My kids, aged 33, 30, 20, and 18, add up to 101. That, plus a career helping parents navigate raising their own kids, and I’ve learned a few things. (I’ve made plenty of mistakes, too—just ask my kids.) By way of true stories and timeless mom quotes, here are a handful of pearls from pregnancy to post-launching:

Bulging at the seams with my second child, I waddled into my grandmother’s house. “What will you name this one?” she asked, loving but definitely entitled to know.

“For a girl,” I started, “we’re thinking Rivkah.” It sounded lyrical and meant Rebecca in Hebrew to me, a strong and determined matriarch. It reminded my then-husband of his love for rivers and all things riparian, and he agreed.

“That’s awful,” Gramma spat fiercely, a spry, shrinking-below-her-younger-five-foot stature, 83-year-old. "Just terrible. You can’t do that.”

I knew I’d done nothing wrong. I was 33 and couldn’t remember her angry since preschool. Stunned, I stayed mute.

“How could you even think of naming a child Rivkah,” she railed, disdain dripping from her words. “You just can’t!”

It turns out that in the small Utah town where Gramma grew up, there was one sex worker, and her name was—you guessed it—Rivkah. My grandmother and her sister Sadie paid Rivkah secret visits and appreciated her kindness. She offered them coins every time they climbed the stairs to her apartment. But these visits were forbidden and surreptitious. The name’s stigma stuck.

In time, Gramma and Aunt Sadie grew to accept “Rivi” for short. They didn’t have a choice; it was her name, and she was so cute that nothing could keep them from wanting to “eat her up” and love her in every way.

Pearl: All kinds of people, some you barely know, feel entitled to regale you with tons of parenting advice from the moment you are pregnant or parenting. But they don’t know........

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