Yeah, it’s weird. My sister had her first at 24, and mutual friend of ours is just now pregnant with her first at 38. The difference is so stark. I used to feel like OMG 24 IS SO YOUNG TO HAVE A BABY YOU’RE STILL A BABY YOURSELF HOW IS THAT EVEN RESPONSIBLE, but as I’ve seen my friends and family have their first kid…

Not to be a pedant, but Jolie and Pitt are doing family therapy - which is TOTALLY different from couple’s therapy. It’s a whole different set of goals and skills you work on, and in cases where the parents have already divorced is going to de-emphasize the couple to focus on the emotional/psychological needs of the…

No. Abso-fucking-lutely not:

I mean, I grew up with a narcissist for a mother, so the idea of using/abusing your kids for your own perverted benefit is nothing new to me. I’ll cop to blinders about the money part of it, though. We also grew up fuck-ass broke, and between that and the fucked up “parenting” I got, I was left with a pretty screwed…

Why thank you.

The thing is, it’s not even that hard to have a responsible get-together. Especially if you’re rich! Given her status, I’m guessing she has a large property with lots of outdoor space, and might not have even needed to restrict her guest list much beyond what she already did in order to make it safe. And it would be…

Exactly. I grew up in an incredibly dysfunctional family. I can’t say that the trauma of being removed from them would have outweighed the benefit of living with better people - but I can’t say it wouldn’t, either. Considering the very public way the first adoptive family lives and the specific needs of the child, I…

Ew.

Yeah, don’t disagree about that at all.

Yeah, that’s pretty fucking gross.

I mean...you’re probably not wrong. But I have a lot of my own baggage on that score (not being monetized, lol, we were broke af, but the whole not-being-loved-the-way-kids-need-to-be-loved thing) and I try really hard not to foist that baggage onto other families. Shit is complicated, and I have sympathy both from…

Yikes.

absolutely.

I mean, she was doing that mommy shit (ugh) before the adoption, though, right? Can’t really blame her for writing about the parenting issues that were most pressing at the moment. And I don’t know how much money she was bringing in, but adoption is so expensive it just seems impossible to me that she was actually…

Listen. Adoption is such a long, arduous, painful, confusing, emotional, EXPENSIVE process that the idea anyone would or could go through it as some kind of popularity stunt or money-making enterprise (omg) is absurd. I mean, I think vlogging the whole thing like this is in very bad taste, but reasonable minds can…

Class action lawsuits require approval both from the district court and enough members of the class in order to actually settle. This article from the ABA explains it nicely. The bankruptcy matter complicates things significantly, because bankruptcy rules create tiers of individuals/organizations with priority over…

My husband has the absurd idea that any one-piece is a “granny” swimsuit, any two-piece that is not a bikini is lying about being a granny swimsuit, and any bikini that is not simply two tiny triangles up top connected by string, and two slightly different sized triangles on bottom connected by string, in plain black,…

Yeah, I *loved* her as Aunt May, precisely because Peter’s guardians had always been portrayed as kindly, somewhat clueless geriatrics. Tomei’s Aunt May is such a great counterpart for this reading of Spider Man, which is so much more true to the comics. Holland was actually a teenager when he was cast (19), as…

File under “N.” For “No Shit.”

Sometimes you just have to stand there in your wrongness and be wrong. That might mean telling the truth and dealing with the consequences, or it might mean keeping it to yourself and dealing with that emotional burden. Only you can determine which option is the better one based on the specifics of your relationship…