During the middle of a back-arching tantrum, it is so difficult to remember the sweetness of her crib-songs. And when she is returning to the drawer I continually tell her not to touch so that I cannot prepare dinner, I might forget her kissable cheeks and two-year-old smile.

The older I get, the more I realize where I am, or rather when I am.

Call it increased self-knowledge, or awareness, but I’ve never noticed spring like I am right now. The signs of spring are hard to come by where I live: no snow melts, very few daffodils push through and then, only when they’ve been planted in a yard and the air only sometimes smells of new blooms.

In the past I’ve been more aware of the situations around me than I have been of the season. Last year, I was planning my daughter’s summer and looking toward Kindergarten. Two years ago I had a newborn. And each year I taught I always looked with longing toward the two months of ease that June and July brought.

Spring in California is moderate and fair and brings warm breezes and puffy clouds. It is calm and points forward. Spring sneaks by and paves the silent way for summer. This year however, I can’t help but stare at the bright hills and the mustard blossoms behind my house. Spring is loud this year and scented and for an instant I might feel as if I live in a climate with four distinct seasons.

So maybe it is more than me just stopping to watch the clouds and smell the air; maybe it is more than me being aware of the season. I am distracted as usual by upcoming summer schedules and other responsibilities, but this spring is different. Only a wet winter can green the hills and soak the soil enough for flowers to come through.

Maybe this year is special. This year I am noticing everything and not letting it go by in silence. This year I am chronicling it daily. This year I am paying attention to the season.

I was kind of a nerd in high school. I wasn’t a cheerleader like Linda, or funny like Annie. And I surely didn’t have cute fluffy hair like Lisa or Mel.

I was a get-good-grades non-athlete who didn’t drink and certainly didn’t smoke ANYthing. I was overweight and I went to a small private school with my graduating class numbering only 69 students. To still be a nerd in a group that size is quite an accomplishment.

But because our school was so small, everyone knew everyone, and everyone knew everything about everyone, including past mistakes and probable future ones. It was like living in a small town within the larger megalopolis of Orange County. Nevertheless, I did manage to keep a small group of friends whose members would ebb and flow with each new year and whose interests were similar to mine.

We were nothing special and really didn’t fall under a label. The interesting thing about a school the size of mine is that there were a fair amount of kids with excellent grades in Math and English, but also possessed talent on the volleyball court, popular boyfriends, invitations to parties, and cute legs in cheerleader skirts. I just wasn’t good at anything else besides studying. There were no distinct groups like a larger school. All of our groups were nebulous and each one branched out to include students from other ones. The head football player might also be the lead in the musical, or help in the science lab.

My constant A’s on papers and tests did nothing for my popularity. Those were also the days when grades would be posted on the insides of windows and at the fronts of classes on blackboards. In a school our size, everyone could recognize one another’s student number (it was 6 digits that I had kept since 7th grade). Everyone knew I got an A.

I learned early on to keep my mouth shut when I got something back from the teacher. Nobody wanted to be friends with a girl who got good grades AND told everyone. I would either lie (but that wouldn’t work because back then I was a terrible liar, and they knew I surely didn’t get a bad grade) or I would try to avoid those conversations altogether.

I began to guard my words in an unhealthy way.

If I trace back my aversion to being the center of attention or my horror at speaking my mind and someone not agreeing, I always come back to this: being embarrassed about being “smart”. I can follow my ten year silence back to this, I think. Forever self-conscious, I’ve always wanted to fade into the background of a room.

I guess I still think of myself as a nerd. I have lost weight and I have accomplished a few athletic goals in the past 8 years, so I guess I am not as much of a nerd as I used to be. I will never be a cheerleader (thankfully because who would really want to see a 33 year old mother trying to turn cartwheels), and I will never be the center of the laughter at a party (I’ll leave that to my husband). But I am learning to write and to speak the words that come. I am learning that I don’t have to keep my mouth shut.

I have never tried so hard to make something perfect.

Even the beautiful three layer carrot cake with sweet cream cheese frosting and chopped walnuts on top: even that creation looked great and I didn’t try that hard. I just gathered the ingredients, set aside a time for baking and followed a recipe.

There is no real recipe for writing. This article that I am attempting to perfect (with the profound and extensive editing advice of three friends) is driving me crazy. I guess I had fancied myself someone to whom easy words came fast and furious, and that I could work with them well on a page.

I am not so sure anymore.

I’ve worked on the same tiny thousand-word article for about a week now, melding my friends’ editing suggestions into my own work and still trying to retain my voice. I have reworked and restructured and reworded; I’ve removed adverbs and adjectives and replaced them with stronger verbs. I’ve put it to bed and then revisited it the next morning.

You know when you read the same word over and over again it begins to not look like a word any longer. Then you think you are crazy because you know it is a word in your head (heck, you’ve written zillions of papers and a thesis way back when – you should know the English language). Then you show the word to your husband and say something like, “I know this sounds silly, but is ‘Easter’ really a word?”

He looks at you like you should be committed.

That is what I feel about this article. I’ve read the same words and rewritten the same sentences over and over and it is beginning to look like a mumbling mess.

I guess it won’t be perfect. Even if I structure it perfectly and the ideas flow well from one to the next, the publisher still might not like it (unlike my carrot cake which everyone loved). This particular article probably won’t be accepted. At least this time.

My only solace is that working this hard and this long on the same 1000 words will produce something. It may not be perfect, but it will be written well. Even if it is not published in the compilation I am sending it to this weekend, it will be mine to work with again and resubmit it else where.

And maybe like my three-tiered carrot beauty from last weekend, it will be good even if it does lean a little to the right.

Dealing with a two-year-old tantrum in the middle of a crowded zoo could never be categorized as a fun outing.

Words have power.

Spoken,

sang.

Whispered,

written,

or unsaid.

The words of a friend are among the strongest.

I asked for help with something I was writing. I wanted critique and I wanted advice. I want to get better and to advance in this craft. I really need to learn. I sent a short article-length manuscript to three friends, exposed myself to their wisdom and waited. Vulnerability is difficult.

Faithful as friends are, they responded. I have never seen as much “red pen” in my life, even as a former English teacher. Rewrite across the top would have been easier for each one of them. They each have jobs, families and much more important responsibilities than helping me with my article.

Getting their three responses back, I might have been tempted to procrastinate. Its easier to leave the emails in my inbox. Instead, I printed each one out and laid them out on my bed, complete in their marked-through finery. I cringed first, but then I began to wholeheartedly agree. The sections I knew needed work, they each noticed too. The sentences I couldn’t seem to write well were marked with better ideas. In fact, each one of them (from different corners of the country) agreed with each other without discussing it with among themselves.

I actually surprised myself with my own response. Instead of feelings of rejection or hurt, I nearly immediately felt gratitude. I agreed with them and I felt so thankful that I had women who cared enough about me and wanted me to advance in this craft that they spent the time to give me their helpful and detailed edits.

Patronizing words are powerless. Words spoken in love with truth are priceless.

Thank you, friends.

A field full of dandelions, white and puffy, are a little girl’s dream.

As a compulsion left over from my front lawn dashes, I wanted to pick the dandelion. And I wanted to pick it for her. I wanted her to feel the brief respite from childhood impotence that I had felt. I wanted her to be able to blow the dandelion and watch the spores float away in the morning air.

When we were new parents, my husband and I would look over the crib at our baby, and whether she was sleeping or screaming (as she often did in colicky fits for almost a year), our hearts would truly be filled with new love for her. We’d wonder at the incredible love that was expanding our hearts individually and collectively for this infant.

She was amazing in her own right: beautifully formed with perfect fingers, toes, and lips, and full of wild energy and fire. She would smile and giggle one minute, and the next unfold her unhappiness in the form of tantrums and yells. Our new baby was almost divine in the spell she had on both of us: we were equally in love with her and incredulous at the amount of energy she would expend in the midst of her colic.

One day my husband thought aloud to me in a rare quiet moment, “I wonder what her voice will sound like — when she starts to talk. I wonder what her little voice will be?”

At this point in my induction to motherhood, bouncing between exhaustion and intense emotion toward my new baby, it was difficult to think about anything coming out of her tiny mouth other than a newborn shriek. She either slept, screamed, or ate and screamed at the same time due to her case of infant reflux. Nursing was nearly impossible because she cried nearly the entire time she fed.

It was the first time I realized, truly, that this baby was not going to stay a baby forever. The every-two-hour feedings would not last for eternity and that someday she would begin to walk and to talk and to run. She would turn into a little girl. In my new motherhood it dawned on me that I was beginning to raise a “child”, not merely a baby. She would learn words and speak sentences, and someday she would learn to read.

Someday this wailing baby would have her own voice.

As she grew, like most babies do, she also grew out of her colic and became a busy, happy toddler. She began to speak early and by the time she reached her second birthday, her words came one after the other like water. She learned new words every day and formed sentences and thoughts that astonished us and made us laugh. Her second birthday also brought a period of tantrums unlike any before, as well as more yelling and screaming. Now, however, her words were enmeshed in her screams. “Nos” were peppered between “Get me OUT!” and “Let me GO!”

I could finally hear her voice and it was loud most of the time.

Sometimes she would sit quietly and talk to me like toddlers do, with words only intelligible to mothers who must translate to everyone else what their babies are trying to communicate. She would laugh and point and name the world as it went by. What I hadn’t realized when she was an infant is that a child’s voice surfaces gradually and a mother warms to it gently. Word appear here and there and eventually, without any pomp or eventfulness about it, a child begins to speak. Her voice emerges.

My oldest daughter is six now and she has a beautiful, soft little-girl voice. She sings when she is alone, she reads aloud to her dolls and she pretends conversations between her toy horses. Her voice, by nature is small and sweet. When she whispers in my ear in mother and daughter games, it is music. She says true things and has learned to love words like I do. She is only beginning a lifelong classroom of experimenting with language and learning how words harm or help others. Just like her father guessed over five years ago, her little voice is perfect, beautiful and sweet.

She hasn’t lost her fire, though. Also, by nature, my daughter is emotionally charged and most days this escapes through her mouth. She gets angry easily and her feelings are hurt irreparably just as easily. She yells and storms around, almost like she did when she was so little. Now, she is a tall Kindergartner with fiery brown eyes and long auburn hair. She ricochets between speaking gently and crying out with extreme emotion so regularly that it is as if she is an infant again moving quickly between bouts of colic and laughter.

She uses her voice to speak truth, and usually is is a childlike truth that I have either forgotten in my comfortable adulthood, or I have missed altogether. Her words can ring true in the back of my heart as if she has been there all along.

And of course like most children who test their voice, there has been the occasional lie. And also like most children, she has learned that lying is wrong by treading tenuously on the surface of a untruth only to be found out and gently scolded. We then have the discussion that my mother had with me about trust and lying and the harm our words can do.

Since my six-year-old was small, we’ve added another baby to our family. She is now a equally passionate toddler with as much thirst for life and as loud a voice as her sister. When she was born two years ago, my husband and I gazed over the crib of our second daughter and wondered out loud the same thing that we had wondered about our oldest. We thought about her future and her voice and the words she would speak.

And she does speak. Her child’s voice has burst through the confines of toddler hood to hit life full force. Her words come tumbling out after one another like water out of a faucet constantly finding new places to rest. She speaks quickly and uses her words as eloquently as a two-year-old can.

Nearly six years ago when my new mother’s heart was enlarged with so much love for my first baby, I had no idea the affects that she and her sister would have on me. It is their eyes that capture me late at night when they are closing for sleep and their sweet faces that sweep me up in love for them. But is their words that seize me. Their little voices cause me to stop and pay attention closely to new truths set to toddler song, and adult-sized words that emit from a six-year-old mouth.

They speak and I am listening.

Walking together, too little to hold hands for very long (the older is responsible, but the younger has other things on her mind), they act independently from each other. Secretly, on the inside, they wouldn’t know what to do if the other wasn’t here.