This morning, seventeen families woke up and remembered, for the first time, that their babies, mothers, fathers weren't coming home.  Because they went to school, or to work with kids, and a former student shot them to death.  They are not the first seventeen families to wake up to this reality.  They won't be the last. 

My daughter asked me the other day what my biggest pet peeve is.  I stammered for a minute, and then said something like, "when people leave their stuff all over the floor instead of putting it away."  Which IS a big one, and also very mom-appropriate.

I guess I am probably starting to look older, although I am pretty delusional about it--and not in a self-deprecating way.  Like, "I think I look like I always have" way.  Maybe I was too hard on myself before, maybe I'm willfully blind to the wrinkles now, I don't know.  But I'm in the middle.

It begins with a new kind of conference, which you have to keep on the down low, because once the cat is out of the bag outside of Pantsuit Nation, you know people will start to flip their lids.

But because I can't keep my mouth shut about all the wisdom I've obtained--mostly the hard way--over the past few years, here are my must-have tips to bringing a new life into the world:

I am now old enough that people look to me to be an example.  I'm somebody's mommy.  I'm somebody's mentor.  I'm somebody's role model--unbelievably.  All of those things are pretty weird.  Somewhere along the way I seem to have grown up and nobody notified me I would have to model good behavior at all times.

"Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyway."   --Glennon Doyle

Literally, almost every woman I know who works in a male-dominated industry has a story. And many of them are not just mildly bothersome, they are like “if it happened to your daughter, you’d be inclined to go kick some ass and make a ton of noise” kinds of stories. Honestly, up until now, I kind of assumed the guys all knew this was the case, even if they weren’t aggressors of this sort.

So I've got a gaggle of kids at this point (there's not that many, but when they are running around me in circles yelling "Mommy!  Mommy! MOMMY!" sometimes it seems like 7 or 8) and I have failed in unique ways with each of them.  I'm sure I've done enough or forgotten enough to keep all of them in therapy for years to come, but some of my failures are really lessons for the harried mom, so I'm making lemonade out of my inadequacies for the benefit of others.