I don't see anything wrong with being an auntie. I certainly don't see anything wrong with giving up a life that doesn't seem very attractive to you anyway in favor of a life that does. There's only one potential problem I spy on the horizon: what if the moms aren't as thrilled with having a full-time auntie as you are being one? The problem, as I see it, isn't that they aren't your kids; it's that they are someone else's kids. If you and your sisters had a falling-out, what would happen next? What about the fathers? Are all of these people willing to consider you a permanent part of their lives? Unlike a parent, you have no legal right to visitation in the event of a family breakdown. Consider all the circumstances in which a breakdown might occur. How would the dynamic change if your sister got divorced and remarried a guy who couldn't stand you? What if kid number 2 said, "I wish you were like Aunt Mary, she never nags me" and mom freaked out?

I'm not saying don't do it. I think your letter is heart-warming. Just make sure that the things that belong to YOU are enough to sustain you. Don't give away everything you own. For one thing, relying on your sisters' families for your happiness will put a pressure on them that can't help but be a bad thing.

The more I think about this letter, the more warning signs pop out at me. The LW has spent her life working for non-profits. She wants to make sacrifices for children who aren't her own. She wants to devote herself to someone else's family; that will, she says, make her happier than having a family of her own. In other words, she sounds like a completely dysfunctional caretaker type.

It's possible to be a caretaker without being dysfunctional, of course. But caretakers who are not dysfunctional have learned a secret about life which the LW seems not to have grasped; before you fix the lives of others, you must fix your own life.

The first time I encountered this concept, something about it bothered me, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. So I bounced my thoughts off my husband. It's true, I do carry my keys in my hand on the way to the car; in fact, I've run off a guy who ran up on me in a parking lot with nothing more than a fistful of keys and a deep-throated yell. (Husband likes to joke about how scared the poor guy must have been.) It's true that I'm constantly aware of the choices I make about my behavior and my environment. Yet something about this "rape schedule" theory struck me funny.

"That's simple," my husband said. "I do the same thing. In fact it wouldn't occur to me that anyone, male or female, would go through life not expecting to do the same thing."

He goes on to describe approaching a convenience store late at night. Employees conspicuously absent. Is the clerk in the john, or is there a robbery in progress? This location has been robbed twice before. A few moments pass; the clerk returns with a mop and bucket. Ah, good. Now it's safe to enter the store.

Yes. That's exactly it, what bothers me about this bit of wisdom. The idea that women live on a "rape schedule", that to women the world is a prison in which they are constantly aware that they can be assaulted at any time, assumes that there's some way in which this experience is specific to women.

Men get assaulted too. Fewer men than women get raped, but men get raped too. Little boys learn early what it feels like to be chased home by bullies. Within my immediate group of friends, I can count one woman who was date raped, one young man who was raped in a locker room at high school, a man who was robbed at knifepoint outside an ATM, a woman who was carjacked and murdered, a man who had a gun held to his head during a store robbery, a computer repairman who was making a delivery when his partner was shot dead in the car seat next to him at a stoplight. For every woman I know who's been a victim, there's a man like the man my husband used to work with who wasn't able to walk to the back of the store where he worked because it gave him flashbacks of the robbery. Life is dangerous, for men as well as women. Situational awareness is a good idea. There's no way to make life risk-free, but also no reason for failing to take reasonable precautions. This makes us special how?