Unpopular Opinion: Nobody Tells You That Attachment Parenting Kinda Sucks

Plus: Cat and Jane gossip, Sassy Tees for sale, and can we please argue more in the comments?

Hi weird people,

One of the greatest things about my job has always been hiring weird and incredible people. Sometimes there's not even a role available, or they have no interest or experience in the role I have available, but they are so weird and so incredible that I fit those trapezoids into those round holes regardless. [Key examples: Cat Marnell as my first Health Editor at xoJane and Christina Kelly from Footwear News (respect) as one of my three inaugural Sassy staff writers.]

These Individuals with a capital I also, I’ve realized only recently, then stay in my life forever after. There have been some falling outs (a couple of managing editors here and there – NOT Debbie and NOT Corynne – and a writer from Sassy and Jane who quit and decided to hate me and I'm still not quite sure why. But I'm a Scorpio and WILL find out!)

I thought of this because earlier I texted Cat to ask her if I could trust somebody (isn't it great to have people you can trust to tell you who you can trust and you know you can trust what they tell you and just act on it? I have a few people like that and boy do I love to lean on them.) So while “shivering in the air conditioning in a hostel kitchen in Thessaloniki eating leftover falafel,” at whatever hour it was there, Cat gave me her assessment, which then turned into multiple hours of us gossiping. We went over a “known man with whom she was casually intimately involved” (Approved Language Intact) and her new book(!!!!), which has a character named Jenny Knight who is the editor of xoJenny and based on ME. Cat is still sober and such a blast. I love her bluntness and insights. [Some of her thinking reminds me of someone else I thoroughly trust, and that is Courtney Love, which was why it was a thrill to introduce them a bunch of years ago and listen to them talk talk talk for hours one night at Courtney’s townhouse (I fell asleep). But I digress and I name-drop and there’s so so so much more good to say about Courtney too obviously, so I don't want to give this reference short shrift.]

Other people I have hired and who are still such a part of the fabric of my life (oh my God, that's a commercial) range from Spike Jonze to Emily McCombs to Chloe Sevigny (the one everyone seems to know about) to Ricki Lake (she took over the talk show I was hosting and did much better at it and we still have an amazing little friendship/kinship over that all these years later), to of course my current partners in crime, Charlie and Corynne.

I know you all know Corynne - especially those of you who have written for AJPT, because she is here shepherding almost every single story through– in some ways similar but a lot more creatively than she did for years with me at xoJane. So it's an extra thrill when she writes here herself and we get to all give back to her what she does for the rest of us daily, being so so careful with our words and photos and ideas and comments. She's almost always one of the first two commenters on every post and even if she's read the story 10 million times before always has something new and sweet to say about it.

I know I've said it before but hard to say it enough: I love Corynne. She's not just part of the fabric of my life, we are stitched together with some Kevlar thread and probably duct taped on top of that. [And super glued! - Corynne] So let's give her some love while she talks about personal stuff today that I'd never heard.

Oh, by the way, not enough people disagree in the comments on AJPT in general from my standpoint. I love how supportive we all are, but debate and disagreement are super fun and worthwhile too. I can count on two fingers the number of comments we've gotten where the commenter took issue with something the writer had written – thanks Diego! So let's all do that too. I can take it. Corynne can take it. And we all have a strong enough bond now that we can weather and grow from some friction. Now on to Corynne!

-Jane

PS Sassy T-shirts are so cute!

By Corynne Steindler Cirill

I caught a glimpse of my reflection today while picking my daughter up from her first two-hour camp of the day. Holy hell. My hair: frizzy. My clothes: wrinkly. A friend told me I looked cute in my sundress, but I felt like I was wearing a crumpled mumu. And my skin has been doing this horrible thing where I get cystic acne that almost immediately turns to a blister and then scars over. So I have all these little red marks on my face. (Thank you, I am not touching them!)

Oh, and did I mention it was raining?

Last night, I didn’t sleep much. Again. My two weeks of stress-induced insomnia (mostly involving my 10-year-old growing up fast and furiously in a way that feels sudden) did somewhat subside the other day. But this time it was my daughter, not my anxiety, waking me.

“Maaaamaaaaa.” She called out in her slightly scared, slightly sleepy voice. “Maaaaamaaaa!”

I was in the most deep and heavenly sleep at that point, I think it was about 2 am, so when I heard my husband get up to try and comfort her, I fell right back into it. But only momentarily.

“She wants you,” he said when he returned to our room with our daughter.

“Mama,” she said, staring at me from the side of the bed. “Why did you leave me?”

I don’t know how we got here.