm concerned" framework like I did before. My gut response is, "You're being idiots and you need to stop - you are more and more becoming a pain in my ass, with no end in sight." Does Word have some kind of Difficult Conversations template that I can follow?

Sigh.