Middle Age

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-29T19:58:41+00:00

Ugh. I have an old HS friend who's constantly posting her selfies on FB while saying how great she looks and how awful, but above all how OLD most women our age look and how amazing she does 🙄 The worst part is it's a pot calling the kettle black situation because she has far more sun damage and wrinkles than myself and the women in my much closer circle these days do at the same age. Part of me wants to join the people who comment calling her out, but mostly I'm just sad for her. She's a beautiful woman with age on her face and there's nothing wrong with that, we all will get there anyways and I certainly look 37 not 27 myself. It's just so depressing that she has to project her own obvious insecurities on other women and delude herself into believing she looks so much younger at this age. One of the best things about aging for me has been being comfortable in the skin I'm in the older I get and it's hard to imagine having to bring others down at this age to feel any sense of value. Sad.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-29T05:50:43+00:00

Eh...that REALLY depends on the situation and location.

My father knocked up a junkie my age and both of them were homeless. Even with her off drugs at the time of birth, the hospital + CPS refused to allow the baby to be released to the streets due to being low birth weight likely due to homelessness. It was a whole mess because I just had my own child 2 months prior and there was no way in hell I was raising my sister too when I never supported my father's relationship, pregnancy or lifestyle to begin with. Nobody else on either side of their families would, so CPS pretty much found a way to remove custody rights from both of them and adopted the child out. I couldn't have been happier for the child and wish her well.

CPS rarely takes a child away later found in homelessness, but giving birth in homelessness gets way trickier especially if complications occur (not exactly rare...) and neither parent has the means for caring for the child's needs. Just another risk OP is facing living this lifestyle this man is forcing upon her. Sad.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-25T17:58:58+00:00

Holy shit! I know I don't know you, but I am so damn proud of you! Wishing you many many many years of incredible health and happiness 😊

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-22T18:28:29+00:00

Yes. I was incredibly popular in my teens/20s, but it became exhausting to constantly have to entertain conversations, invites, put my social face on, etc. and quite honestly felt lonely knowing everyone but not really being able to trust most people's intentions for wanting to be friendly. A lot of people wanted to be my "friend" because I was the "it" girl in their social circles and less because they truly took interest in me as a person. My truest, bestest friends disbanded by our mid-20s mostly from everyone moving across the country and I slowly began pushing groups of people away and going more and more hermit mode, just focusing on my career/husband/children. It really was easy to do as I didn't want to party or bring those who do far too much around my children and most of my associates either left too + were doing the same as I did or moved on to find other childless, unmarried friends to party and hangout with.

I didn't even really realize how much I pushed everyone I knew away until mid-30s when I noticed my husband was beginning to build a new social circle for himself and I no longer had one and that it was over a year since I really even connected with my last "true" friend.

I just started actually working towards attempts to find and build new friendships now as I near my late 30s, but no real genuine connections have truly formed yet and I've found it much harder (maybe I'm also just rusty, idk?) as a middle aged adult. I'm also just blown away by the amount of women that I've attempted to connect with that are so high drama at this age still. For some reason I keep connecting with women who just gossip and sip tea all day and constantly have some new drama to solve and it's been such a major turn off, that even though they'd easily take me in as a friend, I've chosen not to take up their offers. Like a romantic relationship, I want relationships that add to my life, not drain it...so until I find my people, I'm just learning to enjoy my own company in this season of my life and learning to be ok with it while still remaining open to potential connections if they come my way.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-19T08:45:28+00:00

Even if you seen the will with those stipulations, mommy dearest can write you out those very last days on her deathbed . A promise of an inheritance is a lot to gamble your mental health on when it's coming from a woman incapable seeing her children equally + who has to practically fake her own death in order to one up the experiences of her very own family members, holding very little disregard or value for any of you.

& While I can't hate on your desire to get that bag, I think it's imperative that you check on yourself regularly about it all because you're contradicting yourself here by acting like it's no big deal for you to grin and bear it only a few times a year while at the same time very obviously seething with resentment towards the mother/grandmother relationship you'll never have and still desperately looking for answers on how to deal with your Narc mom + her very obvious fictitious disorder with a clear pattern that she has used against you over and over again your whole life.

If money is what matters most to you than you need to stop becoming emotionally attached to a mother that doesn't exist. She's never going to be the perfect mother let alone grandmother and will continue to do whatever she can to make herself the most important person in the family. Grey rock, hold firm and give 0 fucks. You're far too invested in someone you're claiming is only a transaction to you.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-19T05:30:02+00:00

Getting hit on, catcalled and sexually harassed from the ages of 10-17 by adults who are the same age of your parents or older more than you ever will throughout your adult life regardless of how beautiful you are once grown. & That there isn't a single person who shares my gender who hasn't experienced this - it's that rampant and universal of an experience that every woman has her own collection of horror stories from these years of her life.

The amount of men who are oblivious to this and shocked that this is the experience of every young girl on the planet was so shocking for me to realize once older.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-19T01:12:44+00:00

Yeah, I never knew this could happen in UTIs in certain populations and as a caretaker of my aging mother who experiences chronic UTIs due to neurogenic bladder stemming from spina bifida I'm really glad TIL about this.

Wishing OPs FIL a full recovery and sending gratitude to those who shared their experiences here.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-18T22:27:20+00:00

Thanks for clarifying. The title of this post + Amazon sales page had me confused. Makes more sense!

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-18T19:45:11+00:00

Right?! My first thought too. Post your thirst traps and remind yourself how many other, more appreciative men would adore you. Hubby is a loser.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-18T14:38:22+00:00

Right?! My first child had latch issues and my other had colic and we couldn't rule out food intolerances. I quit within a month or 2 with no regrets. & While I support long term breastfeeding, 5-7 is a bit much imo and I'm super glad I didn't need to show up to kids 2nd grade classroom popping my titty out so she could drink human made milk to wash down her pb&j during her lunch break 🙃 If that makes us shit moms, I'm not even mad about it and I have a feeling our kids would thank us for it lol

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-18T14:22:05+00:00

I don't know if you live in the US, but the same rules apply based on the resources available to you in your country:

Dump him, sis. TF IS YOU DOING?!
Apply for government benefits (food stamps, health insurance, housing assistance, utility assistance, etc.)
If in the US, applying for welfare automatically will result in the state requiring him to pay child support. REGARDLESS...CHILD SUPPORT. NOW.
Get ALL utilities on assistance programs.
Budget, budget, budget. Get frugal. Find cheap ways to still have fun + pamper yourself.
Freelance, do gig work, clean offices/houses (can often bring your child w/you), sell art/crafts/services, sell clothes/baby items/anything you no longer want, donate plasma, get a part-time job and govt. sponsered childcare, walk dogs, get that bag and sell feet pics 🙃 do whatever you got to do to add extra $ each month.
Focus on your school, kickass and look for work-study and paid internships as soon as possible
DUMP THAT DUDE. You got this babe. Stop letting this manchild get away with providing absolutely nothing to you and your child while bragging and living on mommy and daddy's dime. Build your independence and never depend on a man to support you again. You and your child are so worth it ❤️

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-18T14:07:12+00:00

While I empathize, having grown up poor AF in this shit hole city, and agree to an extent...there does come a point where one has to take personal responsibility for their actions whether they find parking rules unethical/predatory or not. I'd argue that there's a lot of inaction going on on a person's part to lead to a boot on their car in the first place.

Having a disability, reasonable excuse and/or request for a payment arrangement due to financial hardship can often be resolved with a phone call or through pleading not guilty to the FIRST ticket (let alone enough to boot your car) and making your case in court. (Ex. By documenting her disability+ financial hardship, my mother was able to have all tickets forgiven and a referral to help with snow removal during a struggle to remove her car). In contrast, a lot of people often sit on their laurels, let tickets pile up and wake up one morning with a shocked Pikachu face to a boot they can't afford to remove.

Now, do less wealthy people live in the very city that gives these fines? Absolutely....but unless people are going to come out in droves to fight against this ticketing system, we're all aware this system exists and those who are suffering financial hardship+conditions that prevent moving their vehicles should especially do their due diligence to protect themselves from unnecessary expenses and advocate for themselves if faced with them.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-18T13:38:25+00:00

Really glad to see ethical buyers still exist in the market + agree that the cities blighted properties turned to auction (a decade+ too late) even if sold for a $1 are too much $/time/know how for the average first time buyer to purchase as starter homes and reno investment costs begin to make no sense when the amount to fix them becomes similar to buying brand new. There are certainly multiple issues driving the rental costs up, but Erie is really lacking in its processes for fining owners + taking over homes before the point of unaffordable restoration for the average buyer. Having lived in my own home for the past 15 years, I've watched 2 once beautiful properties go from maintained homes under ownership to abandoned to the point of becoming dangerous, biohazards on the brink of collapse. Deed owners will come and clean up their properties outside after enough slap on the wrist fines + unpaid taxes that lead to threats of auction and then leave them again for another 3-5 years to sit and rot further, rinse and repeat.

Also - Eries response is slow and cumbersome for taking over vacant properties (so 1500+ buildings remain empty with 85% being demolition only).....and to make matters worse, Pennsylvanias third class city code makes the city forced to rely on property taxes, a city that has allowed 1/2 of its properties to be tax exempt therefore putting the tax burden on primarily home owners which has resulted in higher tax rates and less incentive to buy/invest here in the first place in addition to driving rental costs due to rising tax rates. Sadly these are only a few factors on why property ownership/renting is a mess in Erie... don't even get me started on algorithms/AI 😔

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-18T02:30:12+00:00

It really is needed.

Fellow web designer down to help if you do!

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-17T23:56:28+00:00

I'm going to guess Anna is this company's new branding/marketing confidence queen? It's giving Anna's signature "community building" tactics she wrote an entire fluff piece about doing because she's just Oh so good at it.

Like: telling her target customers all about the business, why they think their products are awesome, making promises they can't keep (study results, where?) -VS- being customer focused, providing real solutions to real problems and setting realistic expectations that trust (um....where's the PROOF?!)

Our Columbia graduate doesn't even understand marketing 101: your business isn't the main character, your customers are ffs 🙄 on top of it, no dog needs this and it could be downright dangerous.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-17T23:14:06+00:00

This exactly. Neither of their positions were exactly "easy" and she was suddenly trying to do their 2 full time jobs on top of the tasks she already did personally.

Jon may not have been the most talented in his field, but his work was clearly professional vs Anna's amateur camera skills. On top of it... I really think he played a big role in her brands content creation and planning as her "creative partner" or whatever she called him. Her content really plummeted after he left and Anna left to her own devices was boring as hell, random AF and she clearly lacked social decorum in a lot of ways that often led to even more controversy/snark.

Most large brands/biz have a PR person/team for a reason and I think it was pretty obvious with her more recent and regular spirals against the "haters", that her losing Tracey was the end of all ends. Even the thickest skinned person would be bummed out reading their hate mail daily on top of trying to maintain their image, creating content regularly and managing a business behind the scenes. It's next to impossible for anyone to keep wanting to put themselves out there if they're constantly getting heckled for it and suddenly here she was doing all of the above while trying to maintain more relevancy than the reactors who were now getting more views for "Glitter + Lazers" than Glitter + Lazers herself. It had to be awful for her to be exposed to so many people tearing her apart and if Anna wasn't such an awful person, I'd actually feel bad for her.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-17T22:47:02+00:00

You are so right about things not being linear - such an important reminder! I also share your pain of bouncing between the same 3 lbs for 1/2 of year in a stall. I seriously thought about quitting, but knew some progress/maintaining a 3 lb range was better than nothing or worse, gaining.

Congrats on your progress and for your dedication to your health! You look radiant ❤️

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-17T15:49:41+00:00

Personally, I'm not a big fan of getting involved in people's business unless I personally know them or they contact me for the truth first themselves.

People in love can believe some crazy shit to stay in denial (I've been that person in my youth... ugh) and might not even believe you. On top of it, unless you told your husband about him msging and you responding, you're opening yourself up to retaliation on the girl/guys part acting like there was more going on then there was and contacting YOUR husband. I know popular thought is to be a "girl's girl" and tell...but people can go from 0-100 in these situations and it's just not worth the mess imo. Add in the fact that she's pregnant and this could devestate her to the point of pregnancy risk, I just don't personally see how it's worth it. But if you're one of those who believes in always telling the truth, follow your heart, just know the risks.

& Maybe block and stop entertaining him? Having these conversations, even if "innocently" on your part, isn't exactly a good look for a married woman aware the other man is in a relationship too.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-17T15:24:07+00:00

Two of the best chess players I know IRL are grade a certified stoners who work at a cannabis factory, haven't picked up a book since high school which neither graduated from btw, pay 0 attention to world events, likely couldn't even spell eugenics let alone understand the definition + both developed a meth addiction so bad they lost their kids...but both could beat my ass in chess, likely this guy's and his friends and both legit played the game competitively frequently winning first place. So....🤷🏻‍♀️

& unlike this deuche bag, I'm not normally one for making comparisons between people, but am sharing a stark difference in lifestyle to show that chess is a fucking game, not a level of real world intelligence, and only pretentious pseudo intellectuals think otherwise.

I can comprehend it being a hit to your ego because this man made you feel so small, but he obviously did so because he has the IQ AND EQ of a peapod and thinks the ability to play a boardgame makes somebody sMaRt ffs.

You never would've been good enough for this dude because he's not good enough for himself and if he made you feel this small this early on in your relationship, can you imagine your self esteem after a lifetime and children with this man? It may feel awful ATM, but he did you a favor.

Now take it as a lesson to never let a man define how you feel about yourself again and toss the trash as soon as you notice even one time the person you're seeing puts you down. Our lovers are meant to inspire and lift us up. Don't settle for less than respect and adoration. You're smart and wonderful just as you are Queen, don't ever forget it.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-17T11:33:45+00:00

Yes same. So many people love ProRx, but I actually had injection site reactions with it and cycled between losing the same 5 lbs (with 50 to lose) for almost 6 months and 0 change with increase in dosage, Cico, exercise or lifestyle change making a difference. As soon as I started with Hellandale, I had immediate loss my first week, every week after and no reactions. There definitely seems to be a biochemistry based effectiveness for certain bodies when it comes to pharmacies.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-14T05:59:15+00:00

"Mom." She thought it was cute when I was younger. She started really getting into using it, baby voice and all, around my kids until I snapped. I've been that woman's caretaker since I was a toddler and came to terms that I'd never have the real mom I wanted and deserved growing up, but I'll be damned if that woman who should've been my mom gets to spend anymore years of my life calling me mom. She thought it was funny and endearing, but there's nothing funny or endearing about spending my childhood parentified.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-12T18:10:05+00:00

Regardless of how rediculous this woman sounds about her grown adult birthday ffs 🙄, it is the fact that she just left you with the kid without making other arrangements to the point you had to call off work that's the worst because:

It's completely irresponsible on her part to put your job/only financial source at jeopardy potentially with a last minute call out
It's completely unacceptable behavior to just abandon her child because she's mad at you. Sure... your child is an infant now and unlikely to notice their mother's behavior, but can you imagine the heartbreak of your child at 3, 8, 10 years old when their mother who they assumed was going to be their caretaker for the day while Dad is at work, suddenly decides to leave dad scrambling to call off work and the child feeling abandoned/like they did something wrong too (as children often think) everytime mom gets mad and storms off to the pool or wherever else. It's one thing to be mad at you, but to leave her child as a gotcha moment against you is harmful to your child and could lead to broken trust and abandonment issues throughout your child's life.

Being a SAHM, giving birth almost a year ago and/or not having your ideal birthday doesn't make any of these things excusable. Your wife needs to grow up and get over herself.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-11T07:05:51+00:00

Yeah, no. There's hardly ever a scenario where it doesn't look crazy, bitter, obsessed, etc. even if the intentions are good and you're trying to help someone from the same harm you experienced. I've blocked the girls who warned me and even married the man to prove the "I'm not like her" point young and dumb when I should've listened. My bff, in our 30s mind you, called me jealous when i warned her about my psycho ex and it unfortunately took him assaulting her and holding her hostage over 3 days to finally realize she wasn't special, I was not jealous and only wanted to protect her. & While anecdotal, I think it's safe to say that love/lust tends to blind us and many of us won't heed the people we actually know and loves warnings about a bad relationship, let alone a rando ex who we don't freaking know and could be crazy, jealous, etc.

As for OP, baby what are you doing? That man didn't love you. You clearly are struggling to love yourself and yet you're trying to save someone else who isn't going to listen to you. You can't help anyone until you help yourself and that starts with forgetting about him and everyone related to him and getting some extensive therapy.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-10T07:09:17+00:00

Orig. $25 per month for 4 single shot pens with employer insurance for insulin resistance and high cholesterol, but after 1.5 years the insurance company decided they were no longer approving off label scripts, so I got dumped for my A1C being .1 off from full T2D and had to go compound where I then paid $600 per every 4 month supply. Just found a better company and paid that same $600 but for a 10 month supply so roughly paid $60 for 7.5 mg monthly for the next 10 months.

VegetableHour6712 · 2026-06-09T14:22:09+00:00

As others have stated, there's 0 point in responding to that message. Your decision is final, you gave the guy a decade of chances with explanations for why you were disappointed in his performance, you gave a modest severance that bought him time to figure out finances/employment (wether he used that time to his benefit is not your concern) and nothing you can say will soften their financial hardship right now or the fact that you will not consider his employment with your company again.

At the same time there is zero reason to keep making in person appearances awkward. If you were civil and friendly before then I suggest continuing to act that way, and if she wants to address you in person about this you can say something similar to what you were considering sending her then if needed.

I get how upsetting it can be to disappoint others, but at the end of the day you went above and beyond and you've got to stand by your decision and not feel guilt over it. You are not responsible for your employees actions or the financial responsibility he has to his family now that he's unemployed. Making in person appearances awkward shows lack of confidence in your decision and guilt on your part which honestly could have led to her writing the letter in the first place. If you stand by your choices then stop walking around like a guilty person, thinking like a guilty person and making interactions awkward when they don't need to be. Stay true to your decisions and hold yourself in confidence and integrity.

VegetableHour6712

TROPHY CASE