Her legs stretch longer, it seems, with each month that passes. Soon, she’ll stand taller than me, I think, and her arms will hug my neck from my own height. I will be able to put my own mother-arms around her and hold her body as a woman, not a child.

She stood nose to nose in front of my full length mirror; her two-year-old feet stuffed into a pair of my lets-not-be-mommy-for-an-evening shoes. She looked at herself in toddler jeans and my shiny black pumps and said to herself,

She hasn’t been tainted by the world’s view of beauty yet. She only knows what her father and I have spoken into her expanding mind: that she is in fact a beautiful princess. She doesn’t know what “fat” is, or how acne can scar a soul, or what it feels like to be “too” tall. She hasn’t been trained to see herself through culturally defined screens of beauty.

She is running out the door for her father to drive her to Kindergarten. It is Friday and she is in a good mood. Maybe she’ll have a good day.

She turns around and grins at me as she’s closing the front door, and she pauses, motioning for me to come closer. She kisses me, and then calls for her sister. She hugs her sister too, still grinning and then asks me to kiss her on the palm of her hand. I do and she holds it to her cheek to transfer. She grabs my hand and kisses me. I hold it to my face and feel her 6-year-0ldold love through my skin.

She’s gone.

This extended good-bye begins to scare me. I think that maybe there is some cosmic reason she is taking so long to kiss me and love me and express herself this morning. Maybe, awfully, this is the last time I will see her. Is this a sign? Will the two of them, the love of my life and my first baby, get in the car and not see as another car runs a red light? This just might be it.

I call after them, Be careful!

Over thinking it as I often do, my thoughts race through the next 90 seconds.

How will I raise my other daughter on my own?
Where are the life insurance papers?
What kind of job will I get and who will watch Naomi until she goes to school?
Can I keep the house?
Will I have to go to Hope’s Kindergarten class and explain what happened to her classmates?
What will I do without the man I am in love with?
How will I explain to my toddler why her sister is gone?

The interesting thing is, the fear is quite real. It happens. Things like do occur and families are lost and broken and hurt.

But I have to stop myself. I have to quiet my heart. I don’t often feel the overwhelming dread like I do right now, but when I do, I have to control it before it goes to far. I could potentially worry myself straight into a mental facility strapped to a bed.

I could hold onto to an irrational fear like this. I could carry it in my heart and never let my children out of my sight. I could keep them in the house, under my careful eye for the rest of their lives. I could call my husband twenty times a day to see if he is alright. I could carry this and let it become the loudest thing about me.

Or I could quiet it. I could let myself sink into the love and the heart of God, who cares about me and my family more than I can understand. I can let Him quiet the fear that sometimes takes me over.

I call my husband anyway, on his way to her school. The 90 seconds of heart-filling fear is gone and I’m not really worrying about insurance papers anymore. I want to hear his voice and know that our daughter is safe in the back seat.

She is, and I can hear her singing along to the music in the background. I think we all will have a good morning.

Anyone, anywhere could be reading this.

We’ve webbed the world into our living rooms and bedrooms over cornfields, glaciers and oceans. Instantly.

That is the wonder of living in 2008 and experiencing the Small World Phenomenon of the Internet. Add Google to the mix and we have instant access to anyone who basically has ever lived (and who has an Internet presence). Any person I didn’t like in high school? Google them. Any person I might meet this afternoon? Google them.

Google my name and this blog is the first entry. Anyone who has ever known me basically now has immediate access to every aspect of my life that I share here. (As an aside, you will also find Sarah Markley the social worker and the graphic designer and one who is dead and is listed with her descendants).

And I’ve been vulnerable. I’ve shared weight loss stories, true failures in mothering, and basic hurts I’ve gathered throughout my life. People know all sorts of things about me, but I know very little about them. And I think its alright.

In one terrifying sense it is crazy to think I would share deep and personal things in a PUBLIC journal and PUBLISH it daily for ANYONE to peruse. Sounds like my 10th grade worst nightmare. It is the dream where I am naked in the grocery store or my high school Chemistry class and I realize it just as I enter. Yeah. In a way, that is what blogging is.

But diverting from the public nudity metaphor, there is a certain freedom in exposure. There is no longer anything to hide. It is liberating. The irony is that usually knowledge is power. But in this case, it might be freedom.

Of course I hold a little back. Each one of us has an inner piece that even our spouses or God has trouble breaking into. Each one of us keeps part of us safe and quiet from the world.

But I hope that anyone, anywhere reads me. By daily sharing, consistent writing, I have found it easier and easier to be vulnerably honest. And while I may not be the most inspiring blogger on the web, I might share enough of myself that someone might understand that she isn’t alone.

Because we are all in this together.

When my toddler became a child and not a wailing infant any longer and she was able to walk and giggle and put words together, she began to play with her sister. Their similarities were obvious – both strong willed, both highly emotional, both full of energy and both continue to move ahead at full force until they fall into bed at night. I thought that I had gotten the four-year-later version of her sister.

This morning, after an extended and ear-piercing screaming tantrum in her play and music class, we left and came home. The class had just begun and Naomi wouldn’t be calmed or quieted. A normal two-year-old tantrum quickly turned into a kicking and screeching mess in the bathroom. I picked her up still kicking, grabbed our shoes and took her to the car.

My space bar isn’t working.

Its sticky. I pound it with my right thumb and it doesn’t stick down, it just doesn’t space.

I mean sometimes it does (I am writing a post right now and there are spaces), but I am constantly having to go back…

Backspace, delete…..THUMP THE SPACE BAR AGAIN!

I simply assume the consistent and proper functioning of my silly, little space bar. I expect it to work correctly, in its four inch-ness, without having to pull a muscle in my right hand to operate it. It is a given in life. Space bars.

I guess I take a lot of things for granted, like space bars and refrigerator lights; dirty diapers, laundry detergent and gasoline in my car. Givens. I assume water from the faucet and heat from the heater and electricity from the wall. I expect to be able to walk to the mailbox, to climb my own stairs and to take my runs on my own two feet. I assume that I will wake up healthy and that my girls will go to bed with full tummies. Also givens.

A given is exactly that: GIVEN. Granted or awarded. I’ve done nothing to deserve it, nor have I paid anything for it. It is given from Him who grants all things big and small. God gives me my runs at the beach and clean water to drink and sleep at night. He’s awarded me a cat with no claws who can catch a lizard, and also the freedom to laugh at it. He gives me little hands to hold, and those same little hands to wash.

Heevengivesmestickyspacebars.

My ideas of friendship are constantly undergoing some kind of redefining. So much so that I can’t seem to fix a direct gaze on it. It is such an easy thing, it would seem, and it comes so naturally to some people. I had assumed that I had finally “got it” about friendship, but I still feel confused.

When I was a little girl, a friend was someone I played with at recess. We shared giggles about teachers or mean playground supervisors. I was the one who got ditched in “Ditch ‘Em.” But the next morning, so eager for acceptance, I would reach out in a juvenile friendship to the girls who had left me in the dark the night before.

As I got a little older I learned that girls who were friends told and kept secrets. To be a friend, you had to know something private and hidden. I was often the third, not understanding the inside jokes and longing to be told the Secrets. I understood later that secrets are something that everyone has and those same girls would have much bigger and scarier ones as they got older. Those they wouldn’t share with anyone.

In the horrible ‘twixt and ‘tween of Junior High School, I found friends and clung to them with both arms, so fearful of being left alone, or worse, left OUT.

In High School we all learned about betrayal and just how much is too much to perpetrate on a friendship and still remain friends. There were boyfriend-stealings, public-humiliations, and the horrible gut feeling of finding out on Monday you hadn’t been invited to what had happened on Saturday. But in a school our size, you still had to sit next to her in English. And then you could laugh, and talk about the quiz on Friday while trying to forget hurts.

As an adult, friendship has taken many forms. Some have been unhealthy and selfish. Some I have used to seek my own benefit or just simply to make me feel good, perhaps attempting to make up for the lost secrets of my girlhood. Grown-up girls still play Ditch ‘Em in grown-up ways and adult sized betrayals often have farther reaching consequences than those when you are 15. I have both done the betraying and been the wounded in different friendships.

Others have been healthy. There have been groups that have enveloped me and loved me, scars and all, for who I am. The girls I lived with in college, the women I met at my recent conference…these clusters have given me a different sort of confidence in my ability to make friends – that being myself is really all I need to do and good people will accumulate themselves near me.

Some friendships have burst into brilliant color and closeness and faded just as quickly. Some have been forged over mothering, over long early morning runs, or over frozen yogurt and have kept a steady pace.

So really, as I am thirty-three and married and mother of two and have had hundreds of different friends over my lifetime, I still am not sure what friendship looks like.

Is it talking to someone every day about crock-pot dinners and toilet-training? Yes.
Is it waiting 7 months to call someone to talk but when we do it is as if no time has passed? Yes.
Is it being sorry about words said and wishing things could be taken back? Yes.
Is it still feeling left out because I wasn’t invited? Yes.
Is friendship being able to sit with someone and watch TV and laugh without having to have a formal conversation? Yes.

Yes, yes. Friendship is constantly being redefined, daily, hourly. Every new or old friend is her own flavor of friendship and I am learning that the only real living moves and breathes within relationships, regardless of what those relationships look like.

Mama, I found you!

My toddler yells and screams and runs headlong toward me at the beach, slapping the wet sand with her feet. She is sunscreen-greasy in her hot pink polka dots and she wraps her arms, cold from the spring ocean, around my legs.

Ah, Mama….I found you….

Its a sigh now, not a bellow. I had taken her older sister down the beach to the tide pools for all of twenty minutes. Her father had chased her around the ankle deep water while we had been gone, digging holes with her and protecting her from the occasional toddler-waist deep wave.

We are back now from our short exploration, and Naomi almost tackles me in the surf, apparently waiting for me this whole time.

Hug, hug, Mama.

I scoop her up, the wet sand from her body now all over me. She found me. And she giggles as I kiss her gritty cheek.

Funny, I didn’t know I had been misplaced.

To her – in her short-term memory baby mind – I had been lost. Twenty minutes probably seemed like a week to her, even though she was doing her own exploration with shovels and sand toys and shallow sea-pools dug in the sand.

I hadn’t been lost, but she found me anyway. And to be honest, it felt so good to be found.

In a wide sense, these girls HAVE found me. I have a different purpose, a narrower focus and more tangible goals than before I began mothering. They’ve changed me in vast ways, in good ways. They’ve hugged away bitterness with cold-beach-arms and melted away hurt with sandy, smiling faces.

They have helped me find me.

Dear Cat,

Please do not think you are the Queen of this home. I am. Before Hope grew into her full six-year-old self, you were just “Cat”. Now, you are “Rosie”, but no one calls you that but her. You are still “Cat” to me.

You live in my home. You eat my food. I clean your water dish and your litter box. I even have taken you to Kindergarten to meet the class.

And as it is with children, there are reasons why I make rules in this home. I don’t allow the girls to play with markers in the living room. The reasons are obvious. I require them to brush their teeth. These reasons are less obvious, but the rules must be adhered to nonetheless. They will thank me when their teeth don’t fall out in adulthood.

And you, dearest Cat, have rules as well. You may NOT walk on the kitchen counter. You may NOT drink out of my water glass, and above all you may NOT go outside.

You may think me harsh or brutal. You may wish you had the life of a ranch cat, chasing rabbits, biting the dogs’ tails all day long, and sauntering in toward the evening for your dinner. But I assure you, you live the life of luxury. You are a housecat. Your kingdom is the extent of our home, even though you are a serf.

There are reasons unknown to you why you may NOT go outside. You have no claws. You don’t. I know you paw at the furniture trying to scratch something, but there is only silent frustration. You cannot defend yourself against a coyote or a mountain lion that might think you are a nice, fat appetizer. Please trust me in this.

The second reason, that I most recently discovered, why you may NOT go outside is that you are also not allowed to bring a dead lizard into the house!! If you hadn’t sneaked into the yard this afternoon during the baby’s nap, you would not have killed, decapitated and spread around the upstairs what used to be (I think) a 5 -6 inch lizard.

I know it was fun catching it, probably more fun than you have had in years. I also know that the dead lizard was something of a love-offering to us or a trophy of some sort. I get it. You can catch a lizard using only your clawless feet and your teeth. Way to go.

But, Cat, never, under any circumstances, EVER BRING A DEAD LIZARD INTO THE HOUSE AGAIN! You will find yourself outside with the coyotes if that ever happens again. Trust me, they have claws.

Loving you dearly,

The Queen