I went with them yesterday, ‘them’ being the three females in my life. Two of them, my daughters, needed swimsuits because, well, it’s summer. The third of ‘them’, also known as their mother, had warned me:  you know they want buhkeeknees, right? I said I had heard that word several times of late but had always tried to change the subject. For example -

Daughter:  Dad, I really really want a buhkeeknee.

Me:  Sweet-girl, have you finished reading Rob Bell’s book yet?

Anyway, I went along yesterday, I felt it needed to be a father’s day on some level. So I stood in a store called Justice and leaned against a waiting-wall while three video screens assaulted my senses with some little tweener-boy trying to sing ‘Broken Hallelujah.’ I kid you not. As the poor kid butchered a classic I eyed my girls’ feet below the 3/4 dressing room door, feet I know well, toes I’ve counted, this little piggy and stuff like that. Their not-so-little-anymore feet skittered around accompanied by growing-girl giggles…

broken hallelujahs to my heart.

I don’t know about a hell, but I do believe in God because somehow my daughters’ eyes were earlier drawn to that known as the tankeeknee. Now I’ve nothing against buhkeeknees, I’m rather fond of them in fact. But when you’re a dad that fondness is tempered by that fact that you’re a male and you know how fond males of any age are of girls sitting on chaise loungers in their bra and panties. I needed something for these middle-dad days I’m in and that meant something to cover their-middle….

Voilà, enter the tankeeknee.

I stood up straight as I saw the dressing room door open. Two visions stepped forward to get my approval:  whaddaya think, dad?

If they only knew what I thought…if they only knew my thrill at seeing their ear-wide grins, a thrill coupled with an extreme difficulty to breathe, sorta like my saddle shifting right underneath me. If they only knew how excited I am for the summer days they have ahead of them, while I so long for those seasoned days when they let me wash their hair.

What do I think? Well, I like ‘em. Let’s get ‘em. And so we did.

Yesterday was a day that built me, my daughters’ father, just a little more. I may make it after all. The gentle irony was our experience took place in a store called Justice. Any man worth his salt knows fathers are built by one thing and one thing only – mercy.

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Read John’s original post and comments at the beautiful due and click around where you’ll find beautiful prose and poetry.  Want more?  Follow him on Twitter.

{Pick by Story Editor Robin Dance :: @PensieveRobin.}

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“It’s time to exercise, baby,” I call to Buttercup. “Did you want to play or workout with Mama?”‘

She’s in the playroom she has dubbed her “magical land,” but immediately joins me at my side and waits for the DVD to cue up. “Are we going to get healthy and strong?”

I smile. “Exactly.”

When I was a baby, my thighs were so chubby that one of my aunts used to eat them like drumsticks. It’s a story I heard often when I was growing up, usually told with the requisite giggles from my mother and a pinch on my legs from whomever else was within reach. I thinned out as I grew, but I never thought myself skinny. Instead, “big” was how I classified my body. “Big” because I was five feet tall at eight years old. The same height as my mother and almost every other adult woman in my family. “Big” as in not dainty with curves that snuck up on me when I was 12 and muscle definition that would have put me in the “athletic” category. But that word didn’t exist in the Spanglish craziness my family resided in. Instead, children were scolded for not finishing what was on their plate and reprimanded for needing to watch what they were eating, usually in the same breath.

I remember very clearly the day my father noticed my new set of hips. I weighed 156 pounds and stood 5’6” tall. I wore a size 10 and only now realize I only thought that was a bad thing because my mother never shut up about the size 6 she could still squeeze into after five kids. If I could wake up with that body today?

A’ye, M’ijita.

My father, who stood no taller than me, pinched the curve of my hip.

“You need to lose some weight.”

I started making myself throw up after watching a news special about a woman caring for eating disordered girls in her revolutionary treatment center. The point of the special was to enlighten and educate on the dangers of eating disorders and the needs of those suffering. I took it as a how-to manual.

Sometimes I wonder if my actions are the cause of the body I see in the mirror today. The hypoactive thryroid. The polycystic ovarian syndrome. The number on the scale. I was skinny before when I thought I was fat. Just because I was the only set of ethnic hips in the sea of curve-less white wonders I went to school with, I thought that meant I needed to better control what I was eating. And because I had failed at being an anorexic previously, the consolation prize was closet bulimia. If I didn’t have the control to not eat, I could at least force my body to get rid of the evidence.

I should have just opened my eyes.

My daughter is three and often confused for a five-year-old. She’s built like her father’s side of the family; tall and lean. My nickname for her is “Little.” And I skip the word “fat” when it’s included in any of the books I read to her.

“She’s so big for her age,” strangers often say when they realize how young she actually is. I always smile and gently correct them, whether or not she is paying attention.

“Yes,” I say, “She’s very tall.”

We eat clean; no processed sugar, no processed foods, and are gluten free, to boot. For dessert she’ll choose watermelon over an ice cream sundae. (At least for now.) And because I can’t control what the rest of the world says or what she will hear, I try to side step any of the emotional triggers adults verbalized when I was a kid.

If she refuses to eat a meal after two bites of food, instead of force feeding, I simply ask if she would like a cookie. If she says yes, I tell her that she has room for more of her meal first. If she says no, I believe her and take her plate away. I never criticize my own body in front of her. And I never diet. Instead, we all eat what’s best for our bodies.

And exercise?

Maybe the truth behind the sweat and the time commitment is that I would like to lose a few more pounds and firm up my muffin-top belly. Maybe I’d like to feel as beautiful as my husband tells me I am (and sometimes, I do). But I’ll be damned if I say any of that out loud to a three-year-old who thinks it’s funny to arch her back and stick her belly out after a good meal.

We are exercising to get healthy and strong.

And one of these days, after saying it enough to her, maybe I will believe that myself.

Pauline Campos writes the personal blog Aspiring Mama, edits at BookieBoo.com and rocks a wikid awwsome #mexifro. Subscribe to Aspiring Mama, and follow Pauline on twitter.

Story pick by Shannon / Mr Lady

(photo credit)

In order to accumulate a soul, you have to suffer.

As if, once enough suffering has tumbled down upon you,
building up like a mountainside,
your second life will begin.

Like Athena you will sprout from Zeus’ head and appear in a ball of light, naked and red.

Love is what brings all the suffering.
Love is watching everyone you love leave, die, perish- each person wilting slowly.
Like day old geraniums in a Mason jar that sat on the kitchen counter when I was eight years old.
They dried and mummified like King Tut wrapped in cheesecloth.
Carelessly, I knocked over the glass jar and at once, everything fell to the ground.

Two weeks later my dog died, and I was convinced the falling jar was an omen.
A sign from the other side that death was creeping over into the living’s territory in a dense fog
(like there are chalk outlines dividing space between life and death, war zones, agreed upon plots of land.)

I watched my mother through a crack in bathroom door.
She cried until her entire face was coated with salt, damp and dewy;
ethereal in a way because all her crying made her beautiful.
It said something about her heart.

I imagined a blind man running his stubby fingers over her cheeks, beneath her heavy eyelids, around the curve of her lips, and only collecting a wetness on his fingertips. He would say that he was touching some great satin seashell or a massive, expensive pearl, not a woman’s face wracked with despair and loss.

Watching your mother cry troubles you inside. It is a deep burning feeling, a fire that is impossible to tend to.
It is fingers gripping your stomach, the same squeeze a fist uses in order to draw juice from a tangerine.
It is a silver knitting needle in your plump, pale thigh, sharp and bothersome.

I did not understand death at that time.
I thought it would be easier to cross into some other territory, another world,
once you had spent enough time in this one.
Like sailing to a forgotten island for a vacation,
forgetting to mention to your family and friends that you’d be leaving.

I thought of human beings as being single minded, single hearted,
just one single body holding everything together.

But, we are an assemblage of parts, our hearts are separated into compartments
and our minds have doors behind locked doors behind brick walls.

Pain shakes it all like an earthquake and in the destruction,
how is a soul supposed to ascend from the ground like a ghost rising from a tomb?

**

Mary is a writer of pith and metal.
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:::

Featured by Story Editor –Sara Sophia /@sarasophia

Today is one of those days – one of many recent and one of many more to come – where life’s new twists and turns have me walking out the door of several years of fond memories and unthought of heartache towards a future of Who Knows.

It isn’t a fancy place, this house. And while smaller than many, it was enough; certainly more than many others hope for and at the end of the day it wasn’t just stucco and wood and cement and shingles – it was our home.

This is the house that broke us, in many ways, though of course it’s not only to blame – not one single thing is. But it was also the house of much happiness – where two of the three boys were born, where many Halloweens and birthdays and summers were spent, where Easter eggs were hidden and found, where dinners were concocted and birthday cakes created, where oranges were picked and eaten in the yard, where swingsets were built and ignored, where gardens were planted and bloomed, where Christmas trees sat (and fell), where life moved at a speed quicker than we could register  – all inside these walls that were being fixed and patched and painted as we fell apart.

I slowly circle one more time in the living room. It still feels oddly full, even in its bareness. Though the smell of cardboard boxes and laundered clothes and nostalgia has left in trucks and U-Hauls, a vaguely familiar scent remains – the way the house smelled the day we got the keys – of vacancy and emptiness. It sinks in. The truth is, this house didn’t break us. We did. And this house isn’t haunted. We are.

It’s hard to fathom that I’m taking one last look around our house and leaving it to go to my house. The newness of everything is jarring and yet exciting and the adventure of it all has its moments of hope and its share of fear.

I shut the door. I pause on the porch step, taking in this very moment, soaking in this change like sunlight on my skin, breath in my lungs. There’s nothing left here for me anymore. Today is another reminder of moving onward, this time, literally. I remind myself: A house is a house but a home is what you make it so I have not just packed our clothes and photographs and books and toys but our memories too. They, though the heaviest of all the things to carry, are the easiest to move.

Megan is many things…an incredibly talented writer, a doting mother, a California girl and a photographer I’ve personally admired for many years.  Read the original post here, then follow her journey by subscribing to her personal blog through RSS or Networked Blogs. Follow her on Twitter, like her on Facebook, and circle her on Google + for charm, wit and loads of amazing pictures.

Featured by story editor  Shannon | @mrlady

“Mama will you lay with me?”

I sigh. Why is this glaring screen more enticing to me than her seven-year-old nighttime snuggles?

“In a minute,” I reply, thinking she might just go fall asleep before I get to her. More than “a minute” passes and then, from the bedroom, “Mama?”

I relent. Walk down the dark hall into her even darker room. Grumble as I trip over the toys left out and the Sit-n-Spin rumbles loud under my feet. Will this house ever be mess-free?!

She’s tucked in under her t-shirt quilt, a Christmas gift I had made for each of us before our move to Uganda. I cuddle her close, smell her hair, rub my fingers down her arms, think of how big she is growing and she really should have had a shower before bed and she giggles, “Mama, you’re taking up a lot of room.” In my snuggling I inadvertently took over her pillow and now she’s just lying on a corner. I scooch over a bit.

She asks for a song. “But not a catchy one–I don’t want to be singing it all night.” I begin to sing “Stay Awake”, but she stops me. “No, no, not that one! Less catchy!” Aggravated, I sing “Amazing Grace,” with all the verses. She calls Benny to her side; he lies down and lays his head across her tummy.

The song’s almost over and Noah stumbles in from his room, fortunately steering clear of the Sit-n-Spin. “Mom, will you lay with me?”

I have things to do, yes, but I consent and send him back to his bed to wait on me. I sing another chorus; Benny and Dorothy sing back to me with their snores. My little gift of grace ever-growing, and will there be a day when she doesn’t need a mama’s nuzzle hug and song to find rest?

I kiss her cheek and go down the hall to the one and only, Noah, waiting for me in his bed. He’s nine and still loves a good snuggle time, though he rarely he asks. Everything in me wants to memorize these moments. These too-precious, fleeting moments when hugs and songs are enough to bring rest. I beg/pray that the Father will remind me ever so gently, when I get too caught up in myself, to remember that these days will not always be. That there will be a day free of mess, and that day will also be free of babies and children and scraped knees and silly laughter.

Amazing grace to embrace it all. Always.

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Discovered by Story Editor, Robin Dance of PENSIEVE :: @PensieveRobin

Don’t open the door to the study.
Take down a lute.

Rumi

I wake up too early and lie in the dark, thinking. I have eight unfinished ToDos from yesterday. I go downstairs and open the study door.

On one shoulder sits a little man, saying, Lute! Lute! Play the lute!

On the other shoulder is another little man. This one says, Are you good enough yet? There’s work to do.

I think the lute man was there first, at least that’s the way I remember childhood. But the other man soon followed. He’s pretty much run my life since the first grade, and maybe before that.  My wish for Nick, my eight year old son, is that he listen to his own lute man for as long as possible.

My fear is that the other man is already whispering to Nick. The idea that I can help Nick put this man in his place is a great seduction for me. Perhaps all it means is that I want to help him to be me, doing it right.

Nora and I try not to mindlessly praise Nick, avoiding “Good job” and such when we can. Instead we say things like, “Look at that yellow line you’ve drawn there. It’s twisting like a river.”

Nick likes to draw. But he worries that he’s lousy at it. This worry used to stop him cold, but now he draws and draws anyway, I’m glad to say. For the moment the lute man is winning.

A couple of years ago I got him a book about mistakes that turned into useful inventions. Not-sticky-enough glue that led to Post-Its, and so on. But the book was more for me than for him. It gave me something to say when he complained about himself. I told him he needed to make 10,000 mistakes to get good at something.

“It doesn’t look like it’s supposed to,” he’d say, showing me a drawing.

“You haven’t made 10,000 mistakes yet,” I’d answer.

Today he worked an hour making an elaborate soft-sword out of old newspapers.

“Can you picture yourself two years ago looking into the future watching yourself making soft-swords?” I said.

“I would say that wasn’t me. I could never do it that good.”

“And here you are,” I say.

He ponders this and says nothing. I ponder him and say nothing.

And here we are.

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Wolf writes at Just Add Father
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Story Editor: Heather King ::: @HeatheroftheEO

(photo credit)

If he sees me when I am with people, he will think my cheeks must hurt from smiling so much. He will wonder if my fingertips are worn down from touching people all the time. He will see how my eyes are really magnets, gravitating towards anything that glitters. He will know that ever time I throw my head back to laugh, I am really swallowing a falling star. He will see all the different shapes my mouth makes, because it moves even when I am listening. He will see the way I hold my hands on my lips when I think before I speak, as if words will escape without permission. He will see my thoughts splash across my face, emotions striking my face like lightning, one after another. He will see that I can never hide behind my expressions, and he will understand that my readability is a sign of sincerity. He will know that those thoughts are just drops, and that inside me there’s an ocean. He will want to swim in that ocean.

If he sees me when I am alone, drawing hearts falling from trees like leaves, he will think of me as a girl from a sad song. He will wonder why the frown in the middle of my forehead is so deep. He will wonder who hurt me and gave me such hollow autumn eyes. He will think someone broke my heart and he will be jealous of that boy for getting so close. He will wonder what I look like when I smile. He will think of my notebooks as keys, and know that they are filled with words falling from a fountain that goes on forever. He will wish his heart was a musical box that played my favourite song. He will follow my gaze and wonder if I’m really looking at the horizon or something else that he himself cannot see. He will be discreet but he will want me to see him seeing me. He will smile when I scowl  and go back to scribbling. He will know that, one day, we will laugh about this. He will want to see my hair spread across his pillow like an auburn pien-mien, lying with his head between my breasts, sharing secrets we swear we’ve never told anybody else. He will want to be the one to light up my eyes, and the one to catch the glint of tears before they fall. He will see the effort it takes sometimes just to stand up straight and he will know what that feels like, but he will stand up straight, even straighter, sometimes, just to teach me how.

There are some things he will think no matter when he sees me for the first time. He will catch my eyes bounce around the room as I play crosswords with constellations and create love stories about strangers’ kisses and observe how the ceiling looks like grated cheese. He will see that my hands are small, and older than twenty-five, and he will know that they give firm handshakes, and that they are maps to an old soul. He will want to hold them, so I can stop fidgeting, so I know he’s with me, so I won’t run away. He will hold my hand just because he wants to.

Alexia writes to us from Athens.  The original post can be found here.
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Featured by Editorial Director, Jennifer Doyle | @playgroupie

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I grew up poor, at times literally poverty stricken- collapsed into tears over our lack of money for basic necessities, food, electricity, housing; we spent one year living, the four of us, in one room of a mousy beach hotel, and another in the four bedroom home of our best friends, which already housed their five family members, two dogs, birds and a few cats. My parents slept on the foldout couch in the living room. After that long, crowded year my mother moved my sister and I back to our birthplace in Jackson, Mississippi while my father stayed working in San Diego.

Lura and I took turns sleeping in bed with Mom, while the one out slept on the cot placed horizontally at the end of the bed. This was my 4th grade year: the year I read Pet Cemetery, made friends with Julia, whose father had died of cancer the year before, the year I moved into a home at the end of a cul-de-sac where my sister and I were the only white girls on the block. We were the only white girls for miles of blocks. The first day of school, where I was one of maybe three white kids, I felt no fear being the only white girl, just my personalized brand of constant fear, the companion of every year I could remember on Earth. I walked into the hallways bustling with black girls, chubby cheeked and bright eyed, hair glistening with scented oils, braided in fantastic loops on top their head or pulled painfully back into ponytails, girls who looked curiously at me, but not cruelly. My teacher was a soft spoken black women who bent down and looked directly into my face. I distinctly remember having the thought that she had eyes like crackling fireplaces. She smiled at me and explained how my desk and books would work, where I would sit, and patted me on my skinny freckled arm with her warm hand. I sat down and looked directly at the round, bland clock hanging on the wall for the next ten minutes, terrified to look around. Overt glances at my classmates showed nothing too terrifying, other than Jim McCracken picking his nose to third knuckle; Myrna Hellslinger appraising me dubiously. The rest of the kids were chatting, catching up after a long, hot Mississippi summer.

The only difference I ever took note of in that Mississippi elementary school was the use of corporal punishment. In San Diego, a teacher would be fired for laying a hand on a student, much less taking a thick wooden paddle, much like a ping pong paddle- perhaps it was a ping pong paddle- and laying it firmly into the submissive asses of pre-teen children. I still remember walking down the enclosed hallway, past the principal’s office, and hearing Jessie Ketchinger, a sweet honey-eyed boy from my class I had a small crush on, crying out in a high pitched yelp after the short swish and smack of the paddle. I would never put gum underneath my desk.

Grandpa M.D. ( M for man, the D is a family mystery ) and Grandma Elizabeth lived at the end of a short cul-de-sac. The right side of the house had a side, enclosed porch with a screen door that opened to the grass, where Grandma and I would walk down the side of the house, to the backyard, to hang clothes on the line. The backyard was really more of a field of grass, with trees lining the left side as you faced it. The trees were tall and gorgeous and had been planted when my mother and her sisters and brothers were children. At the lip of the field of grass lay the forest, a sudden thicket of trees under which lay a carpet of leaves. Some of the most magical, carefree days of my life were spent in the field, that forest.

The black girls on my block were not as nonchalant about my white skin as the kids at school. A few lame, failed attempts to join their games of hop-scotch or jump rope left me confused. I assumed they could sense my otherness, and this was not being white; my otherness had always been born of my families secrets. I found I was wrong: It was that I was white- a white gurrl, as they said. I was thrilled! They despised me because of my skin color – this I could work with.

I decided to approach them one cold, overcast day. Five of them jump roped in the sloping driveway of the house next to mine. ‘ Can I play? ‘ The tall girl with two braids on the side of her head and a large, knobby nose shook her head, popped her gum. ‘ Nah, ‘ she said. I spoke up, ‘ Well I wanna. ‘ She stopped jumping and appraised me. ‘ Look girlie, you wanna play with us, you can fight us, each one like, in your Granmama’s back yard. You fight all right, we’ll play with ya’ll. ‘ She gestured toward my small sister, on the porch. ‘ All right, ‘ I said immediately. These girls had run down homes barely kept together by rusting nails, bathrooms spotted in mold, tubs with brown and gold holes sprung in the sides like sores on a mouth, accents as thick as molasses and long standing friendships based on a culture I hardly remembered, and another I could never claim. But they were the only friends to be had, and I wanted them more than anything.

We solemnly filed to my Grandma’s backyard. The girls stood in a small black knot, and I stood attached by only the hem of my dress touching the hem of Janice’s dress. ‘ Ready? ‘ she asked, fists raised. Janice was chubby, with short hair and perfectly round eyes like buttons. But she looked kind. I raised my hands. Janice took a swing at me, hit my arm, I winced and tears filled my eyes. The girls laughed. ‘ Haw white girl! Haw! ‘ I filled with rage, plenty on hand in my little heart, the rage of the helpless and suffering, a rage I had carried like worms in meat for as long as I could remember. I screamed a half throaty shout, like a crazed bird, and pummeled Janice in her arms, her chest, her smooth soft throat. She made a cross with her arms, she was done.

I panted, sick to my stomach. The next girl, a petite and beautiful princess named Joyce, put up her brown skinned knuckles and smiled. Each fight afterward was playacting. At the end, we put our arms around each other in a circle. ‘ You all right now, ‘ Janice told me. And I was. We spent the rest of my year in Mississippi playing- swinging on incredible vines from trees into the rain made swimming pools of Jess’ backyard, the spot her father had purposefully dug out to make a giant mud pool for the children to play in, or driving for ice cream at Baskin Robbins in the back of my Great-Grandpa’s red Ford truck. I have pictures of myself with the girls, laying back in the truck, perched on the gutters, arms round each other’s shoulders, best friends.

Maggie writes at Flux Capacitor.
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Pick by Story Editor – Sara Sophia // @sarasophia

You ought to have seen what I saw on my way
To the village, through Mortenson’s pasture to-day:
Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb

-From Robert Frost, Blueberries

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Dana McGlocklin is a Seattle based family and fine art photographer.
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Featured by Story Bleed Editorial Director, Jennifer Doyle | @playgroupie

A daddy, daughter game of “bulldog” before her turn at bat, an intense moment.  Captured.

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Check out more of Keri’s photography and her ability to capture a moment.

Featured by Editorial Director, Jennifer Doyle