She Would Have Been 80
/She was not just my mother. She was so much more.
Read MoreShe was not just my mother. She was so much more.
Read MoreIt is through stories that we stake our claim in the world and make our experiences matter. It is through our stories that we know and understand each other. It is through our stories that we learn and change and do better.
Read MoreI have written every day this week. "But where are the words?" you ask in your adorable sleepy voice.
Yeah, you have a sleepy voice even though it's 11 a.m. but I won't judge you for sleeping in and being lazy because I am an unconditionally loving person and I've had enough coffee for both of us.
The answer to your question is, "Everywhere."
As you can see, I am a deep thinker and enjoy answering seemingly simple questions with existential hogwash.
Hogwash is a word a serious writer would use, especially if the writer lives on a farm and writes about hogs.
I don't live on a farm but I used to live on a piece of land my parents referred to as The Farm. I don't know why they called it that since we didn't grow crops or have any animals other than the mean shetland pony my father won in a poker game.
But I can use "hogwash" if I want to and who are you to judge, Reader with the Sleepy Voice?
The point of this post (and I know we are all wondering about that...including me...) is that I have written elsewhere. That's right...I stashed the words in other places.
I wrote about the plight of second children and the fact that it took us 10 years to make Zeca's baby book:
Then, you bring home the second dog and it’s a little bit overwhelming and you realize that having two dogs is more work than having one. In fact, you realize that there is some sort of weird mathmagical thing that happens where adding one more dog exponentially increases the amount of chaos in your life.
It’s the same with kids.
Of course, dogs and kids aren’t exactly the same. For one thing, you can put a dog in a kennel when you leave the house for mimosas. But, the strange mathmagic does apply to kids and that’s why second kids get screwed.
I also wrote about parenting everyday heartbreak because kids have a lot of feelings:
There are hard things that happen to kids–bullying and playground fights and violence. There are times of transition–divorces and separations, the death of a loved one. There are significant struggles–learning differences and mental and physical health issues. Most parents, when faced with these big things, know what to do and say to help their kids through them but what about the everyday heartbreak?
I also wrote a few thousand words that no one has seen--super secret words. Maybe about farm living and washing hogs. Or maybe about pinwheels...or pinworms. For the record, pinworms are not as pretty.
See? Words everywhere.
Speaking of words, we expect our daughter (who doesn't like to read) to read 30 minutes every night. Last night, she grabbed a book and joined me on the couch for our reading time and do you know what book she read? The dictionary. Did she learn new words? No, she did not. She read about presidents (there was a section in the back) and studied the Periodic Table of Elements and then read the introduction to the dictionary aloud.
There is no point to that story other than the dictionary is full of words and my daughter is weird. So there's that.
This is the part of the post where I tie everything together but I think we all know there is no way to do that because this is one of those posts. So, just raise your eyebrows and smile at the screen and then drink some coffee. After that, shake your head like this post was just a fever dream.