Wow, y’all. Was that a week or what?

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Summers of my youth were filled with sunny, sticky hot days, swimming parties, bike rides, and friends. Houston weather, relentlessly suppressing, choked your lungs with moisture. Us kids would ride around, ignoring the heat, to each other’s houses like mormons on mission. We would bike everywhere, arriving sweaty, sticky, and breathless ready to play and repeat the entire process.

This summer, as an adult, I’m able to re-live that experience. Or, at least in my own way, reminisce about it.

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I admit, I noticed her coffee mug first. I don’t know why, it was a perfectly normal coffee mug. Perhaps it was the size of it (Good for water, I thought) or the way it slanted in the pouch of her backpack (Must be empty, I considered). These are the types of thoughts my mind created to keep me from tearing up. I didn’t want to think about leaving my crying preschooler again. I didn’t want to think about him sobbing and yelling, “I WANT TO GO WIFF YOU!” with his scratchy, sore throat in a fever fit. I didn’t want the Mommy Guilt to hijack my mind. “You are a shitty mother, a selfish mother, a fucking god-awful mother.” So instead, I looked at her coffee cup.

At some point I realized I was staring at her. The train whizzed through a tunnel and I saw my reflection. I was staring. I caught myself and looked up to see if she noticed. That’s when I saw her crying. She wiped her nose with a tissue and exhaled steadily. Her eyes were puffy. She made no eye-contact. She did not give any indication she knew I was watching her.

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I have a laundry list of random bits I’ve believed because my parents told me so. Sometimes as an adult, I’ll start to say something, stop, and realize I’m uttering complete and total bullshit. Bullshit which I’ve heard a million times from my parents.

I probably need to see a counselor about such matters but instead, I will tell you.

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In the haste of Monday Morning, we forgot my daughter’s sleeping bag for her Kindergarten rest time. Having the luxury of working close to her school, I ran it over at lunch time and decided to stay for a few minutes to see what life is like for her in her mini chairs eating the lunch we packed with the friend she always talks about.

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We were at the dinner table the other night, when the conversation turned surreal:

“No, look, Elmo and Zoey would never get along as a married couple. Zoey is way out of Elmo’s league.”

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I recently had a conversation with my president about my future in the company, career aspirations, and plans. It was a two hour conversation, a good one, but ultimately one thing he said keeps repeating over in my mind, “What you’re good at and what you enjoy might be two different things.”

The guy is deep, y’all. Deep, intelligent, and wise. And full of these little gems.

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Have you ever noticed how sometimes a certain theme will pop up in your life at one time? Like when you ask a friend for a DVD she borrowed and she mentions that perhaps you let another friend borrow it and that friend, without prompting what-so-ever mentions that DVD and brings it back? It’s like just by saying the DVD title out loud, all of the universe collectively worked with some weird underground energy current and subconsciously effected the mind of your friend?

Or is that just way too new age bullshit?

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My daughter was born after 24 hours of labor, both of us struggling to bring her in to this world. I posted photos via moblog in 2004 to update a small and friendly community waiting her birth. They read the day I went back to the hospital sick with infection and read my struggles of post partum depression.

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In the past few months, I’ve painstakingly removed most processed food from our home and slowly moved my food purchases to the Farmer’s Markets and local butchers. Costco is no longer our grocery store, as I refuse to purchase anything with a shelf life longer than a week.

This is incovienent, true. But as we’ve discussed, good clean whole food is not only dirty, it is work.

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