Eliana Osborn

We take weekend turns. He does vacations and summers. Literally. He takes them away. It is great.

My sister Liz is full of wisdom, like my favorite quote I’ve shared with practically everyone I know: “Every pair of underwear has two good sides.”

Size, like age and salary and whatever else, is just a number. Pretending numbers don’t measure things isn’t helpful. I’m 38 years old: That isn’t good or bad, but it IS different from being 18 or 50.

After years in apartments that should have been condemned, even these sad restroom facilities were vast improvements. And so we stayed, the husband and I, vaguely embarrassed when guests stayed over and commented on the bordello vibe of the bathroom.

Then we had a kid. No working bathtub suddenly seemed like a big deal. And the functional bathroom spaces weren’t places you’d want to hang out. There’s a lot of bathroom time once you’ve got tiny humans. (You’ve been warned.)

I’m proud of you right now, even with all the sadness. Proud of you for heading to rehab, leaving the kids, the man, the house — all of it — to get on top of things. Doing it instead of just thinking about it, talking about it even, hemming and hawing? That’s pretty badass.

I’m not there yet. But I need to be honest—I’m closer to 40 than any other multiple of five.

I get how we want to make our kids successful and everything, right from the start. Feeding into the pressure, here’s the tagline from Starling’s company: “The world’s first word-tracking system that can improve your child’s trajectory for life.”

You know how someone can give you a compliment that you know isn’t true? Like, they tell you a dress looks good when you are absolutely certain that is not the case? But if they keep saying it looks good, you start to think “Yeah... this looks good.”

1. Write a damn letter.

I’m not a fan of repeating things over and over so that they lose their meaning. "Pledge: a solemn promise or agreement." It is that extra level, the solemnity, that makes me uncomfortable with casual usage.