A rivederci, Gino

"I'm feeling a little emotional about this," my dad admitted, as he stabbed a sesame-coated bread stick into the pat of soft butter.

"Me too," I said, trying to disguise the catch in my throat.

An hour earlier I had called him from my desk in a fit of inspiration. "What are you doing tonight?"

"Nothing, why?"

"Leave in an hour. I'm taking you to Gino."

Gino was our restaurant, the red sauce Southern Italian boite near Bloomingdale's favored by the blue hairs, the ladies who lunch, and the olde time-y New Yorkers who still understood the value in that perfect bowl of pasta alongside the ghosts of Jackie O and Frank Sinatra.

The menu hadn't changed much in decades, save for the line at top that read credit cards honored. that was added last year. While Gino had died in 2001, the wait staff didn't turn over. Or age. They all seem to have been born 64. The flowers were fake. The Christmas lights over the bar may have stayed up longer than they should. The maitre d' never used a list, never took a reservation. He just caught your eye at the bar, made a mental note, and when your table was ready, it was ready.

Gino was comfortable, it was tacky, it was unfancy and it was fabulous.

But the defining characteristic of that restaurant, by any account, wasn't the tangy aroma of the lauded Sauce Segreto; it was the wallpaper. The spectacular, miraculous, lose-yourself-in-it wallpaper featuring giant zebras leaping across a field of crimson.

The wallpaper was the perfect metaphor for the restaurant itself: You got it or you didn't.

When the news broke last week that Gino was closing after 65 years on May 29 thanks to a rent increase, I gasped audibly, the way you might when you read that your favorite 60s-era sitcom star had died. I couldn't imagine a New York without it. (Neither can people like Gay Talese or John Pizaarelli.) And that is why, with not a small degree of urgency, I insisted to my father that we make our way to midtown.

It must have been my grandpa who first took me here as a very young girl, to this crazy, funky restuarant, the zebra wallpaper place, 20 blocks south of his own apartment. He was a regular, and he made sure my Shirley Temple came with extra cherries. He introduced me to Gino, who kissed my hand and made me feel fancy, like the ladies in pearls seated around us, diving into their Proscuitto con Melone. He plied me with Fettucini a la Romana, ruining me for low-cal dining forever.

That was the first time we ate there together. The last time was in 1981, the time Grandpa whispered over stuffed artichokes I might not be around much longer.

But that wasn't his last time there.  My dad reminded me that when Grandpa needed a break from the tubes and the colostomy bags and the doctors and the medicines with the long names, my dad escorted him down to 61st and Lex and through the green and yellow doorway.

"He's not supposed to eat that stuff you know," my grandmother scolded my dad.

"He's dying," my dad said. "What's the difference. Let the man go to Gino's."

You got it or you didn't. My grandmother didn't.

I remember the dinner there celebrating my triumphant return home from Providence. I remember the dinner on my first September 11 birthday since 2001 that I was able to stomach, but only if it were at Gino. I remember the first time I took my baby girl there in a carrier, awaiting the day that she would be old enough to sit upright at the table with her own grandpa, drinking Shirley Temples and discovering the exquisite joys of tiramisu.

He didn't get that date with Thalia. He did get a date with me though.

As I had climbed out of the 59th Street subway station, headed across Lex towards the green and yellow sign for the last time, a text from my father popped up on my phone: This is the Gino I remember and love - bar is mobbed. Lots of people waiting for tables and no names. Just the boss remembering. And a great vodka gibson.

Sentimental diners wielding iPhones snapped photos of the wallpaper. Bottles of white wine sloshed into heavy stemmed glasses. "I saw Coppola in here just three weeks ago," a guest whispered to a friend. Two ladies picked at their arugula salads. We were seated sooner than we should have been. We ordered second drinks. We finished the breadsticks. The kitchen ran out of stuffed artichokes.

[photos: Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, Mom101, NY Times Magazine ]

---------

psst... for another take, check out my dad's post on his blog, A View from Madison Ave.

In celebration

This week, someone I love did something I'm very proud of: She completed five years of sobriety.

I wish I could make it to her meeting tonight, to support her from the crowd when she stands up to talk about five years of just saying no, but I can't. So instead I'm giving her a shout-out here. Raising a glass of (non-alcoholic) fruit juice and saying GO YOU.

 You did it, just like we knew you could. Even if you didn't know it yourself.

The pill bug

I'm watching my daughter play with a bug. It's a pill bug she plucked off Grandma's lawn, the kind that curls up in a tight ball when you touch it. Only it's not curling up. It's making its way up Thalia's arm, tickling her and sending her into fits of delighted giggles.

"He really likes me, Mommy!" she tells me. "I tried to shake him off and put him back in the cup but he likes me. He wants to stay with me."

She strokes him with her fingertip. She examines his tiny feet. She gazes right into his face, as if this ordinary black pillbug were romantic as a ladybug or as sweet as a pale green inchworm. She talks to it in a high-pitched voice, the same one she uses when she plays "mommy" with her dolls.

She tells him that everything will be okay.

I smile and go back to my newspaper. I know that one day soon, she'll say ew. One day she'll learn from some girlfriend or another that girls are supposed to squirm when they see bugs, supposed to shriek and run away. One day soon she'll learn that the worms she likes wriggling in her palm, and the daddy longlegs she likes tickling her feet are boy things. One day she'll learn that girls don't play with bugs when they want to be liked by other girls who don't play with bugs.

But right now, I'm watching my daughter play with a bug. And I'm in love with her.

In defense of PR

I joke that I am the Rorshack blogger. I write opinion posts that are sometimes so balanced, that readers see what they want in it. Sometimes I'm nuanced. Sometimes I'm not as blatantly, obviously, clearly clear as I should be and then I end up with both sides end up in my comments giving me thumbs up and happy face emoticons.

And then I have to go uh, wait... you're agreeing with me disagreeing with you. I think. Maybe.

And sometimes people disagree with me agreeing with them.

(They're the difficult ones. I stay away from them.)

Recently I wrote a post about being paid for marketing programs that you do as a blogger that struck a chord. The comments, as always, are better than the post so read them for little happy nuggets of golden deliciousness.

But my post was about compensation for ads. Banners. Sidebar widgets. Social media promotions. Giveaways with contractually bound requirements like keyword placement and run dates and follow-up posts and follow-up follow-up posts, that all start to look a whole lot more like work for a marketer, and less like good content for your readers.

I'm not sure that it was totally clear, so let me be clear now:

I did not write a post about being paid to review products.

I did not write a post telling bloggers to demand free products to write about.

I did not write a post telling bloggers to be assholes to PR people in the name of "standing up for myself."

I want say this in defense of PR folks: They are professionals. They put on nice shoes (man, those NYC PR chicks always have the nicest shoes), put on nice clothes, and head to an office every day where they get paid to do what they do. Now of course some are better than others. Some flat out suck. But many, many do not. Many are still learning how to navigate the waters of social media and blogs as media platforms to pitch, and they are eager to learn and to do better. But they are pros. They are used to working with other pros, like the ones who write articles on tween accessory trends for magazines, or the ones who decide which products will end up with Kathie-Lee Gifford giggling over them in a 10:14AM Today Show segment.

We as bloggers, for the most part, are not pros. We're not even journalists. We're...different. We're the publishers and editors and writers and social media promoters and ad sales team all wrapped up in one.

That's crazy when you think about it.

Think of how hard it must be for them: They are used to pitching publications that are actually in search of relevant content for their audiences. And now suddenly, *bam* there are all these blogs out there and some are in search of relevant content, some are in search of free products, some are picky picky picky, some will write up anything that comes with a $10 Visa gift card attached, and some...well, some are just there (hello!) to write about their kids and reality TV and their drunken karaoke parties and don't want pitches at all.

But we aaaaaall end up on the same pitch lists.

Mayhem!

Look, I have had bad days and been snarkier in response to a pitch than I should have. Frankly, I have been snarkier in response to my children asking me for a second cup of milk than I should have. I'm human.

But if you get a pitch you don't like, allow me offer up a few ways to respond to it:

1) Delete it
2) Politely decline.
3) Politely decline and suggest how you'd rather work. Or better, point the PR person to a page on your blog that describes the kinds of pitches you're open to, and how you work
4) Ask to be removed from the list.

If this is helpful, here is a standard email we often send from Cool Mom Picks. In fact, I sent it twice just yesterday (sigh).

Thanks so much for thinking of us. This book isn't a good fit for our site right now--we tend to cover books that are of specific interest to new parents, generally non-fiction. Feel free to check out our archives to see the kinds of books we've reviewed in the past so you can keep us in mind when something relevant for us comes up.

Of course I get annoyed when we get 150 or more irrelevant pitches a day. Because good lord, can we be more clear on what we cover? Sustainable nursery furniture? Yes. McNachos with new jalapeno-ranch dip? No.

Be strong mamas. Be discerning. Make sure that whatever you agree to write about is a good fit for your blog, and gives you butterflies in your tummy to write about because you just love it so darn much. And if those giveaways are more trouble than they're worth, stop doing them--hopefully your readers are coming to your blog because they love what you have to say, and not what you can possibly give them for free.

So yeah, stand up for yourselves. But remember, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. And that PR person offering you the "crappy box of cereal" for review today, might be the person offering you the yoga retreat next week.

You can say no to pitches and still build relationships.

Or you can say no to pitches and go back to writing about your kids. Which is what I'm going to do right now.

The Amazing Adventures of Supergirl! Episode IV: Supergirl Takes on the Politically Correct Preschool

Welcome to our liberal, East Coast, toy gun-free, non-violent home. Where, for some reason, my almost five year-old daughter's new favorite word seems to be kill. Closely followed by dead.

As in, Ha, I killed you Captain Hook! Now you're dead!

Or: Let's play the game where you are the bad guy and I kill you and you are dead.

Or my favorite: If you don't let me have that glitter pen right now Sage I will KILL YOU.

Now of course this all leads to wonderful discussions about why we don't tell people that we will kill them, and what dead means, and that hey, shouldn't we watch a Care Bears video right about now? That Grumpy Bear is so cute when he's trying not to smile!

It's actually funny to me that the interest in killing/bad guy/dead is all Thalia's, my sweet girl whose superhero alter ego is "Flower Girl," the princess with magical powers from flowers she shoots.

(Sage, who is a bit more in touch with her masculine side, always chooses "Mighty Man.")

I've tried to give my girls a little leeway in acting out the more aggressive fantasy games, keeping in mind that pretty much every boy in the neighborhood does the same. But you know, it doesn't come easy for me. I admit that sometimes I am quick to squirm when I hear imaginary light saber fighting (Sage's Luke to Thalia's Leia) and yell "be careful! Be careful!" wayyyyy too often, even though I know the boys in Thalia's class do the same with far less parental discomfort.

I guess it's the old letting boys be boys and letting girls be...I don't know. Something you can be while wearing a pink skirt and sparkly shoes.

Mea culpa. Sorry, inner feminist.

I watch as every boy on the front lawn of our school at pick-up will snatch a stick off the ground and turn it into a weapon. Not a single parent looks up from their Blackberries. And I've tried to learn from that, to desensitize myself a bit from the admittedly jarring vision of chubby-thighed little girls karate chopping each other. So I'm attempting to work against instinct best I can, and let the play fighting and play stabbing and play ninja kicks go on--at least until it gets to the killing part--thinking that I'm doing an okay job as a progressive parent by letting my daughters express that side of themselves too.

Clearly not everyone is on board with this, however.

Last month during a family visit, my brother and his wife (who I like--so no in-law jokes, you rabble-rousers) became visibly uncomfortable watching my girls play Super Hero with their girls, what with all the dead-killing-bad guy stuff. I figured at first it was that instinct thing: girls + "YOU'RE DEAD!" = no-no.

But instead they informed me that their own preschool had in fact banned Super Hero dramatic play altogether.

Banned Super Heroes.

I was floored.

I'm no childhood development expert (oh, trust me on that one) but it seems to me that acting out these hero/villain archetypes is developmentally appropriate at four and five, and that to disallow it is stifling something very natural--and maybe even important. Isn't that an effective way for kids learn about morality? And good versus bad? To say nothing of the essential skill of keeping your cape from getting closed in the car door.

I asked my brother whether the super hero games at their school couldn't just have more rules, so that kids weren't allowed to touch or hit. But the school's stance seems to be that no, all super hero dramatic play always leads to someone getting hurt, so it's forbidden as a matter of policy.

And I thought wow. Just wow. Decades of tradition of kids playing Superman, Lone Ranger, Davey Crocket, Wonderwoman... gone.

Is the culture so violent now that we can't stomach even fake bad-guy-nabbing? Are we smart to nip pretend lasso-ing and laser gun-ing in the bud? Are we all just absurdly sensitive and overprotective and over PC and smothering our children with fear? Or maybe I'm just lucky, coming at it from the perspective of someone with children who don't actually ever hurt anyone.

I'm kind of wondering what the heck is going on here.

Words to live by

Drastic inboxes call for drastic measures

I receive so much email it's astounding. Don't we all? I have been thinking of 2010 as The Year of the Inbox.

Gmail is kind enough to snare 1000 or more pieces of spam a day from the likes of "Tirone Elanda" and "Mr George Van Persie" in its delightful little teeth, but my inbox itself is the entry point for quite literally hundreds of pieces of correspondence a day: PR pitches, newsletters, flash sale alerts, hi's from friends, family photos, bills, cards, linkedin notifications, party invitations, listserve updates, school business, bad jokes from inlaws, political petitions, work correspondence, and yeah, the occasional bit of spam that slips through the cracks.

It's exhausting me.

I've gotten better at scanning the subjects and hitting delete en masse, but I've always wondered what I might be missing; which little gem would escape me in my haste to keep up.

This week I received some spammy looking thing that seems to come every month or so. The subject is something like ZzuuzuuKittiezzz wants to share photos with you.

Deleeeete.

But wait...

was that...?

I scurried back into my trash folder and took another look at the familiar figures in the preview photo.

I was face to face my daughter's preschool friends.

Every single month, I have, without a moment of hesitation, deleted every album of class photos snapped with love by Thalia's preschool teacher and sent out to the parents.

Every month. All year long.

The look on some of the other parents' face when I told them was priceless. You'd have thought I deleted my actual daughter.

I have been thinking long and hard lately about Tina Roth Eisenberg from Swiss Miss, who recently--and quite bravely, I should say--declared email bankruptcy. She deleted her inbox whole, with a brief apology, and the hopes of a fresh, more productive start.

It led to some interesting debate in her comments, from those who found it rude, disrespectful, and selfish, to kindred spirits, like me, who supported her completely. I even found myself a bit envious.

I really think that as women and mothers in particular, we often put everyone else's needs ahead of our own. Our children, our partners, our work colleagues, our friends, and yes, even strangers who touch our lives electronically through our inboxes. I can quite literally spend the entire day managing emails, responding with polite no thank you's to irrelevant pitches, following up on this/that/the other thing, later realizing I have accomplished little else in the day.

And since working again full time (Oh, have I mentioned I've been working full time since November? Hello!) I simply don't have the time to do it all.

But worse, I may be missing the important things spending my life when I'm enslaved to email management. Not just the photos of my daughter's face when she sees a caterpillar in a netted box become a butterfly for the first time, but the important things that happen when my computer is closed. I don't want to spend each increasingly rare free hour I have thinking, "Oh good. Maybe I can get through at least 50 of those old emails." I'd rather write a post. Or read another chapter of Peter Pan to my kids. Or work on my book proposal. Or take on Nate's pile of clothing that is now stacked so high off the bedroom floor, the kids have turned it into a slide.

I currently have 1649 emails in my gmail account, 222 of them unread.

That is just one of three accounts I manage.

I'm getting quite ready to select all-delete (though not without tremendous guilt or I'd have done it sooner) and call it a day.

How many emails are in your inbox? How do you manage it all? Would you take the email bankruptcy plunge?

Halp!

---
This post is also syndicated at BlogHer.com
And thanks to Gretchen Rubin of the Happiness Project who gave it a shout-out too.

Nothing in life is free. Except, it seems, a mommyblogger.

Well congratulations mommybloggers:

We are all officially known as  the Best Free Advertising Resource of the Marketing World.

Whoo-hoo!

It's a big title, I know. Maybe too big to fit on a sash, when we walk down the aisle at our next mommyblogger pageant (brought to you by Piggly Wiggly and the makers of Turtle Wax).  But I'm sure with a skillful hand, it can be cross-stitched in teeny lettering on a nice throw pillow and given away in a blog contest. Six extra entries if you Twitter it.

How do I know about this coveted accolade we've earned? Because yesterday, the advertising team at Cool Mom Picks (a small and worthy mom-run business if I ever knew one) spent a good deal of time putting together a proposal for a four-month advertising program for a major brand that was rejected because *gasp* we had the audacity to ask for actual money to run their banners.

Not giveaways for our readers.

Not "a link on our microsite" or "access to our event" or "gift cards for your readers" which is in fact what they were hoping to compensate us with.

Money. As in, that stuff we use to pay our writers and designers and tech guys and the US Postal Service and the fine discount hotels of Las Vegas during trade show season.

I think the actual response from the marketer was something like: Oh, we don't need to pay for this. The mommyblogs are so great, they're excited to help and do it in exchange for a link!

Here is the specific "help" they are referring to:

-Promotion on your website and all social media outlets (blog, Facebok, Twitter, etc)
-Placement of promotional banner ads on your blog with hyperlink
-Dedicated email blasts and/or inclusion in newsletter highlighting the promotion
-Promotional links on existing promotional material (ie on emails you send to your readers)

Now stop and think about that for a sec:

"Help."

In exchange for a link.

Wow.

And it's not even the first time I've heard that moms are lining up for this kind of exchange.

Now let's be generous (very generous) and assume that their microsite sends you a whole 10 visits a day with that big ol' promised link. That's 300 visits a month. That's 1200 visits over the length of this 4-month campaign.  If you're normally earning a $10 cpm on your banner ads (again, being generous here) and you've agreed to post their banner in your sidebar, you've just offered up 4 months of graphical banner advertising on your site (plus twittering, Facebook updates, emails, and so on) to a huge company for a whopping $12.


Why, I do believe their marketing agency is getting a bonus this year!

For a long term I've been writing about this stuff. (Hey, I'm in advertising and it's on my mind. It's a disease, really.) I've written about what you're worth as a blogger. About why women in particular tend to undervalue ourselves. About self-promoting with class and dignity. About the difference between advertising and editorial, and understanding why we don't ask PR agencies for money when they pitch us a story, but why we do ask for it when they want us to place their video widgets in our sidebars and stick a BRAND AMBASSADOR badge on our home pages right next to that photo of our children, you know, the cute one at the swimming pool.

I've said over and over that yes, what you do with your blog does affect the rest of us. And that just because a six year-old in the Guangdong Province is willing to build injection molded plastic toys for $.10 an hour doesn't make it okay.

And just a few weeks ago, I got into an interesting discussion on Twitter, about why, if we're signing a contract with a big marketer for a one year spokesperson gig, something some mommybloggers are angling to do right now, we need to stand up together and say--politely--why, thank you ever so much for the opportunity, Big Marketer, I can't wait to get to work and do the greatest job ever. Now let's talk fee...

Of course those marketers will get what they pay for. They always do.

But ack, it's getting so frustrating to those of us who really care about this kind of stuff.

Let me stop here and assure you, I'm not actually upset at all about losing the proposal. Happens all the time. Let me also say I can't blame the mommybloggers completely (although I think it's wildly naive to imagine that we'd somehow get the long end of the stick on this one). I do understand that a major appliance or a Visa gift card or a trip to scenic Cincinatti is a dandy trade for the seemingly small task of promoting something, especially in a tough economy. Even the promise of "publicity"can be pretty darn appealing.

Really, I'm less annoyed about moms who are willing to work for coffee makers than I am about a big brand that is willing to pay a mom in coffee makers.

Or worse--links.

Simply because they can.

Because they know a mom will accept.

But here's the thing, it won't stop until we all say no. Until we all say, this isn't good enough. And we send that marketing consultancy right back to their client, forced to confess that maybe this word of mouth campaign, this asking of the mommybloggers to do all of our advertising for no pay wasn't such a great idea after all.

Wouldn't it be nice if, just once, someone was forced to say, we underestimated the moms.

Even if you're just starting out, even if you have 10 readers and two of them are your toddler twins, your time and effort and endorsement are worth something.

I believe in you. Can't we all believe in ourselves?

----
Edited to add: As always, I want to make it realllllly clear that I don't believe in being paid for product reviews. That is not advertising, although I've seen it referred to as such by bloggers. That's editorial. There's some good clarification in comments, especially from Susan Getgood.

The night before three

Last night I said goodnight to a two year-old for the last time.

Last night I got home in time to let you eat two little candies and called it dessert. We hugged and we cuddled and we rubbed bonked heads and bandaged scraped knees. We pet the kitty (Not so hard! Not so hard!) and we fed the dog and we read the next chapter of Peter Pan.

Only you wanted to read it yourself. You traced your finger across the words like Thalia does, and called out each one; although the words you saw were not JM Barrie's.

I want to go make a quickly pee. And he wants to go make a quickly pee. And if I don't make a poop I can't poop but I can make a quickly pee but not both. And I want a Mo-Mo and a lo-lo and a lalalalala. And that word says Peter Pan! And that one says POOOOOOOP.

And Thalia and I both laughed through our tears at the exquisite humor of a two-year old for the last time.

And we cuddled and we had a sleeping contest and we had a second sleeping contest when that first one didn't work. And then we had a third sleeping contest only I counted to ten without the seven because you said you don't like seven and then you asked for another sleeping contest. And then you wanted to pick just one doll to sleep with -- just one doll to sleep with, only you came back with four. And your S pillow. And your milk.

And I rolled my eyes at a two year-old for the last time.

I told you that the sooner you would go to sleep the sooner you would wake up three. The sooner we could kiss you and sing happy birthday and give you a present. The sooner you would go to sleep the sooner it would be the morning.

You held my palm in both hands and pressed it to your soft, sweet cheek and smiled.

Last night I touched my lips to the sweet forehead of a two year-old for the last time.
Then this morning, you woke up three, just as I had promised.

How has it only been 1,096 days? I'm sure you've been in my heart forever.

Happy birthday Sagey. I love you down to your toes.

Whoooo! I'm Mother of the Year!

Despite my trials, my missteps, my self-doubt, and my inability to make scrambled eggs, it would seem I've won some sort of Mother of the Decade Award.

It's true! Major League Baseball wants me to throw out the first pitch, America Ferarra gave me props, and some dude tattooed my name on his back.

Thanks, Moms Rising. I love you guys.

If I am unable to fulfill my duties for any reason, please feel free to pass the crown onto Michelle Obama, who I understand came in a very close second.

(Psst...want to see your own video or send one to your mom? Click here.)

Want another cool thing you can do in honor of Mother's Day? (Besides heading to the Cool Mom Picks Mother's Day Gift Guide and forwarding linky hints to your SigOth.) Write your own six-word Momoir for Smith Magazine and True Mom Confessions, and try to sum up the miraculous journey of parenthood in a whopping six words.

I gave it a shot here.  Although I think Kristen Chase's is the best.

So..what would yours be?

The songs don't come easy

Last night was one of those nights that's more common than it is rare these days--I simply couldn't make it out of work and home much before the girls' bedtime. Just one more meeting. Just one more email. Just one more stupid 2 train that didn't come until forever.

When I walked in, the girls raced towards me on wobbly legs, arms outstretched, screeching MOMMEEEEE breathlessly - always the happiest part of my day, cheesy and cliche though it may be.  No sooner had I hugged them that Sage jammed a fist into her eye and my sitter declared that she was ready for bed.

This is the point where I'm supposed to tell you that I patiently helped them change into pajamas, combed their hair, read them three stories and kissed them all sweetly.

But I didn't. I was tired too.

I was less patient than I would have liked to have been. I asked three times for them to get into jimjams themselves, each time with increasing annoyance. I told them that no, we didn't have time to read a chapter book and that it was very late and we need to get into bed right this second.

It was partially true. But it wasn't just for them.

Then the guilt strikes. I realize that I'd seen the girls for a whole hour in the morning, followed by...nothing. They've waited all day for me to get home and play with them, do something fun, hear about their days. But sometimes I just don't have it in me. I don't have the sweetness and the devotion and the patience for a long, drawn-out bedtime routine.

"We don't have time for a book," I told them, but seeing their disappointment I offered a compromise.  "We have time for a song. Just one each. Who wants to start?"

Sage of course picked something I've never heard of, that had something to do with Shrek in the mud. Instead, I sang that Smashmouth song from the credits while they protested NO MOMMEEEEE NOT THAT ONE. I sang it anyway, off tune as always, and felt myself start to lighten up. I giggled with them. I allowed the fake protests to go on too long. There may have been tickling.

Next Thalia spent forever trying to figure out what her song would be while I volunteered the first bars of whatever popped into my mind - You Are My Sunshine. I Won't Grow Up. Eat a Bowl of Cherries by Rhythm Child, from the previous day's Kindiefest show. The Family Guy theme song. Every time they screeched NOOOOOO I feigned surprise: What? Not that one? But that's my faaaaavorite!


Finally Thalia gave up and sang me some song she's been learning at school with absolutely no tone or melody whatsoever, and I realized the poor thing has inherited my voice. It still sounded beautiful to me. I flipped on the nightlight, and tucked her in with only a few of the nightly protests. I stroked her back through the cover, but only for a minute. I watched her breathing steady and the day start to escape from her.

It all seemed like the easiest thing ever, kneeling by a toddler bed and singing songs and being silly with the people I love most in this world before kissing them off to sleep.

It wasn't. That's the secret we never tell.