In other news

Skipper got new glasses and Duchess dyed her hair pinkish.















































Also, Duchess has a Boyfriend, who has come over for dinner at our house TWICE.

Cook has been enormously enjoying playing the role of Sitcom Dad, and actually asked Boyfriend "Well, are you going to be a doctor or a lawyer?" (Boyfriend, to his credit, said "I'm sixteen; I don't know what I'm going to do.")

Skipper turned ten.

Zero

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

Eight.

Nine.

Ten.

Miscellaneous notes

Recent events:

I took Duchess and a friend to a Thorns game. We  had a lovely time. (Yes, Duchess is much taller than her friend. She's 5'7" now.)

We adopted two guinea pigs. We brought them home on Saturday, and they spent several hours sitting under their hideys, keeping perfectly still and dedicating all of their tiny brains to wishing things hadn't changed. Then they started eating and pooping. (So. Much. Pooping. I don't understand how they can produce as much poop as they do - it seems like their entire body volume every day.) They're slowly getting more used to us, but the nature of guinea pigs (as prey animals who are basically burritos on legs) seems to indicate that they will never really stop being at least a little scared of us. As pets, they're kind of a dud - they will never love us, and at best they will just feel good about us in so far as they associate us with food. Skipper is disappointed that they don't love her. But I'm finding them surprisingly charming. I like watching them rustle around in their cage, being weird and occasionally noticing me and being momentarily terrified. I like that they don't care about me. My only role in their lives is to feed them and clean up after them (So. Much. Poop.) and I get to love them freely with no expectation or wish for reciprocation. I like that. I'm not sure what that says about me.

Anyway, here they are. Their names seem to have been finalized - we're calling them Momo (small darker-colored female, found abandoned in a park) and Snufkin (enormous brown male, rescued from a hoarding situation). 

The days are not long enough...

So we had a wonderful trip - four days in Iceland, three days in London, and eight days in Scotland. Nothing terrible happened (in spite of my fears, some of which were very lurid - I am very good at fears), and everything went very smoothly. We saw SO MANY beautiful places and things; I felt like the vision part of my brain started exploding when we got off the plane in Iceland and never really stopped lighting up with fireworks at any point.  We ate new things, learned new words, and learned a bunch of history. The two things I ended up really taking away from it, though, were surprising to me.

First, I enjoyed spending time with my family. We were pretty much together continually for the whole trip, which is not a normal situation for us, but it worked. The kids are old enough to carry a lot of their own logistical and emotional weight, and even though they whined a lot and were super-annoying a lot, they were also good travel companions. They were curious and excited and had things to say, and when we had to slog, they slogged. We all mostly enjoyed each other's company. (Duchess said "Mom, I forgot that you and Daddy can be fun!" which was broadly insulting but I took it as a compliment. Duchess also, much to our amusement, wrote about London in a postcard to a friend: "I have to sleep on a pull-out couch, and there's no wi-fi, but it's worth it.") I was afraid that we'd come home utterly sick of each other, but we didn't. Well, at least I didn't. I feel grateful for all three of them.

Second, I thought a LOT on this trip about mortality. Apparently, the combination of spectacular grand-scale scenery, visits to historical sites focused on the lives of people who lived their little lives hundreds or thousands of years ago, and doing things that I'm sure in the moment will kill me (like flying on a plane, or driving in rural Scotland) makes me think about death. Not sad thoughts, mostly, but I just ended up thinking a lot about how brief life is, and how our lives are both really poignant and totally meaningless. I felt very small. I also wanted to hold onto EVERY SECOND.

People who will no longer write books for me to read.

I'm not sure why the death of Oliver Sacks made me think of the death of Terry Pratchett, but it did.

Social

Duchess got a love note this week at school, ostensibly from a boy of whom she is fond and who is widely acknowledged to have a Crush on her.* (Duchess is suddenly, and somewhat surprisingly, popular these days. There are a handful of boys who have acknowledged Crushes on her, and some of them are social leaders.) She thought it was probably a forgery, and she wanted to know. So she promptly asked the boy if he had written her a love note. He said no. They spent some time speculating together about who was responsible. Everything ended well.

Here's the thing. I can't imagine this scenario playing out for me when I was ten.** I can't imagine getting a note and then asking the kid if he had written it. Ever. At ANY point in my life. I would much rather deal with the ambiguity than confront anybody about anything uncomfortable. But Duchess has a different threshold than I do for social discomfort, and more confidence in her own social power. Watching Duchess make her way in the weird world of almost-adolescence makes me feel like I'm looking at entirely new territory, because her path is so different from mine. It's really interesting.

Anyway, Duchess has a new cast. It's green. She'll get it off in three weeks.


*I am also fond of this kid, who seems very ethical and thoughtful for a 10-year-old, as well as endearingly forthright.

** If I had not been a hopeless social outcast, I mean. I didn't get notes.  

there wuns wus tow grls

I just ushered Cook and the kids out the door - he's taking them to gymnastics (and running errands while they gymnasticate). Skipper yelled and cried for the preceding 15 minutes, and Duchess yelled and cried for 5 of those minutes. I was very glad to see them go.

Cook and I are both finding it difficult right now to be with our kids a lot of the time. A lot of the time, it is not pleasant or restful or joyful to be with them. Duchess is pretty happy right now, generally, but also very reactive, and her reactions can be very unpleasant. Her default response to any kind of challenge to what she's doing (such as, for example, a mild advance notice that she needs to get off the couch and get ready to leave for school) is to lash out verbally. She can be very nasty and self-righteous.

Skipper is, as I wrote before, often similarly nasty, but for her it's kind of a general approach to everything. She seems to feel most comfortable when she's feeling wronged and aggrieved, so she sets up every situation as a lose-lose scenario every which way. Say it's time to go to swimming, and she freaks out and screams "I don't want to go to swimming!"  - if I then say "Okay, let's not go to swimming," she immediately makes an about-face and screams "I want to go to swimming!" - there's no way any of us can win here. She doesn't feel safe expressing (or, I think, even feeling) enthusiasm or positive expectations for things, because that would make her vulnerable to disappointment or to what she perceives as humiliation, being made to feel a fool. She doesn't really seem to have a natural groove in her temperament for optimism, contentment, or for feeling good about the way things are going, and she has some very deep grooves for anxiety, defensiveness, anger, irritation, and scorn, so it is easiest for her to just file all her life experiences into those grooves. That's a tough, painful way to live, and it's also painful for the people with whom she lives. I think that this acute misery right now is partly a developmental stage, but it's clear that it's also rooted in her temperament. We try to coach her in identifying and naming her feelings, and in any coping techniques that we can muster up, but I don't think it's working. I'm not sure how much can be done, honestly, other than to support her as she works out for herself how to live her own life.

Extracurriculars are hard with her. I have signed her up for extracurricular activities (three separate activities a week, at the moment) because I feel like it's really important for her to get started early on a few things in which she can be a beginner with similarly-aged kids, and gain mastery that will make her feel competent. This seems like really important experience for someone who is afraid of trying things for fear of failure. However, now that she's thrown a tantrum before gymnastics three weeks in a row, I don't really want to keep taking her to gymnastics. With every kid, a big part of parenting seems to be figuring out how hard to push on what, and with Skipper I have no idea even how to see the line at which I need to stop pushing. She says she wants to keep doing all three of her activities (gymnastics, taiko, and swimming), and she clearly enjoys them and feels good during and after the activities, but she's pretty much a turd about going to them.

This week, she was super-stressed about going to taiko. The teacher had (apparently) given them a casual "homework" assignment to come up with a rhythm and make it active. Skipper wasn't sure what she was supposed to do, and I gently suggested a few approaches she could take (based on my personal experience that if you can't figure out what you're supposed to be doing, it's usually better to wing it and do SOMETHING rather than nothing), and she reacted with predictable angry tears. She couldn't wing it, because she was so paralyzed by her fear of doing it wrong, so all she did was worry and worry and worry and worry and worry, and by the time Wednesday rolled around, she really, really didn't want to go to class. I said she absolutely had to go - she could quit after that class, if she wanted, but she had to face the problem. So I more or less dragged her to class, walking half a mile holding her hand while she wailed and sobbed, and then I more or less shoved her into the classroom. (I was not nice about all of this. I can only imagine what a stranger observing us would have thought about my parenting skills.) And, as it turned out, the teacher never even mentioned the "homework" at all (I'm not even sure she ever actually assigned them anything), and Skipper was so relieved and happy after class, and said class was "really fun." I don't know what we take away from that.

I don't mean to imply that it's all rage and beastliness around here. Duchess, as I said, is pretty happy and is on a good trajectory, and Skipper, for all her assholery and misery vortex issues, seems to be feeling relatively comfortable at school and aftercare. She's usually great when you have her one-on-one. I took her by bus to swimming this morning, and she was really good company.
























Report cards came home yesterday. Both girls continue to be academically successful by report card metrics. Unsurprisingly, most of the things in which Skipper rated "often does" rather than "consistently does" have to do with participating out loud in activities. Skipper tested at a Developmental  Reading Assessment level of 16, which is more or less the baseline they want all the kids to hit by the end of first grade, news which allowed me to relieve her of her apparently-long-held and totally unfounded anxiety that she's not going to be promoted out of kindergarten.

Skipper has been reading up a storm, and seems more willing to actually commit writing to paper. (Where it might be judged! And found to be less than perfect! This is a big step for her.) This is a piece of writing she started before school on a recent morning. I don't know what the two girls were going to be named, and I also don't know what's up with the small character she drew.

Also, here are some bonus photos of Duchess, waiting with me outside Skipper's taiko class two weeks ago.

Fostering competence

I've been reading about parenting a kid who has social anxiety, and one of the recommendations is to support your child's feelings of competence, by giving them a chance to get very good at something.

Duchess loves feeling competent, like any 8-year-old kid. Like any human being. Like many human beings, she's not a huge fan of the work required to gain competence. If she's not good at something, she tends to give it up immediately. When she was 5ish, Cook and I identified that we wanted support her to keep working on something, to find out what it feels like to get over plateaus and barriers and get good at something.* We specifically identified swimming as something to push, and we did push it. (By which I mean that we keep signing her up for lessons and swim team, even when her enthusiasm is lukewarm. If she ever said she wanted to stop, we'd certainly hear out her arguments.) Her experience with swimming has certainly given her a chance to persist and improve, and that's been great. What's really been effective on that score, though, is kung fu,** which is a thing she chose herself. She loves kung fu. She loves the community, she loves the physical activity, she loves the required focus (she says "I don't think about anything when I do it - I just do things!"), she loves the orderly progress. (Not to mention the benefits of endorphins - she walks home after class red-faced, sweaty, and brimming with happiness and enthusiasm.)

All of which isn't to say that she is a kung fu master, or that she has become much more persistent or even much less likely to give up in the face of failure. None of that is true. It's just that it's all good, all of it. I have entirely moved past the things I dislike about the kung fu place. When she walks in there, it's pretty clear that she feels that it is Her Place. The teachers and students treat her with affection and respect, she has a great time with her friends, she is recognized for her commitment and focus, and so on. There are role models*** and mentors all over the damn place. I think most of us want a Place of our own like that, and I'm very glad that Duchess has one.If my kid wants to get endorphins, confidence, community, mentoring, and experience in persistence from this place, I'm there.

So that's the one kid. I'm a little stymied, though, about the other kid. Skipper also loves feeling competent, being a human being, but she doesn't like trying new things, which is likely to promote competence only in a narrow range of activities she has already begun doing.**** Her revenge-driven approach to extracurriculars motivated her to do a 5-class session of gymnastics at a community center. She resisted going to the class every time, and resisted participating in the class every time, but in the end she DID participate, and she seemed to be really enjoying it in the moment. However, she did not want to sign up for another session. She doesn't want to do anything. Given that a six-hour school day seems like plenty of activity for a sensitive four-year-old, I'm sure not going to push her to do anything she doesn't want to do. As I look ahead, though, I see the value of her finding something she likes to do, and sticking with it long enough to get good at it. I hope she'll find something, or somethings to make her own, and I look forward to supporting her in that.

Skipper practiced some of her gymnastics moves with Duchess (who is independently working toward a goal of doing a decent handstand), and got pretty good at doing bridges. At the beginning of her third class, she refused to participate for an extra-long time, until the class starting doing bridges, and she realized that none of them were as good at it as she had become. She ran straight over to the group and joined in. Competence is addictive.


*Without, you know, becoming a scary tennis parent.  I have some natural Tiger Mother tendencies. This week I actually said to Duchess, over her misspelling of one word on her spelling pre-test (for which they prepare by doing language worksheets that include the words), "If you've seen the word before, you should know how to spell it." Being Duchess, she said "That doesn't make any sense," and scoffed right out of the room, leaving me alone to mull over my personality flaws.
** It's not actually kung fu. It's some kind of eccentric hybrid of kung fu and karate, practiced by a handful of people in a couple of studios. I have no idea what the rest of the martial arts world thinks of it, though I have watched some impressive fighting demos by black belts. 
*** There's one kid, a 12-year-old girl who just got her black belt, who is clearly Duchess's role model in all things. She's confident, courteous, academically successful, and has several equally stellar close friends. She's also an accomplished swimmer and volunteers at the library in her spare time. This is not a bad role model. 
*** Playing babies, playing legos, playing house, coloring (she's an accomplished colorer already, in fact!), and drawing people with rectangular bodies, pointy heads, and stick limbs.

It's better than calling me "assive," I think.

Tonight Skipper came up to me as I was folding laundry and said firmly "You. You're a pieface, and I love you."

It's not about me.

Yesterday Skipper and I met up with another kid who's going to be attending the preschool program in the fall at the local school. The kid and her parents seemed like lovely people, but I found the meet-up very stressful. I mean, it's always a little stressful meeting new people, particularly in an artificial let's-build-a-relationship-so-we-can-maybe-share-childcare-and-provide-emergency-backup-for-eachother way, but this was particularly exhausting and demoralizing for me because of Skipper's behavior. She refused to interact with the other kid, who kept hopefully inviting her to play, and wouldn't talk or look anybody in the eye. She watched the other kid very carefully, glowering through the curtain of her hair, but that was all she offered.

This is totally normal for Skipper, and I'm confident that she will eventually warm up to this kid (who seems like exactly Skipper's cup of tea, actually). Skipper's behavior is not entirely out of the realm of normal for preschoolers I have met, but she's definitely toward the end of the shyness continuum, and I haven't really figured out a way to handle it. I don't mean helping her handle it - I have no idea how to do that, since nothing I have done so far has made her less shy, and I suspect it's pretty baked in - I just mean handling it myself. I feel like I should apologize for her antisocial behavior, or explain that she's always this way (not a sociopath, I swear!), but I really don't want to be APOLOGIZING for my child's personality, or making public generalizations about who she is. (In front of her, I mean. Obviously, I make public generalizations about her behind her back all the time!) I swing back and forth between these two opposing feelings, and end up feeling like I failed both to help this other family understand the context for her unwelcoming behavior AND to make her feel that it's okay to be shy and that there's nothing wrong with her.

I want to let my kids be themselves, but I also want other people to see them positively, or at least as the complicated, worth-getting-to-know people that they are. I think this tension will get more challenging for me over the next couple of years, as Duchess bounds toward adolescence and Skipper stays shy. I cannot keep up with the kind of strength of character that parenting seems to require, though I swear I'm building it as fast as I can.

Davy Baby Space Bear

Half my life left to figure this out.

Every single year I have to confront the fact that I haven't yet gotten a grip on the holidays. I think some part of me still feels that the adults are taking care of all the details, so I don't have to bother.

I usually manage some stuff. I organized a very small donation drive for a domestic violence shelter in our community. We decorated. We made the traditional sugar cookies to eat while decorating.* This year, for the first time, we even got a tree! A live tree! It's two feet tall, and it lives in a 3-gallon pail filled with rocks and water, but it's a real tree! And we have a wreath that Duchess made and brought home from a craft party at the home of a friend whose florist grandmother was visiting. So our home looks WAY more Christmassy than every before. I'm also fairly prepared to cook some nice food over the holiday. And I have  presents ready for everybody who will be at my house on Christmas! All three of them!

The activity for which I am most prepared this holiday is the cookie exchange party we're attending tomorrow. This is a social event that might have been designed exactly for me - it's in the afternoon, it's brief, and it involves baking. I plan to bring three different kinds of cookies, all of which will be good.** If this was what the whole holiday entailed, I would be not exactly the Martha-Stewart-style queen of the season, but I would definitely be a reliable minister of some kind.

However, there's a whole lot of other stuff that I didn't get around to. This week, I discovered that it's prohibitively expensive to mail a present five business days before Christmas Day, so the package I sent will not be arriving until after Christmas, a week after almost half of the intended recipients of the gifts inside will have left the package's destination. That was a sad moment. But today was the day I really realized that yet again, I missed the holiday boat. Our mail today included three holiday cards from friends, and I realized that I had never even thought about holiday cards this year. At all. And I LOVE getting them, I really do. The classy ones with a brief message, the ones with all the adorable photos of your adorable kids, and the ones with long hand-written notes - I love them ALL. So maybe I'll send out Presidents' Day cards this year. Regardless, thank you all for your cards! I love them!


*Skipper, who is very interested in cooking and baking, was in charge of rolling the cookies in cinnamon sugar, so the cookies were completely brown. They tasted fine, though. Skipper is experienced enough with baking that when I assign her a bowl of ingredients to stir,  she asks gravely "Can this be over-mixed?"
** I've done a lot of baking, I've got some excellent equipment, and I have learned to use good ingredients. Cookie-making is one area of my life about which I remain fairly confident, even when Skipper is helping me out. 

Nest-Leaving, Part One

We took Duchess to the drop-off site for her camp today. (We insisted she shower before she leave, which is why she looks so damp in these photos.) She had everything on the camp packing list jammed into one bag, which we hope somebody else will carry for her. We checked her in and stood around with her for a while until all the kids piled onto a couple of buses. Duchess met one of her cabin-mates while we were waiting, and on the bus she sat next to her new acquaintance; we could see them chatting in their seat while the other kids got on. Duchess smiled and waved and made silly faces at us, and then the bus drove away. Skipper started wailing. 

When I do my subconscious child inventory (all parents do this, I believe, though I suspect when you have more than four or five kids you might just give up), I keep jolting with mild alarm when my brain can't immediately identify where Duchess is. And I won't hear anything from her until next Saturday, when we retrieve her. That's kind of awesome, and kind of tough on my poor subconscious. Cook and I are both enjoying having only one kid to tend to, and the absence of territorial battles. Skipper, once she recuperated from the initial shock of her sister's departure, quickly got used to being an only child. Tonight, after playing by herself for a while, she said gleefully "I want Duchess to stay away!"

But we really don't.

Let me clarify...

...ridiculous TV that I LOVE.

Reality shows

Skipper and I were setting up for her nap this afternoon when she started making frustrated noises. I looked over at her, lying in her bed, and she said angrily "There isn't enough room! Punghy didn't scoot over!" After a moment's contemplation, I said "Honey... Punghy can't scoot over." and she said "Why NOT!?" and I said "Because he's a stuffed animal. He's not alive. He can't move by himself."

There was a very long pause, in which all the indignation and irritation drained out of her expression, to be replaced by bafflement and then a kind of dawning revelation, as if suddenly some things made a lot more sense. "Oh." she said.

I had kind of a bummer of a day yesterday. Not awful, or anything. Just kind of a bummer. My voice is still only partly recovered. I found out that my new job, which was supposed to start today, is at best delayed three weeks, at worst cancelled for good (budget cuts). I had to tell the babysitter I just hired that I can't hire her. A coworker told me about some hard, sad  things going on in her life. On my way home on the bus, I started reading a new library book and discovered it was a sad book, and had to put it away, so I was staring out the window when a sort of spray of something sprinkled over me. It turned out to be coffee grounds, sprayed off the used garbage bag a homeless guy behind me was vigorously shaking out.  My first response (after suggesting firmly that he stop doing that RIGHT NOW) was to teeter toward the verge of tears,* but then I thought about the way I was going to tell the story to Dutch when I picked her up, and I realized how ridiculous it was, and my perspective was miraculously restored. (Then I realized the coffee-ground coverage wasn't very extensive, and they at least seemed to be reasonably fresh, and not mixed with anything nastier. And given that I've ridden public transit  at least two times a week for over a decade, I should probably just be grateful that my grossest experience involved only coffee.)

And then after Halloween (which was NOT a bummer in the least, and cheered me up immensely), I downloaded the photos off the camera, including these, which erased the last vestiges of emotional grime from the day.

* Because Oh My GOD! My life is SO HARD! And NOW, COFFEE GROUNDS!!! O the HORROR! I am so SO sad! Why does EVERYTHING bad happen to ME?!

It's Friday NIGHT!

Here's what I've been doing lately, not necessarily in this order:

1) Listening to this song (but not watching the video). What, you don't like the song? You find the subject matter creepy? I don't care.
2) Wishing that our summer weather had happened IN THE SUMMER, instead of waiting until September to do its thing.
3) Having more bike conversion experiences. Today, you guys, I biked ALL THE WAY DOWNTOWN!! I biked across the goddamn bridge. I am SO BRAVE! I actually chanted inspirational things to myself for the last half of the trip - "Look at you! You're crossing the bridge! You're biking DOWNTOWN! You're crossing the bridge!" - while dozens of other bicyclists and joggers (!) whizzed past me.
4) Doing laundry. Bike conversion experiences involve a lot of sweating.
5) Deciding that if traffic speed was cut down to a 20 mph maximum everywhere except for limited-access highways, basically everything would be better. Seriously, everything.
6) Wondering how to make Dutch happier, or nicer, or something. I think she's pretty fried from the effort of going to school, which doesn't help, but in general right now, she's just awful. The other night she freaked out at dinner, and stomped out the front door. Skipper immediately started howling, and shrieked "No, Dutch, don't run away!" but Cook and I looked at each other a little dreamily. Then she came back in and was incredibly nice and helpful and cheerful the rest of the evening. We thought maybe she'd been body-snatched, but she went back to being kind of an asshole the next day, so that theory was busted.
7) Watching TV while washing dishes.
8) Obsessively combing Ebay in search of more shoes with lemurs on them.
9) Trying to teach Skipper that it's GOOD to wash your body occasionally.
10) Working.
11) Thinking of ways to prepare and eat tomatoes.
12) Trying to avoid having to explain September 11th to Dutch.

Today a random guy with lots of missing teeth and a strong odor of alcohol helped me fix my bike on my way home from work. (And he really helped me - I would have taken much, much longer to solve the problem he diagnosed and fixed in about 12 seconds, and he was super-nice about my complete mechanical idiocy.) That was a lovely thing.

Tin, aluminum, and diamonds

Cook and I are approaching our tenth anniversary. Last night, while Cook was trying to fall asleep, I recounted half an episode of the Daily Show (an OLD episode) while wearing my nightguard. "And den he was prutehding to be Johje Boosh and he was like 'heh heh heh deh room has to smell like ciddamon!'"And Cook, good person that he is,* said nothing until I finally noticed that I was being insane, and then he gently confirmed that yes, I was.

Cook and I are very different, and he is a very private person,** so all I'm going to say about this whole married-for-a-decade thing is that it's been good, and it's been bad, and here we are!

*Also being mostly asleep.

** You can imagine how he feels about having stories about him posted on the internet. He's pretty gracious about that, too.

When you're only six, there's still a possibility that you MIGHT get your invitation to Hogwarts.

Dutch is in the middle of reading the final Harry Potter book. (She decided to keep reading in spite of the increasing scariness.) She disappears for long periods and then walks up to you, looking very concerned, and says things like "Mom, Hagrid is DRUNK!" as if you've been reading along with her, care deeply about it, and think of fictional characters in the present tense.

Tonight she watched part of the first Harry Potter movie, and Cook and I watched her watch it. The first part of the first book (and the first movie) is the most enjoyable part of the whole series, in my opinion, and it's definitely the most widely appealing. Who hasn't wished to be informed that he/she is very special and thus specially invited to a secret magical society?* It was an unmitigated pleasure watching with Dutch, because she was so deeply involved with it. If you want to watch four not-very-action-filled minutes of Dutch watching a movie, please be my guest:

(Why yes, that is Cook in the background, drinking a beer.)

*Okay, probably a lot of people. And that does sound kind of like Skull and Bones, or Scientology. But you know what I mean, right?

Sentimental Interlude

My friend is getting married this weekend. We won't be there when she gets married, so I'm not going to be able to stand up and give a toast, but I wish I was (though it's a barbecue-and-hammocks kind of wedding, so I'm not sure toasts are even an option). This friend was my first real friend, the first friend I chose, the first friend of my heart. I had friends before that (though not very many, as I have been socially awkward since my first breath), but they were mostly proximity-based - neighbors and family friends - or the sort of person who is kind to a socially-awkward classmate not so much because of any particular chemistry as because they are just kind people.*

This friend arrived in my life when I was miserable and mean and sad. She was smart and funny and weird and warm-hearted. She was generous and expressive and loving in a way that I was afraid to be myself, and she showed me that being open to happiness often requires making yourself vulnerable. She taught me that it was fine to be both cynical AND sentimental. She introduced me to the joys of crossword puzzles and trashy books. I think it's not too dramatic to say that her friendship changed me, and only for the better.

I wish for my daughters that they find friends like this, who open their hearts to joy. And for my friend, I wish joy.** And trashy books, and crosswords, and everything else that is good.

*And may I say how grateful I am to those people? Deanna whatever-your-name-was in fifth grade, I'm talking to you. Thank you.

**But this does not affect my opinion that Beaches is a terrible, terrible movie.