Amy Robach and TJ Holmes Regret Not Having Children
In this week’s breathless installment of the vapid podcasters and shitcanned Schmoopies Amy Robach and TJ Holmes, they regret not having children together.
Is this just another way of TJ helpfully pointing out that Amy is so, so much older than he is, Tracy?
Oh probably. Since last we checked in on the lovebirds, they went to New Orlean’s to celebrate Amy’s 51st birthday, where she got a tattoo and TJ recommitted to drinking.
Exactly the kind of footloose and fancy-free lifestyle that makes you think of parenthood.
Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes recently opened up about not having kids together, with Robach acknowledging that it makes her a “little sad.”
On their podcast, Robach noted that their similar parenting style made her feel like she was “missing out” on having kids with Holmes. The duo both have children from their previous relationships.
Oh, remember when Amy wrote a book about blended families? By “similar parenting style” I assume she means forgetting you have any children whatsoever, blended or otherwise.
FOMO
On the latest episode of “Amy and T.J. Podcast,” Robach and Holmes discussed a shared aspect of their lives. During the conversation, Holmes asked his partner if she thinks they are “missing out on having kids.”
Hey, Amy, you’re my first menopausal girlfriend! Are we missing out because your ovaries have shriveled? HAPPY 51st BIRTHDAY!
Surely my eye would never wander in a town full of drunk, topless coeds.
In response, the former “GMA 3” co-anchor said: “Absolutely. Yes.” She explained, “I see your parenting style, and it’s very similar to mine, and that is a gift.”
I see how you ignore the three children you have for your workplace affairs and it inspires me.
What kind of children would Amy Robach and TJ Holmes have?
Robach continued: “If any of you all out there have a shared parenting style with your partner that makes life so much easier or at least a little bit easier. And it feels good to have a similar mode of operation when it comes to what we want for our kids, what we want to teach them.”
No, I’m sorry Daddy can’t come to your choir recital, Darling. He’s got a date with Amy and Jack Daniels.
“And what I love about you is that you’re willing to let your child not like you in the moment to teach them a lesson to do the right thing. I appreciate that,” she added.
Your children don’t like me. But what I love about you is how you prioritize your fuckbuddy(s) over them. #rightthing
Despite this, Robach admits to moments of sadness, concluding, “So yes, I have multiple times been a little sad that we did not come together at a time where we could have had that option.”
I’m a little sad that my uterus is defunct and that we’ve come together at a time where I have more chin hairs than life options. But I’m sure what we have is special. Look at the younger woman you bred with! And left! I’ll go deal with that cognitive dissonance with marathon running and botox.
But that isn’t the only sadness in Amy’s life.
Some people are mean to Amy.
During Tuesday’s podcast episode, Amy claimed her ex-co-workers disconnected themselves from the fired star.
“There are people who I worked with every single day, who I thought I was close with, who then showed me who they were when they didn’t check in ever. Not once,” the mom of two said.
NO! You don’t say. People you were close with and saw every single day like ANDREW SHUE — didn’t check in with you??
They didn’t care about your hurts or sorrows?
But in Amy’s imagination, people are fascinated with Amy.
The Sun tabloid reports:
One of the questions was about who Amy would choose to interview her in her first sit-down post-scandal.
Amy responded that Today hosts Savannah, 59, and Hoda, 52, would be her first choice, given their close friendship.
“Hoda Kotb. Savannah Guthrie. I’ve known them. I love them. I worked with them. I trust them, probably more than any other journalist because I know them,” the ex-TV star explained.
However, TJ wasn’t as confident in his girlfriend’s selection.
“You going to do that one solo?” he hesitantly asked.
“Well, you were just asking who I would pick. We would obviously have to have a larger conversation about that,” Amy assured.
MY IMAGINARY FRIENDS LOVE ME! CALL ME HODA!!!
Amy wants a life partner. Are you listening, TJ?
Elsewhere on the podcast, the ex-Good Morning America anchor also shared how she wants “a partner for life.”
“That idea of sacrifice, that idea of giving instead of getting, I love that. And it enhances your life to have a partner. I mean there’s nothing I want more I think than that,” she said.
Where can I find a chump, TJ? Who gives instead of gets? Who accepts a lopsided arrangement and devotes themselves utterly to me and my needs? I think a lack of reciprocity would really enhance my life.
Future fake me, TJ. Wedding in Fiji?
Perhaps Amy and TJ should be talking about how they minimise the impact of their poor life choices on their existing children, rather than about creating a whole new generation of victims to be traumatised by their endless f*ckery? But then I suppose that a podcast on “How we owned the consequences of our decisions, blamed no-one else and ensured that no-one else got hurt” wouldn’t be something that they have the emotional intelligence to create.
And speaking of emotional intelligence, I’ve met packets of prawn cocktail crisps (chips for those in the US) with more emotional intelligence than this pair.
LFTT
Speaking of emotional intelligence read the article where Amy says The Bachelor is appropriate for family viewing because it’s educational. She has learned communication skills from the interesting and insightful conversations on the show.
Dear.God.
“That idea of sacrifice, that idea of giving instead of getting, I love that. And it enhances your life to have a partner. I mean there’s nothing I want more I think than that,”
If she had the ability to self-reflect…
I saw a recent picture of the ex, she looks older than she is and just so unhealthy. I actually felt pity for her.
I know I am preaching to the choir, but …
“The idea of sacrifice, that idea of giving instead of getting, I love that. And it enhances your life to have a partner. I mean, there’s nothing I want more than that.”
YOU HAD THAT, YOU FOOL. You had a partner. And you could’ve “sacrificed” your pants-feelings in order to keep that partner. You could’ve sacrificed so that your kids wouldn’t see sordid crap about their family in the newspaper. God, these people.
Wow, the lack of self awareness astounds.
“who
then showed me who they were”
They
had no idea who you were, until you showed them. You lied and conned them just
like you did your spouses.
They
are people who you conned and you risked their livelihood with your antics.
People don’t like that. People don’t like being played for fools.
“People that object to your casual relationship with morality and honesty” notwithstanding, there’s also that reality of “you and your fuckwit friend got fired and that means that I have to do more work for no compensation until they fill both of your spots” is rarely something that keeps those office friendships going.
There are people that were able to keep their pants on that got fired that I stopped talking to. Turning their termination into a media circus? Definitely off of the Christmas card list.
Like seriously, if the office affair got their happy asses fired, God only knows what other stupid stuff they got up to that wasn’t worth public disgrace.
I read an article this morning where Amy credits the show The Bachelor for her relationship communication skills. She says the show is appropriate for family viewing because it’s educational. It teaches people how to interact with each other. She claims the conversations on the show are interesting and insightful….
She’s as deep as a puddle.
I refuse to believe. How. HOW!?
Right? Because every young girl needs to learn to turn themselves inside out to win a sparkly turd. And vice versa.
How to say, “I grew up with extreme misogyny.”
Some fw’s and their APs want the glamorous, public Instagram social media life. They want everyone to see every detail of the torrid affair. They don’t care if their exes/chumps are hurt by this.
Some fw’s want the illegal, secret “find an escort in your location” social media life. They don’t want anyone to see or know of their marital infidelity. They don’t care if their exes/chumps are hurt by this.
Chumps just wanted the simple life of monogamy, commitment, companionship, exclusive and safe sex, loyalty, honesty, integrity, honor, mutuality, respect, understanding and the simple joys of family life. We sure are a boring bunch!
I have no regrets about how I’ve lived my entire life according to my values.
I agree! My FW’s dysregulated tantrum put her on this whole “highschool diva” rampage. Totally grandiose. During my pick-me dance year, she actually said to me one time “I wish you would take more risks.” Didn’t seem to like my response to the effect of having fought to earn what I have and risk losing it all when I have the things that I want(silly me for being faithful and in love with the one I had!) Our 13 year relationship was a casualty of that whole mess.
To think she could have had that excitement if she…you know…invested in the relationship she already had.
Ahh well. Sucks for our FWs.
More risks like secret affairs with other women?
My cheater (during a similar spot in our disaster) said to me “Men want to be admired” (apparently Susan of Seattle admired him).
I told him “the first step to being admired is to behave admirably”
Did you notice any interesting similarities between your ex’s dad and the creep/s she ended up cheating with? I ask because I suspect FW in my case may have married me precisely because I was always the polar opposite of his dysfunctional mommy. But, when he decided to cheat, he seemed to go right back to the toxic mommy model. The physical and psychological resemblance between Schmoops and his mom was uncanny.
Maybe when younger some people from dysfunctional backgrounds are more hopeful about breaking negative family patterns but, in the end, many will snap right back to factory setting and find themselves compulsively reenacting old dynamics with familiar types of people. If one of those dysfunctional FOO dynamics happened to be scapegoating/victim blaming, then it would make sense that some disordered types assume it’s their healthy partner’s responsibility to “inspire” improved character. Then if the disordered person finds themselves slipping back into toxic thinking and behavior patterns, they’ll naturally blame their partners for “causing” this or simply call the whole experiment a wash.
By the latter token, it seems like it could be a built-in booby trap when a disordered person pairs up with someone they perceive is healthier and stronger than what they grew up with. Like “Wait, I’m still a creep thinking creepy thoughts and doing creepy things just like my family. So what was the point of marrying Mr/s Perfect? It didn’t make me better so might as well go back to the knuckle-dragging toxic mutants I know!”
I deliberately avoided anyone who reminded me of my alcoholic, violent father….but ended up with a guy very much like my passive, kind mother, who had her own problems, but it’s much easier to live with. Sometimes you end up with the other parent.
That’s a tricky one. Her father passed away when she was very young and the dominant male figure in her life was her stepdad and it was total Discovery Channel “you’re not my kid” from the sounds of things(which was still true when the relationship started but slowed down significantly over time. It was brought to my attention very early in the relationship that her parents may or may not have had some more open boundaries before she was born(I never independently confirmed it-parsing through all of the likely lies over the years has been exhausting).
To more directly answer your question, I never met Schmoopie directly so I can’t tell(I do see where you are coming from with that and I think it is worthy of further exploration). She wanted him and I to be friends(I saw that trap from a mile away when it was starting to be clear that something was up). My read was that she was complaining about me (rather than, you know, to me) and he saw an opportunity and he provided an image of himself that was “me free from my problems”(hence “Canadian Clone”.)
For the record I liked and will miss my in-laws/her FOO(and to the best of my knowledge they liked me). The core dysfunction really seemed to be “if you don’t like doing something, don’t do it.” A lot of impulse control problems seem to be what was role modelled. Maintaining friendships and relationships in a healthy way did not seem to come up all that much. Apparently her mother did call her to task when she was informed that “we were breaking up”-if that was true it felt good to hear but I will never know if that was true or not(or if the cheating came up). I have not reached out as part of No Contact.
I also had the feeling that there was a general resentment/fear of authority figures in her household that had gone unspoken. Using that framework, cheating as an “exuberant act of defiance” against the guy that pays the bills and says “no” to open relationships would definitely be on-brand.
Ahh, how red flags look like regular ol’ flags under the rose colored glasses(thank you Bojack on that one.)
All this stuff gets into weird science. I’m not sure whether my interest in it counts as skein untangling since I’m not doing it to “fix” an abuser. I talk to my kids about these things in the hopes they’ll know enough to steer clear of dangerous people in the future.
One of the things I’ve discussed with the kids is that most people who had traumatic childhoods don’t become abusers though it can still be a bit of a heads up when other red flags appear. But, all the same, the “red flag” that someone had an extremely abusive upbringing isn’t always visible. A researcher who studied incarcerated batterers noted that these perps often lie about or disremember the abuse they experienced or witnessed as children but, as he dug beyond initial denials, it appeared they all had which is why this researcher rejected genetic criminality theory. So I guess while some use sob stories as pity bait, others will consciously or unconsciously cover up for their own abusers, maybe to the degree that they then went on to emulate these abusers. Some will hypocritically decry the very abusive acts they go onto commit while others do a sort of table cloth trick and won’t discuss the specific abuses they went on to repeat themselves.
One explanation for why an individual might decry abuse they witnessed or experienced as children and then hypocritically go on to commit the same terrible acts is that things that happen in very early childhood can have a latent effect that activates later in life, almost like “Manchurian candidate” programming. I worked with a guy who was very frank about the fact his mother had escaped his violent father when he was six. Since this guy had a tendency to rescue people and there was no indication he’d been aggressive to girlfriends, I took it as a hopeful sign that generational “violentization” patterns can be broken if children are removed from the trauma early enough. But it turned out age six was already too late in his case. I saw an online report that the same guy had been charged with domestic violence and lost custody of his children about a decade after I knew him. I honestly don’t think he knew in his twenties that he was a ticking time bomb but he clearly was.
So who knows what really happened to your ex. Liars lie, sometimes even about the things that turned them into lying liars. Whatever it was, it wasn’t an excuse for “reenacting” at your expense. But I suppose it can be picker-fixing to explore the patterns.
What is fascinating for me in my work in human services has been what people do and do not classify as abuse and/or components of an abusive upbringing. The easy ones remain easy-physical abuse, sexual abuse/incest, drug/alcohol abuse in the household are super tangible. Things like emotional abuse, certain types of neglect, financial abuse…much harder to detect.
When I do intake assessments at work, I usually get a double take when I ask about history of emotional abuse and have to give examples. And it is AMAZING how often they endorse it but just as quickly spackle. “But I deserved it” is one that comes up sickeningly often.
I don’t know what really happened with my ex either. And I never will-even in that latent period between D-Day and her departure the story changed(and I simply don’t have the mental bandwidth to untangle any of that-she is out of my life for my own good and that has to be that-hard not to think about sometimes late at night, though.) In trying to untangle the skein in my weaker moments, I see the interplay of a ton of little factors that all lead up to a singular point at a moment of truth(or multiple moments of truth). She made a decision. And completely on brand for her-I was stuck with the check.
I figured you had studied and work in something related to behaviorism or psych. It’s interesting that you’re finding this big lag in the public’s understanding of emotional and financial abuse or even that it constitutes abuse.
From my experience working in victim advocacy, the fact that you even ask these questions (which most helping professionals don’t) could trigger a delayed reaction and positive effect in some people where they start putting two and two together and rethinking relationship dynamics. It could even affect generations. I think this shows the true value of personal experience in terms of helping/advocacy roles– just in case, on those dark nights, you ever wonder if any of it has meaning or what you experienced has value.
For example, several years ago, I saw one former client of the advocacy service I worked for on Nancy Grace and Anderson Cooper as part of her press circuit explaining why she’d publicly exposed her violent father and had gotten him thrown out of public office. When I met her, she was a cartoon monosyllabic teen. Yeah, nah, okay. I had no clue whether anything I said or the material we shared made any impact at all. But seven years later she was slaying on cable news as an eloquent voice for survivors of family violence. She not only saved herself but her mother and younger brother. Cooper and Grace played devil’s advocate but this former client didn’t even blink. Turns out she understood every single word we told her and not only ran with it but went far beyond. She calmly responded with logic and statistics to whatever they threw at her, even when they played videos of her abusive father’s public blameshifting. I noticed that she didn’t get into some of her father’s quasi-incestuous abuse but even then I admired her sophistication. She was only arguing things she could prove because she was out to change the world.
Anyway, bear that in mind when you see those flinchy, defensive or dopey reactions in your professional interviews. Because of your personal experience, you may be particularly “fertile” in planting seeds of thought.
I’m certainly no psychologist, and in fact, I’m a computer geek. But I come from a very large family (11 siblings) with a physically abusive father. There’s about a 24 year difference between the oldest and the youngest siblings. Most of my brothers have never married. I don’t know why and I don’t ask. My youngest brother has gotten up in my face screaming at me with spittle splattering. I stood there and looked at him like I was examining an insect. Whether he wanted to actually punch me, I don’t know, but he knew that, without a doubt, I’d put his butt in jail had he done so. What has he done with others that feared him? I have no idea, but when I left the house, I swore I would never allow another person to hit me again (without penalty). (A side tangent is that the reason I have never been taken advantage of in my youth is because I have a type of demeanor that men know ‘not to mess with her’. I’ve heard of all kinds of sexual harassment from my younger female colleagues but none of that has ever happened to me. No more side tangent.) My youngest sister is one of the ugliest, foulest people I know. Because she is not getting what she wants from the elder siblings (money, a house, all her bills paid, etc.), she constantly blames her “crazy, PTSD, manic episodes” as caused by her abuse as a little girl. And she says that we’re all traumatized just like her but we’re handling our PTSD differently. The fact is, she was taken out of the abuse by age 7 when my mother divorced my father. She has absolutely no idea (and was never exposed) to the type of abuse us older siblings have had to deal with; however, it provides her a great excuse. I don’t think my dad even hit her, but she probably saw some abuse as a baby. I see her Facebook posts and have heard her podcasts. She’s very respectable and doesn’t seem to have these manic episodes when she’s trying to manipulate people into believing her point of view or getting what she wants. She only goes ape-shit, “crazy bitch” when she does not get what she wants. And though we’ve told her that her demands are not going to be met, and why they’re not going to be met, she screams, “You’re not listening to me!!!” As CL has said many times, it’s not that they don’t hear you, it’s that they don’t like what they hear and so they use their previous life experiences as excuses for their continued behavior. I don’t know why some people decide that they don’t want to continue the abusive cycle, and yet others choose to use it as their reason for continuing their bad behavior. My sister is highly intelligent. She’s manipulative. She likes being ugly. She takes satisfaction in making others’ lives as miserable as her own. You mentioned that some people like the drama whereas others change their lives so as not to live the continued drama. That to me is the ultimate question that needs to be answered. Why do some want to continue a life of high drama and others refrain? Are they addicted to it? Do they like the endorphins that are caused by it? I watched a video (recommended here on CN) about monkeys getting addicted to the ‘maybe’ of getting fed. And the video talked about gambling addiction. People are addicted to the ‘maybe’ of winning. And if you can figure out the answer to the first question, then maybe you can figure out how to get people not addicted to the high drama of life. But maybe not. Some people just feed on it. Good luck to you all.
Amy says they both share the same parenting styles.
She loves how TJ discipline’s while teaching his children to do the right thing..
They also both share the same values.
Do what I say, not what I do.
To be fair they do share the same values, those values are just not what they think they are.
While I can endorse going to NOLA in February because the weather is often perfect, that’s the only correct thing here. The last thing those two pieces of trash need is another victim. Perhaps they already want a buffer to keep the “relationship” going? I would suggest pets, but I don’t think they are competent to care for animals. They’ve already proven they only care about themselves.
This is a car crash in slow motion. Their relationship has already crossed over the center line-I’m just waiting to see if they are the types that stabbed their airbags(and if they have the decency to hit a jersey barrier instead of a school bus.)
It’s like high school science class. We are able to view these monocellular lifeforms and frame by frame watch fuckwit implosion.
Thank God nobody told these nimrods about surrogates yet.
Ugh, they really are a walking cliche, aren’t they? Amy trying to drop hints that she wants COMMITMENT and constantly reassures the world they’re happy together; while TJ makes references to her age and is skeptical of the people she trusts. The heavy drinking… there’s so much stereotypical cheater behavior here.
Amy is displaying the baby trap thinking – if they get a child it will keep TJ in the relationship….but that’s no more true for her than it was for his wife or possibly other women he’s been involved with.
Didn’t exactly work for Tori Spelling either. And I believe she married Dean in Fiji also. (I remember Tori wrote, We fell in love alone so we got married alone. Which puzzled me at the time I read it.)
“…teach them a lesson to do the right thing”
Teach your children to DO THE RIGHT THING. But not by example. That’s a bridge too far.
#parentingstyles #twinning
Not that I think Amy and TJ should bring more kids into this dysfunctional circus and not that it’s not great that women in modern times have options other than being baby making machines until they drop, but anyone else notice how the “average” age of menopause seems to be going down every year while rates of precocious puberty rise?
Digression, I know, but I’m baffled by the “new normal” regarding human fertility. At least one of my great-great grandmothers and two great grandmothers had kids after 50 because that’s how landed families ended up with clans of 10,12, 20 back in the day– they had children until they couldn’t anymore. My maternal grandfather was the seventh child of a seventh son of a seventh son. That’s why my mother had such vivid knowledge of family stories, customs, skills, recipes, cures, midwifery and the family tree stretching back to pre-industrialized Finland– because, in her family, it wasn’t that many generations ago.
These days it seems like we’ve gone from overpop hysteria to a low birth rate crisis in less than one generation, not to mention halving sperm counts, the explosion of PCOS, etc. Though the media seems to harp a lot on how younger generations simply don’t want children, Erin Brockovich and other eco warriors are pointing to more dystopian explanations like the modern chemical shitstorm.
I’m sure Jack Daniels doesn’t help. I even wonder if toxic impact on fertility might be relevant to cheating since reading a study associating “fast life strategy” and aggressive mating (including mate poaching and other “negative” mating approaches) with lower life expectancy and impaired fertility. The theory was that people living in violent or otherwise health-impairing circumstances seem to have a sort of biological intuition about “running out of time” even if they don’t consciously understand health impacts. They may mindlessly become more sexually aggressive and manic on a sort of “live fast, die young and leave a heap of spawn” program. Except, currently, the actual spawning part may be increasingly compromised.
Also, this may not have a direct effect on fertility but we NEVER ask about the effects of blowing up thousands of nuclear weapons since the end of WW2, both with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also all the many bombs the US & other countries, esp Russia, have blown up since then. That’s GOT to have some kind of cumulative effect on humans and other species perhaps in accelerating the cancer rate, but yet, it is NEVER RAISED OR CONSIDERED as something to consider. What if the climate change we are seeing is a result of the nuclear weapons blasts, or that has significantly contributed to them? Our modern world is based on a lot of fake assumptions that I think only worked in the short term of decades but that have devastating long term results on humans and other species.
I think a lot of it is that the modern world is actually more UNHEALTHY than the previous non-tech world our grandparents, and ancestors grew up in. If you were strong enough to survive until adulthood and started to breed, and you were strong enough to survive pregnancy and childbirth….you just kept going. I suspect that the more children you had, the more easily the body adopted to pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding, because it was more of a normal function whereas if you only have one or two children, each becomes a special and unusual event – an abnormality – rather than just a natural occasion of life. So later getting pregnant etc becomes harder because it is not the norm for your body.
Combination of things, but I really DO think that all the chemicals and many of the medical processes since WW2 are very damaging to humans and our natural world (especially vaccines – I hate to say it but I think the entire vaccine process is highly flawed and produces really negative results as people age and I am talking about ALL vaccines. We NEED to be able to openly discuss these things.) The almost entirely artificial world we created is not one that our bodies or the larger nature we are part of has been able to adapt to in such a short period of time.
There’s no question the world is more toxic than the one our ancestors lived in and getting extravagantly worse every year. Like Carson warned 60 years ago, today’s chemical and drug makers (major culprits) can’t seem to produce any “blockbuster” that isn’t mitocidal or that doesn’t cause some kind of reproductive harm.
Unfortunately, the fertility issue in particular seems to be causing a noticeable generational divide in awareness and acceptance between those who’ve already had their children and those who might hope to one day. When working for an eco health publication, I came to take it for granted that younger millennials and gen Z were way more likely to support and have encyclopedic knowledge about climate change and carbon impact theory, millennials in particular would freak the fuck out over any suggestion that human fertility is in decline.
I get it. The data isn’t as terrifying to those of us who’ve had kids already. But that’s the moment when you can really see why Bayer, Dow and every other toxic industry spend gadzillions funding armies of roach marketers to spread bs on social media, astroturf front groups, shill science councils and cranking out defensive ghost-written tobacco science (and buying up medical and science publications and formerly indie review bodies like Cochrane– RIP) to combat every single environmental and health claim against their products: because frightened people in the “denial” stage of industrial age grief will grab hold of those junk studies as “proof” that, well, the hamster’s not dead, it’s only sleeping (or it’s not dead, it just doesn’t want children or is just delaying starting a family or endocrine damaging pesticides and plasticizers are great for sperm production and infant health, etc.) Toxic industry lie like FWs come to think of it.
It scares the hell out of me because the problem only grows worse when people turn a blind eye to it– especially those energetic whippersnappers under 35 whose current child-free status makes them freer to, say, get arrested in public protests than us over-forty parents with dependent kids. There are even things people can individually do to improve their fertility right now and protect the health of future children but they’re not going to even explore those options if they’re clinging to all the “merchant of doubt” style junk science.
I always want to suggest to younger friends that they consider professional detox before they breed, learn to cook and eat organic, clean their homes with vinegar, ditch the synth cosmetic crap and as many drugs as possible, avoid PVC intake pipes and aluminum or nonstick cookware, move away from toxic dumps or coal-fired power plants and chemical producers, take antioxidants,etc. But that runs straight into the other crisis plaguing the whippersnappers: increasing wealth divisions and economic insecurity and the question of who’s going to pay for all these sometimes very expensive measures.
Fuck. Even white vinegar has gotten too bloody expensive. 🙁
“I always want to suggest to younger friends that they consider professional detox before they breed, learn to cook and eat organic, clean their homes with vinegar, ditch the synth cosmetic crap and as many drugs as possible, avoid PVC intake pipes and aluminum or nonstick cookware, move away from toxic dumps or coal-fired power plants and chemical producers, take antioxidants,etc. ”
I completely agree. Basically I say try as much as possible to go back to living the way people did before 1960 or so. Try to live like the grand or great grandparents if you can. All these chemicals are toxic and there are generally natural substitutes like lemon or vinegar as you say (although everything IS getting expensive!) I think people frequently lack time and energy to make things for themselves – and know how – but even simple changes like not using Febreeze or all the shit we spray on stuff just to get rid of imaginary smells would make a difference. I feel badly for the young generation (I don’t have kids) because they’ve been immersed with this stuff since the womb. I hope they come to realize how harmful the Chemical World is and try to go back in as many ways as possible. It’s not always expensive – sometimes it’s about cutting things out too.
Some of the natural solutions are actually cheaper. I make a dishwasher (machine) detergent from 75% sea salt and 25% sodium carbonate (caustic washing soda, not bicarbonate), two squirts of natural dish soap and vinegar in the rinse compartment. Beats spending $12 for natural detergent which can still contain things like laureth sulfate. But I understand the dilemma of using more expensive natural stuff for people struggling to pay rent and eat. That points to another terrifying problem with wealth distribution and the fact that “we the people” have less and less to say about our own political process.
But what you say is true– even for those who can afford safer products and diet, people raised with the wonders of modern chemistry sometimes seem to go into a panic or even become angry if you suggest ditching all the hygiene, bug sprays and cosmetic stuff with a hundred fifty unpronounceable ingredients. It’s like dependency or addiction which, in the case of commercial fabric softener may be literal because these products often contain ether. I also wonder if the fact that many of the chemicals additives in commercial cleaning and cosmetic products are immunotoxic causes a vicious circle because immune-compromised people can exhibit a sort of intuitive fear of germs which makes them ironically cling to chemical products they believe are germ killing.
My mother and I often talk about fertility, as she struggled with it in her 40’s while doctors wouldn’t take it seriously. She was trying very hard to have more kids, but struggled to conceive and carry. While PCOS and thyroid issues run in my family and she certainly has them, the dismissiveness of doctors was appalling. She eventually got fetility treatments, but her original OBGYN was almost cruel to her about it. We believe there is a genuine ageism there (and, I theorize, misogyny attached to said ageism). And it seems like the medical industry has no interest in updating their fertility research – most information about fertility is very old, and very generalized.
It makes me worry about my own fertility. While I don’t want children right now (and currently have an IUD for BC and managing heavy, painful menstruation) I would like them in the future. But when will me and my significant other be able to afford it? By then, will it be too late? I alteady have many of the symptoms of PCOS – mainly, the miserable periods, and they started EARLY for me – but have not been diagnosed. I am in no place to start trying now.
Ugh. I know this is way off topic, but it’s something I think about very often.
My close friend went through IVF. A lot of infertility isn’t caused by lifestyle factors but in this case it was. It turned out her cheating ex and the father of her daughter had a low sperm count from his manic porn and massage parlor habit and damaged sperm because of his secret pill popping and drinking. Anyway, before she knew any of that, she told me horror stories about how misogynistic all the fertility docs were. I ended up coaching her through those experiences exactly as I would a client of the DV advocacy service I used to work for. I couldn’t believe the rank fucking sadism involving every ism you can imagine, including of course ageism which apparently starts at about 27! I don’t know how she got through it.
Chump Domain, I had mind-altering painful horrific periods when I was in my early teens which were finally treated by going on the pill….I had cervical cancer when I was 21….I had major fibroids which started causing major hemorrhaging when I was in my early 40’s, and I got pregnant immediately and easily the old fashioned way after fibroid surgery at 42.5. Of course everyone is different, and I don’t know your age or medical history, but I share my experience with the hope it brings you and other female chumps some comfort. Too many female infidelity victims have had their fertility compromised or ripped off by cheaters and their side pieces, which I find extremely upsetting, and I hope my story can be a ray of hope for some.
❤️
Thanks Velvet Hammer for bringing this side topic in to our forum.
My cheater told me he didn’t want children up until he suddenly did and then (Chumpy me having gone along with whatever he wanted) did an about face and bluntly informed me “well it’s not happening” in response to me having had two miscarriages. Nice. Noting he didn’t even come to the hospital after I had the D&C, my beautiful mother did.
The cheater waited 14-15 years into the relationship to announce that yes he would have preferred to have children. Personally I was on the fence and while there is a lot more to that statement, it is not relevant here.
In any event it is 20-20 clear now that EVERYTHING was only how it was in his mind alone. Actual biology and any pain and suffering of his wife was irrelevant.
My fertility was held hostage and then I was blamed when it was harder to conceive and when later there became difficulties. And then to top that, abandonment discard and then I discovered his affair.
He is the most evil creature and I will never forgive him for any of that. Working on forgiving myself.
That’s AWFUL. I’m so, so sorry. Do be easy on yourself – remember, abusers are working on keeping you under their thumb, and often have experience doing it previously. We don’t go into relationships expecting them to be battlefields, to be under attack. They do.
Thank you Velvet, this is a massive comfort. It made me smile! I hope you treasure your bundle of joy, and they treasure you right back. I’m in my mid-20’s, so I have time, but I don’t know if the financial situation will get any better. My significant other and I do our best.
I do get my yearly pap smears – as far as anyone can tell, ex/FW didn’t “gift” me anything (and I got all the testing I could get), although he was putting me in massive amounts of danger, having unprotected sex with both me and ex/OW (who herself was supposedly having sex with random people in bars, not asking for test results or anything). Jerk. It is truly awful how much FWs steal from chumps. I’m just glad I didn’t let him take much more from me.
If you feel like that traumatic experience might have increased your risk of autoimmunity or PCOS, I read some stuff on the Terry Wahls diet that might be helpful. If you’re familiar with Wahls, she’s the physician who quite credibly cured her own MS with a tailored and somewhat more restrictive form of keto. On the advice of specialists, I used a similar diet to treat my middle child’s serious and disabling health condition and then, wth, ended up trying it to treat sports injuries and autoimmunity in myself when I read about professional athletes using the diet for faster recovery.
Wahls has shared research linking her diet to improvements in PCOS. As far as I understand, she believes the method of action of the diet is through radical improvement of the microbiome which, according to mainstream science, can arguably improve a long list of autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, many of which are on the rise (likely due to the chemical shitstorm factor). Recent research also found that improvements to microbiome probably account for reduction in seizure activity in epilepsy which the diet was originally used for for more than a century.
For my son the effect was nothing short of miraculous. He still has allergies and a few challenges but he’s completely defied original prognosis. His pediatrician even discussed the case anonymously in his weekly podcast. What I can say for myself is mostly that no food tastes as good as finally living without pain feels. Plus I think Halle Berry probably wasn’t lying when she says the diet (which she use for diabetes) stalls the aging process. Even my shoe size reverted back to pre-pregnancy. Slight bonus being able to wear all my groovy pre-mom shoes again. It’s worth checking out.
I actually know quite a bit about the keto diet! I have a family member who is obsessed with it. The issue is my anorexia (further worsened by texture issues) and one of its triggers – restrictive diets. As my nutritionist put it, years ago, “I don’t care if you eat nothing but McDonald’s for the rest of your life, please just eat.” Another trigger is being around food a lot (triggers food repulsion) which makes quick meals a bit of a necessity. I’ve gotten a lot of my ED under control, and am actually the heaviest I’ve ever been (saying that makes me feel sick), but I worry that a restrictive diet with a lot of prep work may set me back. It’s taken about 8 years of focusing on gaining weight to finally get to a point where my doctors are happy. But I have heard wonderful things about keto. Maybe once I’m in a more relaxed place mentally, with more space to breathe, I’ll start looking into some keto meals. Really, I should start limiting just how much processed food I eat now.
I’m so happy to hear about your son’s improvement! That’s wonderful. I’m sure it must be such a relief for you too.
You know what? I think another great topic would be talking about how FWs can worsen eating disorders. I know mine did.
Part 2 of my response to the issue of whether abuse can cause or worsen eating or body issues. As emissaries of extreme objectification, I’m sure it’s a given that FWs casually cause body dysmorphia in everyone around them including their own kids because the objectifying commentary typically seeps out of them like grave water, even in the ones who feign being “woke.”
I’m choosing words carefully. It’s hard to explain but, as a sexual assault survivor (who got away) who worked in a creep-filled industry, I can’t help equating objectifying behavior with the stench of death. It’s not just that there’s something spiritually murderous about reducing people to body parts. It carries a whiff of violent capacity in it that triggers fear even in bystanders. I think it creates a Roman Circus effect where people (women especially), though they may not consciously register the violence beneath the behavior, find themselves frantically trying to transform themselves into a shape that will be “exempt” from danger.
But– prank– there are no exemptions, no “safe” ways to be that can avoid all the forms that aggression comes in, especially for women. Some pervs feel hate and destructive impulses towards the objects of their lust and some emit rage and destructive impulses towards those who “fail” to inspire lust.
I think the mistake people make in analyzing eating/body issues is assuming that a “need for attention” drive these things. Instead I think it’s more about curating the type of attention because many women can’t escape the “toxic gaze” no matter what they do. So we hope to inspire protection and love rather than the alternative– hatefully violent disposal.
Weirdly, surviving a few rape attempts helped me put two and two together because my reactions to casual leering or little quips about appearance went through the roof. I realized that it’s a universal reaction but the fear response might initially be too subtle to identify. Even though I never had any eating issues, I went through periods of appearance insecurity like nearly every other woman on earth. But once I recognized the primal reaction to rapey objectification as valid and informative, I could at least see it happening with more detachment.
I would actually agree – I think many types of abusers actually have similar mechanisms in dehumanizing us, and possibly much of the same anger. There is violent intent in emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. I view it as a red flag when a heterosexual man constantly talks about how hot he finds women (not just individual women, like his partners, but women as a whole) because I find they’re also often misogynistic. There is a quote by C.S. Lewis who talks about a man who lusts for women, and I feel it works perfectly when you use “objectify” in it’s place. The jist of it is a woman is decidedly what he doesn’t want – he merely needs her as an apparatus. It is a lot easier to be hateful towards someone when you don’t view them as a human.
For me, my ED is manifold. I believe much of it is a reaction to my lifelong IBS (I went on a lot of restrictive diets as a kid to try and fix it, but nothing worked at the time, and now I’m missing an appendix and a gallbladder, so my bowels have only gotten more sensitive), my body dysmorphia, my sensory issues, my medication side effects, my anxiety, abuse from my childhood, and the influence of a family member who, while I was a teen, was obsessed with highly restrictive “cleansing” diets (a bit of a yo-yo dieter). Said family member was also OCD and restricted what, when, and where I could eat, making it much worse. They also regularly made comments about my body and what I wore, which hadn’t been an issue before, and with the greater noise of society demanding… By the age of 18, I was dripping below 90lbs with terrifying regularity.
Being with an abuser who disparaged even my best attributes definitely worsened my dysmorphia. And then he’d mock me for having low self-esteem! Screw. That.
The Roman circus of abuse– deliberately cause low self esteem then mock the effect.
I was a chubby thing as a little kid– sort of the female version of the kid in About a Boy– and bullied mercilessly in school until about age 14. The only thing I could think of that may have protected me from developing eating issues was probably early exposure to social justice concepts. I’m sure it only made me quirkier that I used to sit for hours in the library reading up on macabre subjects like genocide, religious persecution, witch burning, slavery, Jim Crow, etc. The basic theme was “bullies suck” and it’s better to be the underdog
As you probably know, some people use keto for weight gain, not loss. It just depends on types and quantities of fat and protein. Prep time also depends on whether or not you go for carb substitutes like “keto bread” or desserts, etc., otherwise the diet can be extremely simple.
You probably also know that starting slow on keto is always recommended because it causes such a radical metabolic shift, like a car going from gas to electric. There are similar warnings for going off of it too suddenly, which can reportedly cause cell death. When I first started, I began by eating a heaping plate full of organic sweet potato fries every day (which I adore) and just reducing them by one a day. I also took bromelain to help my gallbladder deal with the gradual increase in healthy fat. Consequently I didn’t get any of the typical blowback symptoms from transitioning. But it was only once the transition was complete that I started seeing the touted benefits, like no more stabbing hunger pains or cravings (I have to eat on a schedule because my body won’t tell me to eat in time) and, most importantly, no more joint pain and associated inflammation. Oh and better sleep, more stable energy and moods, etc. I don’t think people who have no underlying issues with inflammatory conditions would see a radical difference but for those of us who do it’s night and day.
My son had major sensory issues with food texture and refused to eat anything but a pureed diet until age 12. It took about 23 hours a week of prep and cooking but at least pureeing allowed me to “hide” all the super foods the doctors were recommending for his recovery. Even that he would eat very slowly related to his high choking risk because his disorder damaged nerves and muscle coordination in his entire GI tract from the tip of his tongue down. Pureed form also theoretically increased intestinal absorption. He formerly had the typical celiac lesions that can cause malabsorption and all the telltale signs– pallid skin, dry hair, fatigue, etc. Both the lesions and his peaky appearance/behavior rapidly improved on the diet. I also learned that sensory reactions would improve from removing even subtle allergens. It’s like the body itself expresses “suspicion” of food through sensory rejection when the diet still contains anything reactive.
Despite all the medical documentation and letters from doctors, the kids’ grade school wanted to treat my son’s eating issue as behavioral and tried to push the idiotic, abusive measure of withholding his preferred foods. Consequently, he ended up in ER with intestinal blockage and more drama followed. I almost sued but decided to just pull him out and home school. My gut said to prioritize his health. I always had faith that his physical recovery would probably resolve all these supposedly “behavioral” and learning issues which is exactly what happened. At 12– after my gazillionth attempt to tempt him with solid food– he ate his first organic steak straight off the grill and never looked back. From there he started eating grilled or sauteed vegetables in shocking quantities. Thank God for organic frozen vegetables.
After he started eating solid meat, my middle son suddenly went from 3rd percentile in height to 6′. Since he was still eating the same foods he had since his medical diet started, it seemed the sudden improvements in height, muscle mass and disappearance of sensory issues were simply a watershed moment when all the years of treatment began suddenly paying off. His labs reflected this as well as his learning and language. By 14 he was reading Tolstoy and Kafka and got admitted to a university music program. Turned out the grade school also got his IQ wrong by about 40 points. Poor assholes better hope he doesn’t decide to write a book about his experience.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, sometimes boosted nutrition and hunting down and getting rid of all allergens may help resolve sensory issues though getting past the catch-22 of it can take time. And though there seems to be a fad for people to argue that these special medical diets and supplement protocols produce only a placebo effect and that some kids and adults with various disorders would spontaneously recovered without it, my son can still quickly lose ground and get ill from changing the protocol. He’s fully aware of it which is why he now does his own detective work to figure out what caused a bad reaction, reads labels, cooks and takes responsibility for his own health. Plus he hates the dentist and loves the fact that he’s never had a cavity.
That’s absolutely incredible. I’m so glad he recovered so well. You were such a wonderfully determined mother, so willing to support him. You should be so proud of yourself! The school side of it doesn’t surprise me at all. Having a neurodevelopmental disorder meant I got to see just how willing the school system is to simply abandoning kids instead of helping them – it doesn’t surprise me they just dismissed his problems (and his intelligence!) at all. I actually do hope he writes about his experiences. How many more students fall through the cracks and are unable to tell their story? But it’s also understandable if he has no interest in it. Either way, as long as he’s much happier now!
It’s funny – I remember reading Tolstory about his age – Anna Karenina – and it changed my politics forever.
I think part of the issue is the psychological mindset that goes into dieting. That may trigger my other restrictive behaviors. But hearing your enthusiasm makes me excited as well! I already have it in the back of my head that as I get my mental and physical health a bit more under control, I want to decrease a lot of my sugar and carb intake (as well as my processed food intake).
My son has a strong streak of social justice warrior in him so we’ll see where that lands as he matures. The kids are all at ages where they’re individuating from mom so other than requiring that their work gets done and maintaining a reading list, I’m a bit hands off.
But where we all come together is in talking about social justice-y stuff– sexual politics, civil rights, the roots of discrimination, eco justice, the psychology of corruption, etc. Those convos get loud and rollicking and they’re all pretty deft with gallows humor on those subjects but never in cruel or victim-mocking way. But man are they vicious to perps and villains. I think this makes them influential with peers because they’re so damned cheerful about their outlier views.
I think it helps that I’ve managed to find pretty groovy environments in certain extracurricular activities like art, animation, music and my son’s model plane club so they live in a bit of a free-thinking bubble where even the adults crack up at the kids’ dark humor (and potty mouths. Hrmm, may need to work on that because it’s every other fucking word now…). I think we’re also creating a keto cult in our “bubble” because my accountant, his lawyer wife, the woman who helps with kitchen and housekeeping, the kids’ piano professor, his geologist brother and his brother’s fiance are all on some version for varying reasons ranging from serious health problems to basic fitness. The last big party I threw at the house had pockets of people yakking about their keto approaches and bragging about their blood pressure readings. I kept circling around joking “Have you heard the good news??” Yikes, lol.
I’m searching right now for this fast life study. Fascinating! So it could be a sign that FWs will die sooner? LOL
Here’s an abstract of and excerpt from the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-90579-8 The citations lead to more research.
Life strategies developed in response to various environmental conditions is a subject examined by numerous studies. People exposed to harsh or unpredictable environment, such as is usually attendant upon low socioeconomic status, dangerous environment during development, or unfavourable family circumstances, tend to adopt faster life strategies. They start their sexual life earlier and women have lower age at menarche and first birth and have more children
Maybe so. I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions to this. But just like pickled vampires like Keith Richards shouldn’t fuel arguments that lifelong chain smoking is safe, I don’t think the fact that some FWs like, say, Picasso lived to ripe old ages necessarily contradicts the idea that FW’s might be more prone to underlying health issues or in some way perceive lower life expectancy.
There was a study which found that male cheaters are more likely to die from cardiac related events. Specifically, these guys were more likely to die in the middle of bonkfests with schmoopies. The theory was that, despite the typical manic gym routines of a lot of cheating men, other attempts to seem younger and live a “youthful” lifestyle to keep up with younger schmoopies– like drinking, smoking, etc.– affect heart health.
FW has adopted a different lifestyle with the child mistress that involves a lot of wine an a lot of edibles. I know that neither of those things on their own are bad but they seem unable to function without them. God bless.
Or maybe and more likely their hearts are shriveled black holes so a cardiac event is inevitable ☠️🖤
The average age of menopause is going up, not down.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778126
The “modern chemical shitstorm” isn’t new to this generation. We’re not that far out from widespread cigarette smoking, asbestos, DDT, and lead paint. Young people aren’t having kids because they have options not to, and because they are living in a world where women doing unpaid labor (and kneecapping their own financial stability) is a worse and worse idea.
It seems like the youngest individuals in the study were born around the late sixties, shortly after Rachel Carson published The Silent Spring. As dire as her warnings were at the time, things have gotten far worse since. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/18/toxic-chemicals-health-humanity-erin-brokovich
Just the math alone predicts that age of menopause will decline in individuals born after 1980 because the decline in average age of menarche has significantly sped up since that time. A lot of these predictive studies can be found on the NIH website.
By the way, the JAMA study was sponsored by Texas Tech in Lubbock which hosts the Bayer Plant Sciences building. Interestingly, in 2018, the end date of the study, Bayer bought and absorbed Monsanto which, following the publication of Silent Spring in 1964 in which Carson named Monsanto as a prime culprit in the proliferation of endocrine disrupting chemicals and predicted an eventual global fertility crisis, put the equivalent of a fatwa on Carson. The attacks against Carson were so intense that it prompted then President Kennedy and his brother Bobby to form a commission with a former Supreme Court justice to protect and promote the author. Since all except the retired justice were dead seven years later, the project died with them. Since then, Monsanto seems to have specialized in funding endless tobacco science studies that appear entirely focused on proving Carson’s two major predictions (increase in acquired mitochondrial disorders and skyrocketing of endocrine disorders/infertility) wrong.
Yet the lead author from TTU declares “no conflicts.”
Oh, and apparently economic decline may potentially increase cheating. Someone sent me an article reporting a “poll” taken by two Latin American cheater dating services. One of the questions posed to Argentine cheater app users was whether the current worsening economic crisis had driven them to cheat more. The majority answered affirmatively.
Since FWs will generally grab at any sad sausage alibi and since I have some doubts if these cheater dating app companies are putting out valid social science with all these endless polls, who knows if financial insecurity increases cheating or not on a population level. But because health and fertility decline might have that effect, maybe there’s something to the idea that insecurity– whether actual or pathological– increases FWittery.
FW cheated because he was making *more* money than ever. He handled all of our money and I wondered why two people who together made a nice living (not great, not bad for our area) were always so broke. Turns out, when he started making so much money he realized that he could afford to live two lives — as long as he didn’t tell me about that little fact. Essentially 1/3 of our income was going to fund his second life (or the equivalent of my salary–fun!). Meanwhile I was taking on freelance work like crazy because he kept telling me how broke we were. What a peach, right?
Same thing happened in my situation– the affair corresponded with a sudden influx from secret risky investments. It was more than expected but hardly .01% so I equated his sudden mania with a kind of “new money hysteria”. It still illustrated this idea that terror and desperation drove it. It reminded me of the joke someone made about Trump– that his lifestyle reflected how poor people think rich people live.
That was FW’s spendy affair in a nutshell– cheesy and trashy. Yet he and the AP really seemed to think they were living the glam jetsetter existence. Probably from what she saved by not having to buy her own copious booze and overpriced bistro pizza for a year, the AP took did a budget Euro tour in the middle of the affair and sent FW what was probably supposed to be a “glam” smirking selfie in front of a tacky hotel window in the zillionth arondissement. Shriek, ugh, so very “Honey Boo-Boo goes to Paris.”
Embarrassing. Prior to that, I’d believed FW’s culture vulture democratic socialist pose and believed we were perfectly aligned in rejecting all the stupid trappings in preference for creative and meaningful lives and values. I’d assumed the mocking asides he’d made about the rich-as-Croesus side of my family came from political principles and the fact that several of them are assholes when, all along, it was simply seething envy and probably resentment when he found out my principles are– oh noes– actually real and I wasn’t jockeying for inheritance. I think that’s what made me lose the most respect. He was basically like the cheap and creepy climber from Saltburn.
I have read, (a while ago) that earlier puberty (11 or younger) had a higher risk of earlier menopause. But I wonder if it is that or just that there is an average fertility range and it just makes sense that the earlier/later you start the cycle the body will still provide that range.
It makes sense because women even in the purest, healthiest environments have a set number of eggs. It’s also known that toxic exposure can reduce those stores and/or reduce viability. If– no matter what age she experienced puberty onset– a woman’s remaining eggs are rendered nonviable by any cause, it halts the hormone feedback loop and brings on menopause at any age. But I have no clue what the specific mechanism is behind skyrocketing rates of precocious puberty, just that the average age keeps dropping every year and there’s no way to pretend this is some benign natural occurrence or shift, especially when precocious puberty affects other aspects of health such as stunting growth and impacting bone development. It’s scary as hell and mostly points to the hormone-disrupting chemical soup we’re living in.
I think that’s true even if violent environment can arguably have at least some impact on puberty onset. I read a study in college about how children raised in violent families will typically have earlier than average puberty, theoretically because they’re bodies were intuitively preparing them to mature faster in order to “leave the dangerous nest” sooner and/or defend themselves for survival.
I don’t know if this also extends to wider cultural violence. For more than 150 years, scientists have been duking it out on the question of whether puberty tends to be later in temperate climates and earlier in warmer ones. Researchers from more than a century ago reported that puberty could be as late as 18 or 20 in some arctic regions and as young as 8 in southern Asia. The old theory seems to boil down to temperature and maybe related a bit to regional diet. But, whether or not these reports were mythologized lore, I don’t think researchers were controlling for political stability and degrees of violence within regions so it remains to be seen whether puberty onset could be partly influenced by the fact that, the closer you get to the equator in many parts of the world, the higher the mortality and the higher the degree of danger– maybe partly because those regions are often destabilized by foreign resource exploitation.
So maybe the researchers who are currently trying to tie skyrocketing rates of early puberty to media violence and sexualized content have a bit of a point. But I don’t think it fully explains such an extreme global shift. I even suspect that some of these “everything but chemicals” theories are being defensively funded by toxic culprit industries, “tobacco science” style.
I’m not a doctor, just a computer geek. But I came from a very abusive family. The women in my family all started ‘menarche’ (that’s a new word for me) late in life. I was 16. I had menopause in my mid-to-late 50s. My mother had 11 children. Her mother had 8. My grandma had 14 children. Many of my dad’s sisters had 5, 6, 7+ children. We all grew up very poor. We ate a lot of beans, potatoes, and tortillas. Meat really was a treat. We hardly ever had deserts, triscuits, hamburger helper, twinkies, or whatever. My mom made everything from scratch as that was the cheapest. In other words, we did not get exposed to all of the preservatives that a lot of other people these days get regularly from their infant years. A lot of people don’t even know how to cook from scratch these days. So maybe the reason that things are changing is more related to where someone grew up (environment) and their socio-economic status (the ability to buy ready-to-eat). Is there a study about that and its relation to fertility rates? I think every study needs to be reviewed for who endorsed and funded the study as well as the demographic polled.
Maybe there are studies that tangentially relate to that, like the study that found people who eat at home most of the time, even regardless of what they cooked, tend to have better health than those who eat take out or in restaurants. I suspect that this relates to modern restaurants’ increasing use of toxic fillers, more sugar, cheapo toxic oil (rape seed and cotton seed aren’t food, folks), etc., compared to home-cooked.
I grew up artist-poor and we cooked from scratch and rarely went out as well. It was partly related to my dad’s obsession with health food and preference for meals involving al dente vegetables. I laugh when people equate organic diet with “elitism” because my dad’s fear of malnutrition and toxic adulterants came from growing up in a ghetto orphanage, then dealing with army food where everything was boiled until it was gray and drained of nutrients and he ended up with a few painful bone development issues because of it. Because his jaw issue affected his teeth, he was hyper conscious of dental health and there was also never much sugar in the house. Forget about canned and packaged food either. I think it gave him war flashbacks.
This week I’m feeding my grandsons bearded Gecko while they are on a cruise. I need to feed him 5 live crickets 🦗a day. Yesterday I thought I saw love and gratitude in the lizardd eyes. The same love and gratitude I O believed I saw in the eyes of my 2 xhcheaters. The same love I think
I see in the eyes of the couple de jour in our discussion today. I do have a serious problem tho,and that is, attributing human attachment.and compassionate devotion to cold blooded things ..It is this that I am working so hard in therapy on. Will I ever get it?
Good analogy! We got a bearded dragon last summer and a leopard gecko a couple months ago (my daughter loves them and I have become a semi-reptile convert). Early on, without thinking, I compared the cold-blooded lizard and my ex and how neither can form real attachments to their carers. My 12yo laughed quite hard at that. I apologized since she does love her dad, but she said, “Nah, it was funny. Besides…you’re not totally wrong.”
Eh. I would actually bet your scaly friend knows more about appreciation than any FW!
This is a mess. I would be worried about having children in either of their care. Their drinking is far too out of control for that at this point.
Day-drinking is always a good sign, right? He doesn’t even try to hide it in photos.
TJ and Amy,
Children learn by modeling. There is a lot both of you are doing which should not be copied.
Drinking and cheating and lying and betraying, for starters. And those are very effen big deal starters. And how dare you consider yourselves worth copying with those big deal starters unacknowledged and running riot.
The easiest way to be a good parent is to work on yourself and be person whose behavior is good to copy.
As for me, reflecting at bedtime, and when I wake up during the night, on what I did and said during the day is a daily habit. I have yet to live a day where I felt there was no improvement necessary.
I am glad neither of you are my parents.
“I see your parenting style, and it’s very similar to mine, and that is a gift.”
I’m left to helplessly wonder who this is supposedly a gift from, and to what end. Is there a parenting fairy? Do you put a discarded chump under your pillow and wake up in the morning to find some shiny FW parenting there?
She goes on about “giving,” and yet it’s always the same with FWs — it’s about who’s giving them stuff because they’re just so very special. And it is so very sad no child will get the benefit of similar parenting from two FWs who will break up bitterly when TJ realizes Amy gets older at the rate of one year per year.
ha, so true.
“…when TJ realizes Amy gets older at the rate of one year per year.” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA
I’m definitely ready to stop giving these FWs anymore attention.
Thank goodness, they won’t be adding any more children to their s–show!
Oh wow. Can they be any more vapid, tone-deaf and self-obsessed? No one wants to interview them. They weren’t that great on TV before all this. No one cares about them, what they need or want, or to hear their continued self narrated relationship.
Glad their kids can see this someday and feel horrible. She still doesn’t get it. No one cares about her anymore and her former coworkers think she is awful, or at least career suicide.
They need to buy a clue and disappear from public life. They only serve as bad examples.
Sorry, but I can’t even muster some cold-blooded glee at watching this trainwreck derail, I just find it painful and boring. I’ll skip these posts from now on.
I just put myself in the shoes of their children and how I’d feel if I read this. It feels super devaluing of them, that they exist, that their families got broken up and that their cheating parent splashes their shit all over for everyone to witness. How sad for the children that have had to suffer this. Shame on you for longing for different children, Amy. My god their selfishness knows no bounds.
Amy and TJ can totally have a child together. Just ask my ex and his schmoopie wife – she got oopsie pregnant at 48 and had an abortion while he and I were wreckonciling. After we split and they got married, they went through IVF and she carried and gave birth at 51. Also with her payout, they can afford a surrogate, or adopt… the possibilities are endless. Be creative girl! Or is it that you’re just scraping for pity points that you can’t have babies with your twu wuv? Or maybe she doesn’t want to be like my ex and his wife and have a kindergartener at 54 and 56?
Wow!
I’m late to this but…PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me you are NOT going to adopt some poor child and pretend it’s yours just so you can pretend to be a family. I’ve seen this in people around me – fortunately rarely, but it’s so disturbing. One couple of losers got married (we KNEW it wouldn’t last) and within the first year they bought…er….adopted…some poor child from Africa. These are two very white people. I hate this for 2 reasons – I think if you want to help people in other countries – give money to their village so children can grow up strong and healthy within their own culture and distant relatives and friends. DON’T BUY A KID TO SOLIDIFY YOUR SHAKY RELATIONSHIP AND BRING THEM TO A COMPLETELY FOREIGN ENVIRONMENT. And then inevitably, your relationship crashes and burns.
Secondly, you already have children…..you’ve uprooted and destroyed their families, their sense of order – for YOUR OWN SELFISHNESS and you want to bring in another child to SUPPLANT THEM and that is how they will see it because….that is how it is. If you cared about your own children you would not have done this, but having done it, you’d try to rebuild the relationship with all of them to whatever extent you can. YOUR FAMILY IS WHO YOU SPEND YOUR TIME WITH NOW….not the people you left in the past for your NEW family. Kids can see this clearly. And they can see how fake you are too.
Can’t wait to see these two assholes crash and burn.
I wouldn’t trust these two with houseplants much less a child. Not even a dog or cat.