–by Tracy Lucas

So, yep. It’s Thanksgiving. That’s the current elephant in the room, right?

I’ll go with it.

Happy Turkey Day, youse guys!

It’s time for big parades and football games and warm fuzzies and appreciation and tryptophan and pie, extra whipped cream, please.

That’s the cliche stuff, though it’s all true at my house.

Just as often, there’s an accompanying air of tension. Well, okay. Always. And my family tends to get along pretty well in the grand scheme of things; we’re less exciting than the Rosanne episodes I watch to fall asleep every night.

We’re normal. (Relatively speaking, of course. We all know there’s no such thing.)

But something about the holidays makes us bizarre. We attend meals looking for something to gripe about, it would seem, or carrying all the chips we can fit on our shoulders.

And watching holiday sitcoms go by, you can’t help but notice that everyone else has the same weirdness.   Is it the stress of making all the food for a massive gathering?   Is it the failures you were going to prove wrong this year, but find you can’t, or that no one is willing to forego witty tales of the times you screwed up?   Is it cranberry sauce when it’s still shaped like the can? Maybe it’s just dumb to try to cram a whole  gene pool  at one table and expect things to go smoothly.

Who knows? SOMETHING makes us go nuts on Thanksgiving (and Easter, and Christmas, and and and and)

So let’s have some fun with it.

Post your worst, funniest, most horrible or embarrassing holiday family experience in the comments.    Make us cry, laugh, or punch things.

 Maybe we can think up a prize, even. Hell, I’ll make you a construction paper badge and mail it to you, if you’re obviously the winner.

I know my family doesn’t frequent litmag sites to see what I’m up to creatively. (Yours probably doesn’t, either. Sorry.) Â

It’s safe.     (cough, cough)

Come on. Do it.

Let’s commiserate, and be thankful for each other.

 .

(P.S. – In all seriousness, I’m quite thankful for you folks.    You’ve made my year suck much, much less.)

–by Tracy Lucas

Thanksgiving’s closing in quickly. Enter the holiday season, with all the familial insanity it always brings.

I used to wish I had a normal family. You know, as a kid. Back when I thought there was such a thing. Cookies and group hugs and plush carpet and new pets and lame-o matching sweaters at Christmas. All that.

I didn’t think anyone else had drama at the house after school. I thought it was just us. I wanted to be  a sitcom.

Families are neurotic and slightly disassembled, even at best. Always. I’ve (and you’ve) learned that. No one’s immune. Everybody has plenty of baggage.

Comes with that whole “breathing” thing we do.

One thing that pisses me off the most in mass market, poorly-written fiction is the standard happy family trope.

Doesn’t exist. Maybe mom’s a great cook and loves her kids and remembers to show it. Okay, fine. But she also has to have a DUI on her record or a mystery high school boyfriend or a weird plant festish. SOMETHING.

Those plastic, Pleasant-Valley parents don’t exist. Period. They’re all human. We’re all human. Our kids, who we try our hardest for, will also be human and fuck up in whole new ways.

It’s life, y’know. It’s how families are. They arrive in this world as troubled networks to begin with. They always have.

So why write one-dimensional, shiny-shiny family non-drama into print?

Don’t you hate books and stories where they’re ideal and not real?

Sounds to me like a scared child reaching, authoring characters he’d like to have grown up with. It’s sad, really.

Face your crap. Own it. Write it down, if you’re a writer. That’s your job. You don’t have to pretty it up. Just go with it.

Reality is just so much more—interesting.

And we’ll probably still respect you in the morning.

Probably.

–by Tracy Lucas

Today, I’m working on a heartbreaking article. I interviewed a woman who lost her perfectly-healthy, nine-month-old son to a freak infection just a couple of months ago.

I’m selling that piece elsewhere, so I can’t go into all the details here. But it’s been affecting me all day, and I can definitely tell you that. I even dreaded calling, despite the fact that I had the idea for the story in the first place. I wanted to talk to her, yet I found myself putting off having to think about it. Having to ask those questions. Having to know the answers.

It’s difficult, horrible stuff, and I don’t even know the family personally.

I remember when my own son was tiny. (Well, tinier. He’s two.) I was terrified for him every day. I checked his breathing every five minutes throughout the night, worried to death about SIDS or sheet entanglements or robbers or fires or—

You get the gist. You name it, I worried about it.

I was paralyzed with fear on a pretty regular basis.

I still kinda am. That doesn’t exactly go away. It lessens, once you move past the one year mark and once the psycho mama hormones stop pumping quite so insanely.

(You think I’m kidding, but I swear to God I would have shredded anyone who hurt my son in mere seconds. With my teeth. Gladly. I’m a little more human now. A little.)

But through those first few hundred days, everything scared me. I sweat through every car ride, every doctor’s tongue-click, every bath and every meal. I wondered for a while whether my child would ever be capable of chewing without choking on some piece of whatever-it-was, and whether I’d ever again know the feeling of being able to eat my own meal instead of militantly guarding each morsel of his from fork to stomach.

I couldn’t look away. He might die.

It was that big in my head; the possibility loomed with that likelihood.

I was going nuts.  I’d heard it was common to do so after delivering a new person onto the planet, but that didn’t help. Each niggling fear was eating me alive, and the terror just stacked, levels and levels deep.

There was no rest.

So what did I do?

I kept not resting. And I wrote. I wrote obsessively on all the things that might befall my little boy, all the horrors which I was sure awaited him just around every corner.

I had stories of his drowning in the bath, becoming the sole victim of a car accident, drifting away in his sleep and never coming back to me. Of waking him cold and blue-lipped, of discovering him upside-down in a bucket, of feeding him something and finding him allergic.

I couldn’t stop.

All of the nightmares came out of my head and into the most secret of my notebooks. I haven’t even submitted those stories anywhere yet. I can’t. They’re still too close. (That, and my family wouldn’t get it. I’d probably have child protection service staff on my doorstep in a second.)

So I hid them, the same as I’d done my fears. I tucked them away into a nook only I know about and I tried to forget.

I was extremely ashamed of myself. I couldn’t believe such awful, morbid thoughts came out of my head—and especially about my darling baby boy. I didn’t know how to take what I’d written, much less release it into the publishing wild.

Then I rediscovered David Erlewine’s blog. Most specifically, I remember, it was a short story called “Not Really” which completely scrambled my mommy-brain. His original blog is long gone, unfortunately, since he’s one of those folks who keeps committing to longer projects and pulling it down. (STOP IT ALREADY, DAVID!) The story, though, was also published at Keyhole, thank God, so I can show it to you here.

He wrote many, many pieces about the countless disasters that mentally befell his fictional children, and posted them right beside his profile photo which included his smiling kids on the couch. They’re cute, fine, and very much alive.

I tease him because so many of his stories revolve around children’s deaths.

But reading them helped me. It reminded me—because somehow, I’d yet again forgotten—that sometimes our  worst fears  make the best material.

Yeah, it’s hard as hell. And yeah, it’s raw to write them.

But we all have nightmares. It’s sharing them that releases the fear into the ether and strips its power over us, and of course, if we do it right, the fears belonging to our readers, too. Picking the scab is counterintuitive, but some things do have to be aired and left to dry. Ya gotta get the pus out or it festers.

(Eww. I know. Sorry.)

Me? I haven’t yet had the guts to dive back in and submit any of those stories of my own, but I do find that the older, longer-ago stories I’ve written that do the best are the things that scared me the most to write. In time, I know these twisted baby-fate stories will be that way, too.

In time.  Not yet.

Which leads me to my question, dear reader and writer.

What scares the hell out of you, and what do you do about it as an artist?

–by Tracy Lucas

I was at my favorite regional book festival earlier this month, mingling and selling, and in the process got the chance to strike up conversations with authors from all over the country. Some I’d heard of, some I’d not, but all were interesting to chat with, of course.

I’ve actually been thinking about making a jump to kid-lit. Not instead of my small press work, mind you, but in addition to it. Call it a sideline, if you will.

Talking with folks who have successfully charted in YA waters, I realized quickly that none of my hard-wrought publication credits matter. I mean, sure, I can say that I’ve sold tons of work to someone who isn’t my mother and doesn’t have to like me. There’s that, and that helps.

But in juvenile book circles?   I have no pull. I know no one well. Nobody owes me favors, has read my work, or remembers meeting me at a workshop.

They don’t. They haven’t. They wouldn’t.

I’m a novice all over again.

There are things from my own experiences I can carry with me. I know how to darling-murder. I know that kids aren’t stupid and that writing down to them is. I know only a few books make it** and that it’s a brutal fight to the top, if you’re even given the chance with a big-name publisher, and that if the opportunity arises, you’ve got to handle it carefully. I know that you’re not supposed to say “psych” or “gnarly” anymore, or comprise entire novels based on ’80s rock star storylines.

(Okay, sorry. That last one was a joke. A bad one. I’m tired.)

I’ve been reading a lot of YA lately, mostly due to time constraints, and I’m finding that there’s a lot to dig into. Middle-grade novels are actually pretty cool, if you’re open-minded and want to give them a go, and many of them have harder and more potent topics than the adult novels I’ve seen on the trade paperback shelves the last few years. Seriously. Wringer? Among the Hidden? The Giver? Amazing, tough stuff. All of it.

It’s all the heart, packed into a tighter package. It’s tense.

I want in.

Still, setting out for a new destination brings new challenges, some which I’m sure I can’t even see coming right now. Are there new boundaries?   New pitfalls? Crazy barriers to the millions of dollars I’d like to make?

Probably.

There always are.

I’m going to try it anyway, soon as there’s time.

After the projects I’m working on now are wrapped up and spiffy, I’m going to throw a little children’s literature into the mix. No idea how I’ll market it, where I’ll send it, nor who will buy it—but wandering around in something new is half the adventure, isn’t it?

Besides, my kids are only gonna love me if I manage to get famous writing stuff their friends have actually heard of. None of them are impressed by my editing a literary journal or running a freelance business.

When have you blatantly switched (or as in my case, added) publishing gears?   Has it worked out?

.

** (Incidentally, is anyone else who followed that link more than a little weirded out that Catcher in the Rye is A) listed as a kidsӉ㢠book and B) only six slots higher than a Berenstain Bears book from 1974?)

–by Tracy Lucas

I’d like to say that I’m writing for myself.

(Totally not true, of course, but I’d like to say it.)

It sounds noble and artistic and like I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks about me. It lends the air of being among the writers of old who didn’t bother mailing their material out and just let it be discovered randomly in the walls of their homes after they died.

Writing for myself.

But I don’t.  And I’m betting you don’t, either.

Thinking about it the other day, I realized that I have always written to a very specific, single reader.

In On Writing, Stephen King calls his person “Dear Constant Reader” I always thought that was lame. (Though the book is awesome, and you should get it.) I’m starting to see, though, that he was right.

There is just one. It isn’t a crowd. I’m writing right now for a PANK crowd, and later this week I’ll write for a newspaper crowd, and on Monday I’ll probably write for a radio crowd. That’s work. That’s different. What I’m talking about here is the stuff that pours out of you creatively. Passionate writing, art.

When you create art, it’s moving toward someone. And it’s an uber-specific individual.

My person has drastically changed form throughout the years as I’ve grown and twisted, but there’s always been a lone, devoted person in the corner engrossed with a print-out of my words in my mind.

When I was a kid and I started on this whole writing bent, I wrote to some other nebulous chick who was just like me but a little younger. I told her how everything felt. I wrote about what it was like to get picked on at school, to wear glasses to second grade, to feel like your parents didn’t really like you. It was all quite emo, though we didn’t call it that yet.

(Sometimes, during my goofier eras, there were even imagined fan mail letters about my book, or televised invitations to write lyrics for Jackson Browne or Tom Petty. It was awesome.)

Later, I oozed puppy-love obsession into letters over and over, trying to win the soul of the basketball player I decided I was supposed to fall in love with. Even though I was too chicken to, you know, TALK to him. Ever. Once.

But I wrote to him. Yes, indeedy.

A-B-A-B poems by the dozen.

After my first serious, live-in relationship blew up in my face, I wrote rants and advice diatribes to my ex, then to my future and past selves about my ex, then to girls who had fallen for the same type of man as I had.

When my son was born, I wrote him journal entries and blog posts and post-it notes about what our life was like and where we went and when he first did every little thing, because even in my young age I know we’re all just getting older and I’ll be dead before he matures enough to care. And I want him to know.

My grandfather died a couple of years ago. Just after the funeral, my uncle said to me, “You know, I always wondered what it would be like to go back in time and have met him when he was younger, and just talk to him, hang out. I don’t mean him as our dad when we were growing up, but what he was really like, maybe when he was twenty. I wish I could have known him like that and spent time talking to him without his knowing I was his son.”

Not sure how that relates, but it does.

Who do you write for?  Who will remember you?

Has that person changed along the way for you, too?

–by Tracy Lucas

I was interviewing someone for a newspaper article at the local bowling alley this weekend when I noticed something.

In between chats with my subjects, I had some time to sit with my notebook and stare off into space. Since it was a typical Saturday morning in our small town (read: nothing much else going on here), there were a few families bowling together.

As I watched them, I saw a pattern.

The mothers and fathers posed themselves, took a moment to focus, and lobbed the balls down the lane with determination and pursed lips. Each and every time—without fail, I swear—the parent would watch the ball, shake his or her head in frustration, and turn around self-consciously, announcing to all within earshot why the throw had failed. Either the ball had slipped,  a  hand was twisted at the wrong time, or the shoes were too slippery. Every last adult who bowled made a loud, vocal excuse to the others who were surely watching. (And I guess I was, so there’s that.) When they did hit what they’d intended, they shrugged and tried to play it cool, high-fiving the kids and flitting their eyes around the room nervously as they dropped back into the blue swivel seats.

The kids, though?

They barely knew when their turns were coming. They were watching the lights, the jukebox, the other kids running up and down the snack bar aisle. They were asking about the arcade games and quarters and pizza and prize tickets. They didn’t give a crap about efficiency.

When they did bowl—finally—they did something very different than their parents had.

Each child grabbed a ball (maybe his own, maybe not; depended what color fit the reigning mood that frame), flew up to the line (or past it) and threw the ball with all his might. As reliably as the adults had watched the results, the kids didn’t. Ever. Not once. The children turned as soon as the ball was in motion, and ran back to their seats in celebration, yelling, “Mom, did you see that?! I did it!”and asking about pizza again.

(Except this kid, but she wasn’t there.) She’s committed though, yeah?

I didn’t see a single kid watch to see whether the pins dropped. Not a one. None of them cared.

For the younger bowlers, the point was to get out there and do it. To stand on the stage and throw with all their power and their will, and to make something move. That was the point of going bowling. Who cared about the little numbers on the screen?

For the parents, it was all about the score, the physical grace, or the opinions of the strangers around them who were surely grading each throw.

Who had the better experience? The adults went home without much ado and got back to their lunches, to-do lists and lives. The kids were thrilled from the moment they walked into the alley until the adrenaline subsided several hours after leaving. Possibly longer.

I knew it was a blog post in disguise even as I went back on the clock and resumed interviewing folks for the official day job.

I’m guilty of being the adult. I write what I think will sell, what will get the most comments, what will make me sound professional instead of personal.

I don’t put my heart into it like I used to, because it costs me something. It costs me that moment where I might slip and fall down on my ass with everyone watching.

It’s safer to reserve myself and chicken out. Passion is expensive, and scary.

I need to learn to jump more often and be willing to get my hands dirty. Those random kids at the bowling alley had more guts than I’ve had for a long time, and that’s not right.

All in, on three.

They’ve got it figured out.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ll hit the pins.

It matters only that you threw the ball.

Screw the statistics.

–by Tracy Lucas

I don’t want to post anything today.

I had a shitty day, a crazy evening, and I’m absolutely drained. It stormed all day and I hate storms. I ate store brand frozen pizza at 9:30 pm. My kid puked cherry Kool-Aid and peas all over the floor right after we swept it.

I have nothing witty to write for you lovely folks.

I run into that wall a lot in relation to the kiddos in the house, too. I don’t want to get up and clean the puke, but I do. I’m the mother. I don’t want to cook a real meal; I’d rather throw some Cocoa Krispies on the table and call it dinner. But (usually, anyway) I cook; I’m the mother. I don’t do everything I’m supposed to, and certainly not immediately when I should. I procrastinate. I bitch. I slack off.

Ask my husband. He’d be glad to tell you all about it.

But generally, I do what I have to do. Why? Because I’m the one who has to. It’s my job, my role. It’s the matter that makes up my life. No one else is going to do it, and it deserves to get done.

I should be that way with my own writing… but I’m not. I let it slide.

Way too often, I don’t show up at the page. Or worse: I do, but I phone it in and am really just watching Boston Legal reruns on cable over the top of my Netbook screen.  (** Seriously, I love that show! I just discovered it a month ago—why didn’t you guys tell me what I was missing? Not cool.)

But as a parent, I can’t bow out. I can’t decline. It never matters whether I want to. It’s non-optional and there’s no point in arguing. I clean. I wipe. I wake. I comb, I dress, I make lunches, I sign notes and make appointments.

I’m also a writer, but that identity usually gets brushed off. I’m just too occupied.

That’s not right. I was a writer first.

I give my time to other things, other duties, other daily stuff instead of the one passion that drives me. I don’t do the morning pages I’d like to. I don’t have time to submit stuff to the myriad of mags I wish I could be a part of. I don’t force a couple thousand words into the blank text file that represents the novel I’ve been carrying around in my head for two years. I never tell people, “No, I can’t come. I have to stay home and write.” (Well, unless I have an impending deadline for paid work, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. I mean non-client, expression-only stuff.)

I let it go. I promise “later” and I climb the stairs to start a load of laundry. I grocery shop. I play not-this-honest Monopoly with the squirts. I never do come back to the same crystallized moment of that particular creation’s potential. Hell, I don’t know if that’s ever even possible. It’s gone. I murder it by default. Then the whole nasty cycle repeats. Weekly. Daily. Hourly. Right now.

Why don’t I let myself take, well, myself as seriously as I take everyone else?

Why do I put my creativity last?

Or is that selfish? Should responsibility win since I have a family and have wound up becoming an adult?

Anyone else in the same boat?

–by Tracy Lucas

Because you know you have to know.

There are lots of publishers out there with some nauseating stuff, but we’re not talking about Elmo or (god forbid) Spongebob paperbacks and coloring books.

So sick of those. Ugh.

Anyhow, not them.

No, what we’re discussing today, boys and girls, are some supremely messed up, real-life books for kids. These books exist. They are not photoshopped gags–I checked.

Most are even available on Amazon.

First, I give you Bedtime Stories Gone Awry, featuring such awesome titles as I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much, The House that Crack Built, and Does God Love Michael’s Two Daddies? for starters.  (And um, no, they boldly predict He doesn’t. Of course. Barf.)

In a similar vein, check out 12 Bizarre Books You Won’t Buy.  It’s hilarious. Personally, I think my favorite title has to be It Hurts When I Poop… though Where Willy Went: The Big Story of a Little Sperm is a close second.

But don’t just take my word for it. (Cue Levar with some bad-ass synthesizer music. Sport that banana-clip, Gordie!)

Check out those two links above, because there is cover art to be seen. Oh, yes there is. Some if it you can’t unsee.

Incidentally, researching for this post has quite inspired me. I mean, if people will buy this crap, what wouldn’t they shell out good money for?

I’m browsing this list for my next bestseller. (Okay, it’s the first. But who’s counting? I’m only joking a little bit. Watch for me soon with a picture book at your local Barnes & Noble.) Sample nuggets from the list include You Were an Accident, Grandpa Gets a Casket, Some Kittens Can Fly!, and How to Become the Dominant Military Power in Your Elementary School.

And if you’re still not quite disgusted/amused enough (you’re not!?), check out Cracked’s version of books that should–but thankfully, don’t–exist. And believe me, they get rough. You’ve been duly warned, you sick puppies, you.

–

–by Tracy Lucas

Sending my kid to daycare by himself that first day was hard.

I could easily have shouted directions at the (very capable) teachers for longer than the school day.

How were they going to know what he meant by his nonsense syllables? What if they cut his food the wrong size? Would he go to sleep for them without a fight when they didn’t know the phrases we use to get him settled? If he choked on his lunch, would they snatch him up in time or be distracted by the roomful of other kids?

What if he came home with a bruise, and I didn’t know how it had gotten there, and we ended up in the emergency room with some kind of internal hemorrhage?

Okay, that last one was a bit of a stretch. Doesn’t mean I didn’t think it.

And I wholly trusted this daycare. It’s the only one in town, out of twenty or so contenders, that my husband and I felt at peace with in the first place.

But I had created this kid from scratch. That’s a hard feeling to explain to someone who doesn’t have children, but that’s what happened. I married a guy, and just because we did the dirty one particular night, an entire person popped into existence.

This micro-person couldn’t do anything at first. I always thought that babies were nonverbal and slow to walk, but could pretty much do everything else. Unh-uh.

We had to show him not to scratch his eyes out with his little baby fingernails. We had to help him poop a couple of times. (Trust me; you do NOT want to know.) We even had to teach him to swallow; anytime we fed him pureed whatever, he would open his mouth in shock at the new texture and let it all dribble down his slimy, drooly little neck.

And apparently, for the longest time, and we’re talking months, babies don’t have enough motor control to grasp. To grasp! I didn’t know that going in. All the pictures of the infant tenderly curling her fingers around the mama bear’s pinky? Well, yeah, happens occasionally. Hanging on to things that are useful? Nope. Not this baby. He would fly into a violent rage in hopes of procuring his pacifier (we call it a “plug” at my house) and alerting us that it had gone missing. Most of the time, we found it. In his hand.

Many of our early conversations went like this:

Me: “Here ya go, buddy. Hang on to it this time.”

Him:  (greedy sucking-sucking-slobber-slobber)

Me: “Let’s just go over here and see if…”

Him: (caterwauling like a buckshot banshee)

Me: “Oh my God, calm down, it’s okay. Where’d it go? What happened?”

Him: (screaming, puffing, huffing, choking, red, pissed, raging psychobaby)

Me: (frantic pacing, tearing apart couch cushions, head verging on combustion)

Him: “AAEEEEEEEEeeeEEEEEEaaaGGGHHHooooAAEE!!”

Husband: “What’s his problem? What are you doing to the pillow stuffing and the cat?”

Me: (crying, sure of my failure as a parent) “WHERE IS THE FUCKING PLUG?! HELP ME!”

Husband: “Um. Yeah. It’s in his left hand again, goober.”

At least, that’s how I remember it.

We literally taught this child everything. He came out as a GI tract with attitude, and we worked on him daily until he turned into the walking, talking, dangerously adorable, smartass, veritable child that he is today.

It was baffling to think of dropping him off for eight hours and let someone else be me. Because that’s what it was; it wasn’t that I didn’t think other folks had cool things to show him, it was that the daycare workers were my real-world replacements. They were going to do everything I was used to doing for him, and it was guaranteed they weren’t going to do it my way. There’s no way they could! They had only known him for mere hours, and now I had no choice but to trust them to keep him alive and return him in safe condition.

He was going to have experiences I couldn’t fill him in about later, and memories of things I had never seen. He was going to fall and I wouldn’t be able to reach him; he’d get comfort elsewhere. He was going to learn words I didn’t teach him, try snacks I hadn’t made him. I was going to miss some major firsts.

He was going to live without me.

That’s the real fear for any parent; that our child will do just fine on his own, exactly as we’ve intentionally raised him to.

Releasing a piece to an editor is not so altogether different.

We want to send a five-page cover letter explaining that Mom isn’t really like that, it’s just a piece of fiction, and by the way, we were drunk when the piece was written, so if some things sound a bit stupid, please be gentle. We want to qualify our work with bio credits and educational abbreviations, and make sure editors know we are the experts we pretend to be.

We know our writing better than anyone else ever could.

We were there the day it came into being, and we know the thousand other ways the ending could have gone, the phrase we didn’t pick but almost did, the names and where they came from, why they mattered. We want to qualify our decisions, so the editor will see things our way and make them the way we would.

It takes an editor two seconds to delete a line you made with your blood.

You send off a poem or a story and hope for publisher approval, but what you really want is just that: flat approval, not criticism or reworking. You want it to be the best, most perfect thing ever and to wow the publisher in charm and wit. After all, if it wasn’t perfect, you didn’t send it, right?

It’s hard to let others show up out of the blue and insert themselves. The piece changes. It’s almost always an improvement, if you can look at it objectively, but of course you can’t (well, not without some serious practice.)

The problem with change? Even when changed well, things which are changed are never the same. That’s so obvious, so self-defining to say, yet we fight the concept all the way. It’s a hard thing to step up and be edited, and I’m not gonna lie, it hurts to take your hands back off of something you’ve fashioned from clay. Sometimes a lot.

But is the piece—is my baby—better for it in the end?

If you’ve done your job well, it’ll stand. If I’ve taught my kid enough about how the world works, he’ll make do and form his own relationships with the new folks. It’s the broader sphere the writing/child has to exist in, not the creator’s own.

Yes, letting go is hard as hell. It’s terrifying.

But that boy came home from daycare yesterday singing “Wheels on the Bus”, which I’ve never taught him; talking about Dora, which we’ve never watched; and asking for marshmallows, which I’ve never fed him for fear of choking.

And he was smiling all the way.