1. My favorite book-buying kid just stopped into the shop again tonight. He bought another Captain Underpants, explaining that his school only has two copies of this particular volume and they are in high demand. I replied that I hate giving books back, that it’s much better to own my own copies. He answered, “That’s exactly why we’re in an economic crisis right now” and then gave me a 20 cent tip.

2. I’m still dreadfully behind in my blog reading. I know you’ll forgive me, but that’s not enough for me. I want to be there, all up in your business. I miss you. And listen, if something huge has happened to you and I’m the dick who hasn’t commented in some way? Never be afraid to email me a verbal slap upside the head. I’m not kidding.

3. Since you were all so curious and supportive about this past weekend, I’ll just tell you: I was meeting with magazine editors. It was like speed dating for writers, like seven job interviews in a row. It was exhausting, terrifying, and ultimately exhilarating. Now you know.

4. The contest has ended! The new owner of Alicia’s beautiful pair of earrings is Cathy at Noble Pig. Congratulations!

5. Finally, the announcement.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s about 400 square feet. Maybe even 500. I was so excited I forgot to ask.

It is old. It is rich with character and water stains, built-ins and cobwebs. It has freshly scrubbed window sills; a carefully swept pine floor, painted brown. It has stairs for sinking down into inspiration, high vaulted ceilings for dreaming up. It has a donated desk carried in by friends, and a vase-full of fresh flowers delivered in person by my worried but always supportive husband.

The copper key seems to sparkle even more in my palm.

It is a writer’s studio, and it is mine.

Annie Ruth Brown grew up in a slave shack on the Blue Lake Plantation beneath the whithering Mississippi sun. She and her children worked the surrounding fields for little to no pay, sometimes to the point of passing out, from 1964 til 1994 — an era when slavery had supposedly been illegal for more than one hundred years.

Annie has since moved to Itta Bena, a tiny town a couple miles from that four-room shack. She helms a comfortable home with a revolving screen door of kids, grandkids, neighbor kids, and strays, a loving swirl of chaos eddying around its matriarchal island. Annie has stories like you wouldn’t believe, as you can imagine, but I started thinking about her today for one story in particular. It flashed suddenly to my mind this morning when I had to physically restrain myself from hitting my child.

I’ve only met Annie once. I sat in an uncomfortable concave hole in her threadbare couch one March morning last year, and listened as she told me things I will never be able to scrape from my memory. Indignities and violence suffered on a daily basis simply for being born the color of lovingly shined mahogany. She testified her life story to me that day, spoke things that had me shedding torrents of silent tears, had me terrified I’d be unable to survive the hearing. But she told me a story that made me laugh, too. It was about the time her new neighbors called the police when they saw her take a belt to her grandson. The local officer approached her front door cowering. He was the age of her children, and he’d known her all his life. He knew she wasn’t abusive. He believed she’d had a good reason to do what she’d done. That grown officer of the law, armed with a gun and strong as an ox, respectfully shrunk in the presence of that proud southern mama. He slinked inside her house, saying, “I’m so sorry to bother you, Mrs. Brown. It won’t happen again.”

In Wisconsin, in the gorgeous pocket I live in, we don’t have a whole lot of heartache. That’s not to say we don’t suffer the same horrific car accidents, the same percentage of domestic abuse, the same incidences of random violence, it’s just to say that our level of basic economic comfort is higher than many. The poorest of the poor kids don’t go hungry or naked, and there’s not a single homeless person on the streets of our town. And around here? You don’t hit your kids. You don’t spank them, let alone take them behind the woodshed. If you do? If a cop responds to a call at your house? He’s not cowering.

I don’t know what my life would be like if I’d been raised in a different setting, among different cultural mores and norms, but in this life, I don’t hit my kids. The rare gentle swats to the behind have come in moments of grave danger, or in play. My husband doesn’t hit my kids, we don’t believe in hitting our kids, and I cringe when I see others do it. It doesn’t escape my attention, though, that every single one of the children that ran past Annie Ruth Brown that day called her “ma’am” as they stopped to quickly snuggle with her. These were not abused children.

Emma is the challenge that Gretta never was. She has the ability to boil my blood to a temperature I never knew it could reach. I even wonder, sometimes, if it’s more than the normal tantrums of her age group, if there’s some underlying psychosis driving the worst of her behavior. If I put her left sock on before her right sock, she will have a full-on meltdown. If I lift her out of bed from the left side instead of the right, she will work herself up into such a froth it takes hours to come down. To be clear to my social worker readers, it’s not the order of things per say, it’s that I’m not doing it exactly as she demanded. It’s beyond being bossy, though — she is utterly unable to control her emotions in these moments. She always, always apologizes later. “I’m sowwy I fweaked out, mom. I’m so sowwy.” And each time we go through this, at least daily, I feel more and more helpless. And so angry, so angry in these moments, I hate myself. I shrink beneath the weight of my own self-control, and the horror I feel that I need to work so hard to use it.

I know I’m not the only one that goes through this. I also know that child abuse is a very real issue, and that’s not really what I’m talking about here. I’m sitting here this morning, coffee gone cold, wiped out from another episode that made us 20 minutes late to school this morning. I’m thinking about Annie, and I’m thinking about Emma’s uncontrollable rages, and I’m swallowing down a bitterness born from more than just dime store java. I’m asking myself hard questions, the least of not being this one:

Am I doing it all wrong?

Last night I had a dream about a good friend. I woke up thick with her, and for a good 20 minutes I lay there unable to think of anyone or anything else. And that’s when it hit me.

I forgot her birthday.

I didn’t just miss it, I blew past it without so much as a second glance, back in November. A mere four days after I wrote a sappy ode to another friend! Seriously, could anything be worse?

I didn’t technically forget it, actually. I thought of it dozens of times over the last two months. So, thinking I might be losing my mind, hoping in fact I’d forgotten that I hadn’t forgotten, I frantically searched my email for the missing greeting. (Though we only live 45 minutes apart, email has become our lifeline. I hate the telephone, and she accepts this about me. Every once in a while I get it together enough to send a card, but I know I didn’t this year.)

There was no email sent on the 22nd. Ironically, on the 21st, I asked her if she had any big plans for her birthday. But nothing on the day itself, and nothing – NOTHING AT ALL – in the 17 days since.

What the hell? It’s like a cog slipped. I don’t understand it at all. All I can think is I’ve been completely self-absorbed in my own muck, sunk heavy beneath my own weighty days of late.

I know she won’t be mad. I know she won’t hold a grudge. She’s not that kind of person. She may even laugh.

But I bet she’s thought about it, and I bet she felt a little hurt over it. And that’s something I’ll never, ever be able to erase.

I know she reads this blog. I’m taking this opportunity to apologize, both publicly and and privately, in a way, as if I were speaking these words directly to her. I want her to understand their importance.

How many years have I loved you now? Enough for you to know me so well, enough for you to believe what I have said here and smile about it. Remember I even sent you a card last year? (Or was it the year before?) Perhaps that near-miracle threw the Universe off kilter, causing a direct and opposite reaction. Perhaps I’m just a schmuck. It’s funny, because I’ve thought of you more lately than I have in so many years, and I know you know why. Maybe my brain, more often on auto-pilot these days than not, thought it had taken care of your birthday wishes and relaxed. I don’t know what happened. It doesn’t matter anyway. There is no excuse for not telling you how much I love you every single day, let alone on the most important day of all.

I’m sorry, R.

I sure am sorry. You are SO getting an over-the-top Christmas present this year.

And a phone call in a few minutes….

MY GIRLS.

(sigh.)

On the left, Miss Gretta The Beautiful. When she was only one year old, riding in the backseat of my Hyundai, we pulled up to a stop sign before a highway marked “H”. She immediately pointed and said “The letter H”, just like they say on Sesame Street. By two she could identify Joni Mitchell on the stereo. She could read exactly two-and-a-half months after her fourth birthday, and bested me in vocabulary contests by her fifth. She gets straight-A’s on her report cards, with parents who never check her backpack….The thing is, it isn’t just what she knows, it’s what she understands. I’m constantly forgetting she’s only seven. Because seven, in Gretta-Years, is more like 24-ish. She giggles like an honest-to-god hyena, and no matter how mad I am, I can’t help giggling myself when I hear it. Her verve is contagious. I am daily outdone.

And then there’s Emma the Diva, on the right. Look at that condescending pose. (“What, you wanna take my picture? Go ahead. Take my picture.”) Watch as she mocks me, listen as she chuckles under her breath. When she came into this world two short years ago, she did the impossible: she followed up the Gretta-Act. (Who among us could pull that off?) Oh, but she has, my friends. She has. She came out of the womb with her hands on her hips. In her first hour of life she sent us on an ambulance ride to the ER because she didn’t feel like breathing. She wouldn’t nurse for two-and-a-half seemingly-endless weeks while I pumped and fed her from a teeny tube. She does everything her own way, in her own time. She is completely impossible, but in an entirely different way than Gretta. She lures you in with her sweetness, her shy shrug, her warm “I wub you!” Then she pounces. Our entire house is under Emma’s control, make no mistake. Even Gretta knows it. Just ask her. She only giggles.

I spend my days on point. Locked-and-loaded, if you will, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I coexist with them in a dissociative state, watching from above as they wreak their terror on some other poor fool of a mother. Part of me is horrified. But part of me (a bigger part, thankfully) worships the ground they walk on.

How did I get so blessed? I’ll never know.

Trauma, at first, is a wet wool blanket on the brain. You lie still, unable to move, and you don’t even notice the musty smell — you just give in completely to your body’s most basic functions. You can’t find your words but you can walk a confident path through the snake-like hospital labyrinth. You want to weep over simple arithmetic, but you can successfully maneuver your children through their bed time routines. Nothing is of your own volition, but you don’t resent the loss of control; you simply move forward where you can.

It’s later, I think, maybe seven or eight days in, when your senses figure out where your brain’s been holding you hostage. Each morning you wake a little bit sharper, a little more selfish. You start to whine. You start to notice the way you smell, how little you packed, how cramped your quarters and lumpy your makeshift bed. You find yourself crying over mismatched socks when four or five days earlier it hadn’t even occurred to you to do laundry, or that you even had feet at all.

Suddenly, you want to scream at everyone. You want to answer every flippant, oblivious email with Do you have any idea where I am? How could you ask me that?? You want them all to know the depths of your suffering. You want to kick the world in the shin of the leg it’s stupidly spinning on. You know now that everyone is going to be okay, that you’re only a few days from home, and so you are remembering, worrying, floundering. Your to-do list rises to the surface after you thought you’d weighted her down with enough stones and rope and brick — a surprise. You thought you’d learned to simply appreciate the “little things” but you haven’t, as it turns out, and you hate yourself.

And then, the sky. A sky larger and clearer and fuller than you’ve seen in ages. You stumble into a shallow bowl in a crisp, fallow wheat field and maybe you had to throw yourself off a cliff to find this spot but find it you did, and you forget everything else, because you hear something. The sky is calling you without yelling. She rearranges her lap to accommodate you despite your crass, whiny bulk, and she wipes your snotty face and she is generous as she whispers Sit. Rest. I’m so, so sorry.

I’m just so sorry.

And you believe her. And you feel bad for ever waxing so pathetic. And you settle into that soft spot where she cleaves and in that moment you know in your marrow that you don’t need anything, any time, anywhere, more than this.