While I’m away, readers give the advice.
On noting that a husband’s chummy female colleague is single: Believe it or not, we single women are not perpetually on the prowl for other women’s husbands.
If a spouse’s co-worker is crossing boundaries, then she’s crossing boundaries, whether she is married, single, in a polygamous relationship, dating a box turtle or whatever. That she is single is beside the point and to assume the risk level goes up because she’s single is an insult to single people. Just had to get that off my (voluptuous, Jessica Rabbit-esque, husband-stealing) chest.
J.
On protecting young children from germs: I still watch little kids with shock and awe when they do my favorite urky thing — running their hands all the way along any handrail, escalator rail, wall, row o’ spittoons that they encounter at hand-running level, in any of our planet’s finest sinkholes, then on faces, PBJ’s, etc. And no one ever got cholera in my household, astonishingly.
P.
On one of the many fantastic reasons to get over yourself by the time your children reach adulthood: My sister was the first grandchild and therefore golden, and I was the disappointing second girl. My parents were adamant that two children was the limit barring any accident, so there was never a grandson to carry on the family name and it was my fault for being born the wrong sex.
I give great credit to my parents, my mom especially, for teaching me to respect my grandmother but to see the ridiculousness in her attitude, understand it was her problem not mine and not take her rejection to heart. As we got older, my sister became more aware of the favoritism and she often would get more incensed about it than I did.
My grandmother has been dead many years. It still saddens me to think how her bitterness drove a wedge between her and her only two grandchildren, and how lonely she must have been.
ANONYMOUS
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