{by Dera of Casablanca}

I’m driving home from Fiona’s school when she asks me this in a soft voice:

Fiona: “Mom? Did you ever like a boy when you were my age?”

Me: (thinking, “I loved boys in the womb. By seven, I was already over this dating thing and ready to settle down.”)

“Yeah, I think so.”

Fiona: “Were you ever afraid that he didn’t like you back?”

Me: (thinking, “There was little to no fear in my approach. Capture, seize, and conquer. Much easier.”)

“Sure. Is there a boy that you like?”

Fiona: (silence)

I adjust the rear-view mirror, and see the reddest face smiling back at me. I have my answer.

Me: “It’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed. Is it someone I know?”

Fiona: (nods with her face buried in her hands)

Me: “Fiona, do I have to guess every boy in our lives or are you going to tell me?”

Fiona: “I’ll give you a guess.”

Me: “A ‘hint’?”

(by Jen Lee)

It’s okay to be quiet.
You don’t need to give the full report just yet, you may not need to give it at all. Reporting requires understanding, and sometimes you just need to follow the path and see where it leads before you know where you are.

It’s okay to be quiet.
You can declare your hope in a loaf of bread you bake by hand, you can put unnecessary things on the stoop as an act of faith in future provision. You can let the apple pie you’re making invite company, and the space you’re preparing for friends invite joy.

It’s okay to be quiet.
You can say all you really need to say with one look, with one touch. You can express your gratitude for his love in the way you smile when you see him come into the room. You can let them know how they melt your heart in the tenderness of your kiss on their foreheads.

The words are the last thing to arrive, but the love is here all along.

**

Jen Lee inspires me to live.
Read her perfect life words here.

{by Beck from Frog and Toad are Still Friends}

(photo credit)

Once there had been a mother.

He remembered her, a bit – her breath that smelled like communion grape juice and cigarettes, her harsh laugh and her sudden rages, the way he was frightened and small and hiding underneath his bed, in his tent, under the slide at the playground, hiding from her giant hitting hands and her loud voice.

Ruby made her go away.

He didn’t remember much of that night – nothing much more than Ruby giving him warm funny tasting milk at bedtime and then his sleepy awareness of raised yelling female voices and a sudden loud noise and then silence. Then he woke up the next morning to Ruby bright and extra cheerful and the kitchen extra clean and a new vegetable garden in the backyard.

He likes working in the garden. He likes putting his hands in the dirt, likes watering the fat jolly vegetables. Ruby smiles and brings him lemonade and they have picnics for lunch and sometimes he sits on the swing even though the swing is getting smaller and smaller all the time.

He keeps forgetting to ask Ruby about the shrinking swing. He forgets sometimes that Grandma went away a long time ago and finds himself standing in front of her house where strangers live now. He forgets that Mom went away, too, and hides under the piano bench, hides under the front steps, until Ruby lures him out with gummy worms and trips to the ice cream store.

“Ruby,” says their neighbour Mrs. Huffington over the fence. “You’re doing a wonderful job looking after him, but your whole life is passing you by.”

He remembers that sometimes, the way he remembers the surprising bits of red in the kitchen, the loud sound, his mother’s sharp breath and giant hurting hands. But then it’s time for a picnic and the sun is bright and it’s time to work in the garden again, their special garden where the vegetables come up so big and ripe.

::

Beck has even more spooky Halloween stories with some of your favorite characters, like the one featured here. She also writes with wit and compassion about her life and family. She just started a new blog, check it out.
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{by Michelle DeRusha of Graceful}

They sit on beach chairs, on beach towels rumpled and striped, legs splayed, faces to the sun. They sit while their kids splash and mold kingdoms out of cool damp sand. They sit amidst florescent pink and yellow pails and shovels, amidst half-eaten bags of Cheetos and uncapped bottles of Dr. Pepper. They sit with flesh wrinkled, saggy, taut, bronzed, fish-belly white. They sit and gesture and talk in French and English. And is that Portuguese perhaps?

I don’t often get the opportunity to observe the human masses. The airport is a good place for that, but more often I’m riding the moving walkways with exuberant kids or standing in line for McNuggets and fries. The mall is a fine place, too – settled onto a bench to watch shufflers and shoppers – but usually I’m leaning on the metal rail, gazing dizzy at the carousel as my kids spin beneath colored lights or sweeping frenzied past kiosks in search of the perfect birthday gift an hour before the party.

The beach is the perfect people-watching spot, and two months or so ago I did just that. I sat on a fabric chair low to the sand, book propped on my lap, sunhat pulled low on my brow, legs stretched across infinitesimal bits of coral, and I watched.

{by Valeria from The Red Balloon Photography}

A SOMETHING in a summer’s day,
As slow her flambeaux burn away,
Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer’s noon,
An azure depth, a wordless tune,
Transcending ecstacy.
~Emily Dickinson

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

{by Heather Westberg King}

photo source

He has asked so many questions that don’t have answers and I’m just so tired. I ask him to help his brother. I say, “He’s going to get hurt, can you help him?” He asks, “Why will he get hurt?” I answer through gritted teeth, “He just will! Just help him!” Then he sighs and his big blue eyes look sad and I wish I could find the strength for more patience and less surprising anger.

When I walk into my room to get dressed, I pass the crumpled bed and want to get in it. I want to curl up on my side and cry. I’m not sure why, but I want to do it. I start to walk that way and then I see her, the me in my mind’s eye, on her side in the bed where I am not. She looks like she’s repeating history. She is carrying this disease and she thinks she isn’t and then sometimes she thinks she is this disease. She is me and I am her and she is them and she is not.

She is so afraid that she’s given it to them.

I know that if I were to walk in and find her curled there, I’d think she should get up. I’d think she should shake it off. It’s not her fault she’s there, but she needs to get up, I’d say. Then I’d wonder if some of it is her fault, because I know memories of ridiculous choices can flood in and bring with them the funk, curling her up.

So I get dressed. I wash my face of yesterday’s make-up and I put one foot in front of the other to make sure that I’m not her or them or her past. I fight it because I know that when I do, it gets a little better.

I fake it sometimes, but strangely, most of the time I’m truly reveling in the buried joy. The miraculous happiness that comes through the eyes of my boys. We make a hide-out in a closet and they are thrilled with their flashlights in the dark. I well up with joy because they are who they are and I believe we can change this. Even if it doesn’t stop, it can be lighter, it can get better. Even if they feel it, they can learn that it doesn’t define them. I will tell them. They can learn from the truths we speak over them…

{By Jessica at One Wild and Precious Life}

Today the earth is pressed against this wide white emptiness and there is still this gap in me, this hesitation.

I’ve been thinking about painting.

My fear was the blank canvas and nothing to paint.

{by Mary of Giving Up on Perfect}

We sat shoulder to shoulder in a tiny dorm room around a tiny TV, watching one of our favorite movies. Just as Johnny marched over to Baby and pulled her out of the corner, our friend Jared walked in the room.

As he took in the room, looking from one girl to the next . . . to the next . . . to the next, he said, “What is wrong with you guys?”

Blinking, we looked up at him and realization dawned. Every single one of us was staring at the screen with a [ridiculous] dreamy look in our eyes. It was like we were in a trance.

The same kind of romance trance I slip into when I read romance novels.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Mishelle Lane is synonymous with the singular captured moment.
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{by Terra from Raising Zoeyjane}

Twenty. That’s the number of years I was anorexic for. Twenty-one: The smallest my adult waist ever shrunk down to. Two Thousand and Four: The year I got breast implants, thinking that if I felt more proportionate, I’d have a more positive self-regard. 87: The weight I got down to, ten months post-partum. Eight: The number of miscarriages I’ve had, likely owing to a hormone issue brought about by the eating disorder. 100: The number of Cheerios I would allow myself in a day, alongside an apple and a cup of hot chocolate, when I was fifteen. Two: years as a part-time model, during the grunge/heroin-chic period. While on heroin and cocaine. Thirteen: The number of workouts I was doing a week, at twenty and twenty-one. 1000: How many sit-ups I had to do each day, or I was a lazy failure. Four: suicide attempts. One: Year sober, on November 16th.

I sought out an eating disorder at seven years old because I was a chubby kid who got picked on for it, who came from an abusive home, with a single father who minimized me ‘to keep me from becoming egotistical’ and an absent mother. I wanted to disappear, while also wanting to be able to have control over just one thing in my life. I understood the ideology and the permanence of anorexia, and I read hundreds of case studies before I started to restrict, eventually adding over-exercise, vomiting, laxative abuse, amenorrhea, multiple esophageal infections and a prolapsed colon to my resume.

When sex discovered me, it edited the mantra I’d always repeated, ’You are ugly and stupid and fat. No one can stand to be around you’, and made it, ‘You are not too ugly, stupid or fat. Men will want to be around you for sex. This is all you’re worth, so don’t fuck it up.’ This was my law for over a decade.

When a friend in the Vancouver social media community asked me to participate in a date auction she was organizing to raise funds for a writers’ society, you could say I spit-taked. I tried to back my way out of it, before I’d ever agreed to do it. I was positive that she was delusional and I would ruin the whole event, if not simply embarrass myself by drawing in the minimum bid and listless looks from a crowd.

I’d been practicing for years to hide myself, whether with an imaginary wall, or a literal one made of scrubby clothes and hair, no makeup and ragged fingernails. You didn’t see me, generally, unless I’d decided that I wanted to be seen.

This auction was a challenge to that. I didn’t volunteer, I was asked, so I would be on display, felt as if I needed to measure up to some appearance-based ideal, and it wasn’t on my own terms. I agreed to do it, because I’m a pushover who is more concerned with disappointing people than looking like a fool, but I was anxious and considered backing out, or just not showing up, several times.