We Love, We Live

We love, we live

We give what we can give,

And take what little we deserve.

Words from Once Upon Another Time from Love Never Dies…..

I can’t for the life of me get these words out of my head. So many things have happened recently that can be described in those sixteen words.

I seem to be OK with the first two lines. But that last one….”take what little we deserve.”

Deserve: to merit, be qualified for, or have a claim to reward, assistance, punishment, etc.) because of actions, qualities,or situation. Rate, warrant, justify. 

Well, that didn’t help much. Maybe it’s the word “little” that pricks, and then the tears come and I don’t know why exactly.

Do we deserve anything at all from loving and living and giving? Isn’t that what life is supposed to be about? Did Kate deserve the treatment she received from Big Sister? I don’t think so. Did I deserve it? Maybe, maybe not. Big Sister needed a mom, and that responsibility came to me de facto. I loved, love her, gave her what I could.

I think about these words with respect to my children. Did I give what I could to Wubby, or was there more to offer? I know, “could’a, should’a, would’a”. Second guessing. Replaying. It is what it is, and, for now, it is getting better.

Then the realization that a year from now, Kate will be making decisions about what she wants to do with the next phase of her life, where she wants to be. Two years ago there was no doubt: if Kate went to college it would be close by and she was staying at home. She was a homebody, no doubt. Not now. And that’s a good thing for her.

Which leaves Hubby and me. (The grammar nazi is parsing the syntax of that sentence: Hubby and me, Hubby and I…..) From a grammatical standpoint, the sentence passes inspection. The reality it represents, on the other hand, what will that look like? Expectations, machinations.

Hubby has a co-worker whose wife died last Saturday. She was 53. They have two children, younger than our kids. She was sick right before the holidays. A little over three months later, she’s gone. Expected? Hell, no. Deserved: Hell, no.

But it is what it is: Love never dies.

Every day is a gift, a chance to try again, to do something better, or differently. It feels like I’ve wasted seven years’ worth of gifts.

Words to live by.

just stuff I’m thinking about

(Note: if you are offended by “crazy right-wing nonsense about abortion, contraception, etc.” , or by Monty Python humor, too bad. Read, or read not.)

Just stumbled on that Johnny Depp quote up there. Really, I stumbled on it. StumbleUpon, if you haven’t seen it, is a great time-waster that will cater to your particular means of wasting time. Check it out. Or not.

Truth is, StumbleUpon isn’t what has been on my mind lately. Johnny Depp’s quote up there, and related issues, have been swirling around in my head. (Johnny Depp isn’t one of my favorite actors, but oh how I love Jack Sparrow…just sayin’)

I guess it started with the Susan G. Komen vs. Planned Parenthood thing. When I was a teenager, I thought that Planned Parenthood was actually about teaching women how to “plan” on getting pregnant, or not getting pregnant. I was stunned when I figured out that Planned Parenthood provided abortions. Sounded to me like the women going to PP for abortions where there because they FAILED to plan. Silly me. (Point of clarification: I haven’t actually been in a PP clinic. But several of my college friends had been. It was a ‘slap-self-in-forehead-and-say-DUH!’ moment for me.)

When this story hit the fan, I was fascinated by the amount of uproar it was causing. I pulled out my trusty calculator, did 20 minutes of online research, and crunched some numbers. I documented my process, as follows:

So, I’m wondering what all the excitement is about this. I read the Reuters, AP, CNN, USA Today, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox…did I leave any of them out? Probably. Anyway, the funny thing is that I can’t find any actual dollar amounts, except for the $250,000 Mayor Bloomberg has donated to PPFA to help offset the loss of donations from SGK, and I see that thousands of folks are following his lead.

It took me 20 minutes of research to find the latest annual report from PPFA (2008-2009). They report a year-end net asset amount of $994,700,000. That’s $995 million dollars, rounded up. Round a little more, and you get $1,000,000,000. That’s $1 BILLION dollars.

Most articles report that SGK donated approximately $700,000 last year. Mayor Bloomberg has already replaced over 1/3 of that amount.

Percentage-wise, the annual amount donated to PPFA by SGK is…wait for it….0.07%. Seven-hundredths of ONE percent. Let me check the math again: that’s 700,000 / 1 BILLION times 100 to get the percentage. Yup, 0.07%.

Looks to me like PPFA won. And there’s a Washington Post article that agrees with me. Not the Washington TIMES, but the Washington POST.

I also checked out a current PPFA document on Services. “The core of PP affiliate medical service is contraception and accompanying health care, education and information. In 2010, [PP] provided 11 million medical services for nearly 3 million people, and helped to prevent approximately 584,000 unintended pregnancies.”

Now I’m moving from “just the facts” to “my opinion”….seems like PPFA should work a bit harder on their contraception “education and information” so that they wouldn’t have to spend so much money “preventing unintended pregnancies.” And, is it really ‘preventing’ if she’s already pregnant? Doesn’t sound like it to me. Maybe that wording could be a bit more accurate, something like ‘terminating 584,000 unintended pregnancies.’ Regardless of the semantics, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or Benjamin Franklin thought so.  Maybe if PPFA educated more and aborted less, more PPFA funds could be allocated to cancer screenings. Probably wouldn’t have stopped SGK from buckling under public pressure, but I can dream, can’t I?

Addendum: See? The San Francisco Chronicle says so too.

So, SGK thought about taking a stand against PPFA in support of unborn babies, and then caved under public pressure. Ah, the power of FaceBook!

Now there’s a raging debate over ObamaCare’s contraception mandate. I’m having a difficult time finding a basic definition of what the mandate is, and I’m still recovering from the headache I developed after reading the “Affordable Health Care for All Americans” bill when it was first introduced. This is the most concise definition I could find: The “Health and Human Services mandate orders all insurance carriers to provide the full slate of ‘reproductive services’ at no cost.”

A couple of questions come immediately to mind. At no cost to whom, exactly? What does ‘full slate of reproductive services’ really mean? And the funny thing is that the current debate has nothing to do with either of those questions. It is, in fact, an argument over First Amendment rights, specifically the freedom of religion (or freedom FROM religion….Henry VIII had a lot to do with that particular language making its way into our Constitution,didn’t he? If you know your Monty Python, you’ll recognize this: “There’s a dead priest upon the landing.” “RC or C of E?” “How should I know?” “It’s tattooed on the back of their necks!”)

I find a lot of this angst to be unnecessary. If the full slate of reproductive services conflicts with an individual’s First Amendment beliefs, then is that individual going to partake of those services? Probably not. The bigger question is this: When did the Constitution of the United States become an instrument for determining what the government CAN DO to its citizens, rather than a document defining what the government CAN NOT DO to its citizens?

The bottom line in my world is this: being a parent of an infant demands that you put the rights of that infant ahead of your own. You want to sleep, but the baby is hungry at 2:00 AM?  Guess who wins? Not you. If you aren’t ready to become a parent, if can’t think of loving anything or anyone more than you love yourself, then take steps to prevent becoming pregnant, or becoming a ‘baby daddy.’ Prevention vs. termination. And yes, I know that nothing is 100% foolproof except abstinence. I personally don’t believe it is expecting too much of folks of child-bearing age who do not want to become parents to take precautionary steps, including abstinence, to prevent their fear from becoming reality.

In other words: grow up. Take responsibility for your own actions. If abortion is a large part of your birth control method, remember that you are aborting babies, not puppies or kittens. You are participating in causing the death of an innocent human being. There is another word whose definition is “participating in or causing the death of an innocent human being”, but I’ll leave it unsaid here.

Why is this so evident to me these days? That’s easy. I used to be an advocate for abortion rights, “free” contraceptives for me from my health insurance provider, all those things. Then I had Kate, 8 weeks premature. When I saw her for the first time I realized that I could have ‘terminated’ her, and it would have been perfectly legal in several states that had no prohibition on late-term abortions. And, a few years later, she asked me what a “partial-birth abortion” was. And I had to explain it to her.

It still makes me sick, thinking of that conversation.

Another twist of irony: I’m listening to Pandora radio as I write this. I have it on “quick mix” mode, which means I never know what’s coming next. What’s playing right now?

Amazing Love.

And my home page: Grief is the price we pay for love. -Queen Elizabeth II

a song for Wubby

Lyrics “The Sound of My Voice”
by Jon Heintz

Seems so far away,
And then it seems so close to me,
and the future’s right here in the air and it’s clearer,
Maybe than it’s supposed to be,
Than it’s supposed to be.

And it seems so hard to take,
When the question is what’s wrong with me,
Cause I’m looking myself in the eye in the mirror,
And maybe I am wondering,
Maybe I’m wondering…

If I follow the sound of my voice,
And I live in a world of my choice,
Then when I’m old if I’m lucky,
And the years have gone by…
I can look back and smile.

‘Cause all we have is what we have to give away,
And all we need is to feel it all come back one day…

But it seems so far away,
Like a vision in some kind of dream,
Where I’m looking myself in the eye in the mirror,
And maybe I am wondering,
Maybe I’m wondering…

If I follow the sound of my voice,
And I live in a world of my choice,
Then when I’m old and I’m ugly,
And the world’s passed me by,
Will I look back and cry?
If I follow the sound of my voice,
And I live in a world of my choice,
Then when I’m old if I’m lucky,
And the years have gone by…
I can look back and smile.

a formerly competant woman looks at 50

 

So it’s December 31st, again, and according to the rules in Blogohstan we’re all supposed to sum up our year in nifty little snippets, yadda yadda sis boom bah and all that jazz.

Truth is, I haven’t been feeling much like being a proper citizen of Blogohstan because I woke up one morning in 2010, don’t remember which one, looked at myself in the mirror, and said to the face staring back at me, “GRANDMA! How did you get in my mirror?” followed by “However you managed it, GET OUT! NOW, WOMAN!!”

But, she’s not leaving. She lives in there now. I think I went into a coma or something around 1985 and came out of it in 2010 wondering “what the hell happened to that person that used to be me?” Yep, that’s got to be it.

Counting today, I have 19 more days before TEOTWAIKI and frankly I am scared to death.

So it’s time to put on my Scarlet O’Hara and say “I can’t think about that right now. I’ll think about it tomorrow.”

Today I remember:

• Finding out, the hard way, that Hubby can no longer consume shellfish, and that if you want emergency room service FAST, have an serious allergic reaction to something.
• The absolute coldest weekend in Valle Crucis, ever.
• Not going to  Cielo.
• Wubby flunking out of community college while his little sister overcame her fear of all things academic and became a learning sponge.
• Reading Atlas Shrugged at the beach and thinking, Now it all makes sense.
• Wubby moving out to try life on his own.
• Riding in my first horse show.
• Falling off several horses and living to get on and ride again. Except for Chick-horse; we broke up.
• Bikram
• Knitting enough socks to keep a centipede’s little feet warm all winter long.
• Hillbilly time and feeling absolutely loved, no words required from anyone to prove it.
• Taking Wubby to Metropolis in hopes that his eyes would be opened. Not so much.
• Wubby moving back home.
• Losing two feline friends, and gaining two new feline friends.
• The Christmas that wasn’t quite, and the day after that flat out wasn’t. (There’s something insipid about December 26th, isn’t there?)

So now what?

I think Grandma knows, but she’s not telling. She just looks at me and gives me her best wicked little grin, that one that always said “I’ve got a secret!”

symptoms in some cephalopoda approximating apoplexy

Don’t you love that quote? It’s from “Cannery Row”.

However….

Hubby now has issues with Cephalopods, Gastropods, Bivalves and Crustaceans that caused him to approximate apoplexy yesterday. Darn it.

The culprit was shrimp. Never had a problem eating shrimp before. In fact, one of his family’s Christmas traditions has always been the boiling and consumption of large quantities of them, w/ his dad’s homemade shrimp cocktail sauce. And his dad’s shrimp salad recipe still rates pretty high among the clan.

Saturday he boiled some shrimp and we had shrimp alfredo. Yesterday after church he consumed a few more–I went for the leftover Brunswick stew he made on New Year’s Day, which was delicious BTW. Ever seen the movie “Hitch” with Will Smith? There’s a really funny scene where he has an allergic reaction to shrimp. It was sort of like that, only not as amusing. First he said his throat felt “funny” and thought he was coming down w/ something. Then he started itching a little, and noticed a few hives. In about thirty minutes time the hives were popping up everywhere. We debated waiting it out vs. going out in search of medical attention, and opted for door number 2. There’s an urgent care place not far from the hospital, so we went there. It was closed. Apparently you can only need urgent care on Sunday from 7:00 AM to 12:30 PM.

So, again, door number 2….ER. Fortunately, they take shellfish allergies pretty seriously. Had him in triage in about 20 minutes, then in the “red zone”. They started IV fluids and gave him some heavy-duty steroid something-or-other. It was amazing how quickly his BP dropped to something scary like 65/43 and he was bright red and itching like crazy, constantly trying to “clear” his throat. Then, magic. Steroids went in, and the hives visibly faded. Oh yeah, and Benadryl, lots of it. And an EKG, and oxygen.

Then we waited for a couple of hours to make sure it didn’t come back.

I remember having a nasty case of hives when I was about 5. I don’t remember itching, but I do remember these white blister-looking things, on my arms maybe. He had some on his back that were the size of my hand.

He’s home from work today–supposed to be home until Thursday according to the doctor, but Ron, the amazing nurse that took care of him, said that if he felt better to use his own judgment. He’ll go back tomorrow, probably.

So…no more shellfish, cephalopods or otherwise.

———————————————-

Love is an amazing thing. Yesterday I spent two hours in the ER, watching the one I love get pretty sick, pretty quick, receive amazing medical care and treatment, and recover very nicely. I fed him ice chips, and watched him sleep. Just looked at him, totally focused on him. I haven’t done that in a while, to my discredit.

We were lucky yesterday. Living where we do, with quick access to excellent medical care. We learned something new, something we’ll have to be careful about from now on. If it ever happens again, don’t mess with it. Go straight to ER, or call 911.

And I was reminded, again, of the power, the intensity, of love. How deep, how profound it is.

And how lucky I am to have him.

Sanidad del Cielo

I don’t know how to start this post.

Over on the Cielo page, at the bottom, there’s a picture over several women sitting together under a huge stand of bamboo. Rosa is one of the women in that picture, and I referred to her as a sister.

Yesterday I received the latest newsletter from the director of Mission Emanuel. Included was a story about Rosa:

I knew that Rosa had breast cancer. I did not know the extent until yesterday.

Wubby and I helped build that house in the picture. When I saw Rosa in June, she asked if I was coming back next January. I told her that I didn’t know, but I hoped so. I also told her that, whenever I came back, I’d be able to speak GOOD Spanish. She laughed, as if to say “Yeah. Right.”

There’s a group headed to Cielo in mid-October and I wish I was going with them. I feel helpless. I’d like to make something to send to her, but I don’t know what. Prayer shawls in the Caribbean? It’s too hot in October. January, when it’s beautiful, temps in the lower 80′s, the Dominicans wear sweaters and the Americanos don’t sweat. Much. So maybe a prayer shawl would be ok. I don’t know.

There was another story about another family. The youngest child, Brenda, is eight. She is sponsored by a friend of mine. Last January I got to spend time with my friend at Brenda’s house. She is adorable, spunky…and faces heart surgery.

This post is not about the condition of health care in the Dominican Republic, or in the US for that matter.

It’s about what one person can do to help another person, what one family can do to help another family.

The mission has established a fund to help defray the cost of major medical care for families in Cielo: Sanidad Del Cielo.

Healing from Heaven.

The first time I went to Cielo we dedicated a very small children’s medical clinic, in two rooms on the second (then, the top) floor of a small building that served as pre-school and church. Next month there will be another dedication for a children’s medical clinic. Ten-thousand square feet, located just beyond the bamboo stand, state of the art physical therapy, vaccinations, dental care.

I don’t have much of a voice with this blog, but with what little voice I do have I am asking. One person donating twenty bucks can’t make much of a difference. But a few hundred people, donating about twenty bucks a month over the last 15 years, have made a huge difference in the quality of life for families in Cielo.

Think about it.

Mission Emanuel

Sanidad Del Cielo

1220 E. Concord Street

Orlando, FL 32803

——————————

Right now the distance between Rosa and me feels like so much more than the 1500 miles between North Carlina and Santo Domingo.  And the distance between me and God feels insurmountable.

I’ve seen You calm the waters raging
in the rivers of my mind
Your spirit blows a breeze into my soul
And I’ve felt the fire that warms the heart
Knowing that it comes from You
Then I’ve let it turn as cold as a stone
Sometimes I feel like I’m as close as your shadow and
Sometimes I feel like I’m looking up
at You from the bottom of the

Grand Canyon, so small and so far
From the Grand Canyon, with a hole in my heart
And I’m a long way from where I know I need to be
When there’s a Grand Canyon between You and me

I’ve had the faith that gave me strength
for moving any mountainside
I’ve felt the solid ground beneath my feet
But I’ve had the bread of idleness while
drinking from a well of doubt
And it shakes the core of all I believe
Sometimes I feel like I’m as close as your shadow and
Sometimes I feel like I’m looking up
at you from the bottom of the

When there’s a Grand Canyon between You and me

Sometimes I feel like I’m as close as your shadow and
Sometimes I feel like I’m looking up
at you from the bottom of the

When there’s a Grand, Grand Canyon between You and me

Hopefully I can send something to Rosa next month that will help close the gap until January.

The distance between me and God? We’re working on that.

my friend, the house

(Yes, the girls are home. Yes, the girls had fun. Yes, there will be blogging about the trip when the road stops rushing by.)

Someone new found my blog while I was out with the girls. She read the “what is a house” post and made a very nice comment, and I remembered that I haven’t finished the story.

We sold the house to the guy who made the offer, the first-and-only-showing guy. Only we didn’t close on June 30. As often happens, things didn’t go quite as smoothly with the sale of his house as had been anticipated, so closing was delayed until July 20. Three extra weeks of nail-chewing.

Within the first week, all of the remaining landscaping, with the exception of two trees, one hydrangea bush, and a few hostas, was gone.

The old basement door and front door were replaced.

The porch and deck have since been rebuilt.

He’s started a retaining wall at the end of the driveway.

Everything is very pretty now, as opposed to the remaining shabbiness we left behind.

I still drive through the neighborhood on a fairly regular basis, picking up and delivering kids for riding lessons and church.

In one way, I feel like I’m looking at Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, after Linus says, “All it needed was a little love.”, wraps his blanket around it, and proceeds to decorate it with the lights from Snoopy’s doghouse.

And I feel guilty about how I treated my friend, the house.

(Darned tears…makes it hard to see the computer.)

But then, I remembered.

The new owner of my friend, the house, had to sell his old friend, his house, because of a divorce. I don’t know if he has children or not, but suspect that may be the case because of his desire to find a house with three bedrooms in the same area. His old house was only a mile away, in the opposite direction from the house we live in now.

He may very well be hurting, badly, separated from the children he loves. So, he loves the house instead.

And we loved it too. It might not have showed as much on the outside as it should have. But it was there, on the inside.

And we brought it here.

can I have this dance

I got dance lessons for Christmas.

Last night we had our first one. Fun stuff.

A month from now we will be celebrating 25 years of marriage. Add the 6 years of dating we had before that, plus the year of being “just good friends” before that, and it adds up to, well, almost forever. The dance instructor wanted to know why we wanted to learn to dance. I said, “So if we go to New York to a fancy restaurant that has dancing, they won’t know we’re North Carolina hicks.”

I’m thinking they could probably tell that anyway, not that it matters all that much.

Every little girl, at some point or another, wants to be the beautiful princess, Cinderella at the ball. If you know your Rodgers and Hammerstein, you know that the title of this blog came from Cinderella. Whatever.

If I do the math, it works out that I’ve been with Hubby for 66.6% of my life. I still don’t know everything about him and never will. That’s part of the fun, finding out new things every day. Like, never in a million years did I expect to get dance lessons for Christmas.

We’ve been reconnecting with high school friends on Facebook recently. With a couple of exceptions, most of our friends married, then divorced. I think one of the reasons why marriages fail is because people go into it thinking it’s going to be Cinderella at the ball. But eventually the clock strikes midnight, the dress turns back into rags, the horses to mice and the carriage…a punkin. (That’s Suthrun’ for “pumpkin”.)

The real magic to the Cinderella story isn’t apparent. If I could rewrite the story, I’d write it such that, when the prince places the slipper on her foot, she does become beautiful. In his eyes, definitely. But to everyone else, maybe not.

Because the magic happens between just the two of them. No matter what, they would always see each other as they are in that moment.

Even 32 years later, when the hair’s turning gray, or turning loose. When the laugh lines start getting deeper. When there’s month left at the end of the money, and the cat barfs in the middle of the bed, and the house is swarming with teenagers that aren’t ours, like right now. It is Saturday, after all.

When I look in the mirror and wonder, how could anyone love this person?

And Hubby says, “Can I have this dance?”

Yes.

(About that 66.6%: it’s really 66.6 repeating to infinity. I like that.)

’til death did they part

Way back in the 80′s when I first moved here, before Borders or Barnes and Noble ever sprang from the fertile ground surrounding the mall, there was a bookstore, Hinkle’s. It was a family business with a store downtown and another one at a strip mall just west of downtown. They sold books, of course, and office supplies, and gifts, cards, stationary etc. They did custom printing. When I was getting used to living and working here in the ‘city’, I used to walk to the bookstore during my lunch hour and browse. Over the years as the ‘burbs took over and businesses started leaving downtown, the downtown Hinkle’s closed. Not too many years later the strip mall store closed as well.

A Borders opened in the strip mall. The building downtown has been torn down and replaced with a shiny new office building, now in search of tenants. I sort of forgot about Hinkle’s until I was looking for a graduation gift for someone, I don’t even remember who, and I went to the strip mall with the intention of going to Hinkle’s, only to find that the store was gone. A couple of years ago a grandson in the family died tragically. He was friends with some of our students at church, and they took his death hard.

More time passed, until a couple of weeks ago when……

My neighbor went on a trip and I picked up her mail and newspapers while she was away. I was scanning the paper one morning and noticed an obituary for an elderly lady named Hinkle. She was in her 80′s and had lived a very full life. She was described as “not having a mean bone in her body, but she did have a disdain for crumbs.” All in all, a very sweet tribute to a life well-lived.

Then I noticed another obituary, for an elderly gentleman named Hinkle, printed immediately after hers. So I read it and found this:

On Aug. 8, 1941, he married Mildred, and never spent another day without her, maintaining his unwavering devotion to Mildred for 67 years; Mildred also passed on Sept. 16, giving new meaning to “‘ till death do us part.”

So I went back and read the first obituary more closely. Yes, it was Mildred. The obit said that she had been “persistently courted by a young office supplies salesman”. Then, this:

On August 8, 1941, Mildred married Pete, and the two spent every day for the next 67 years together as devoted husband and wife. Pete also passed on Sept. 16, giving new meaning to “‘ till death do us part.”

She had passed away early in the morning at a retirement community. He died later that day, at Hospice.

And I cried for these people I didn’t even know. Not tears of sadness, but what? Their story touched my heart in a deeply introspective way that I was not prepared for. I was crying out of respect for a love story I didn’t really know. There was sadness in that my parents had to be separated by death way too early, and honor in knowing that my parents had also lived a love story, ending in “til death did they part.”

This is what marriage is supposed to be. I pray that hubby and I will be so fortunate.

taking care of business

In February of 1999 my grandfather was diagnosed with mesothelioma. He endured one round of chemotherapy, said “enough” and went home. My sweet parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, along with a wonderful hospice organization, took care of him while he took care of business. He spent quite a bit of time those last few weeks helping my mom make sure everything was in order, that his wife, children and family were taken care of. Grandpa knew how to take care of business.

Seven years ago today our country was viciously attacked by people who hate us. They aren’t interested in trying to understand our way of life. They aren’t interested in trying to persuade us to understand their way of life. They hate America and everything it represents. This is war, and the only way to deal with it is to defend ourselves from it, to make sure that our children are safe. And if defending our country means that we go on the offensive, take the war to their turf, then we go. We take care of business.

My little girl is supposed to be in biology class at this moment. She’s next to me, on the couch, asleep. She decided last spring to sign up for Air Force JROTC this year. It’s been a tough week in JROTC class. They had the option of watching a National Geographic documentary on the events of September 11, 2001. She chose to watch most of. We’ve never hidden the truth of what happened from her. She knew people jumped to their deaths. She had seen pictures and heard stories. But studying the events in school brought them to life for her in a new and frightening way. She got up this morning and put on her uniform, all without saying a single word. She does that sometimes, gets up and goes about her business without saying anything. Her dad asked her one morning if she was ok and she said, “Just because I get up early doesn’t mean I’m a MORNING person!” Bless her little heart.

Anyway, I started asking the mommy questions, trying to get to the root of the problem.

Do you feel sick? No. I didn’t sleep good last night.

Do you have a test? No.

Is someone picking on you? No. I just want to stay home with you today.

A little tear slipped down her cheek. So, I thought, is this something relational, since she teared up when I mentioned another person?

She is missing her big brother terribly since he went to college. Last night, after she went to bed, he stopped by for a few minutes. She’d seen him at church earlier. She knew he was coming, but she just couldn’t stay awake long enough to visit with him at home later.

Are you missing your brother? Yes.

Many more tears.

OK, this is something we know, but she hasn’t been this upset about it, and hasn’t wanted to stay home from school because of it. So far, she’s enjoying high school.

Think, think, think.

Is this about September 11?

Unconsolable tears.

Mom, last year they didn’t even mention it at school. Not a minute of silence. Not anything. Please, can I stay home?

So, we snuggled up and took a nap. We munched on cookies and watched TV. She loves Animal Planet.

It’s chilly here today so she’s wrapped up in a quilt, snoozing on the couch.

Tomorrow she’ll go back to school, and I’ll have to answer to the school authorities as to why she stayed home today. We’ll take our little war to their turf. We won’t have a doctor’s note, we’ll have a mommy’s note that will say:

My daughter needed me, so I took care of business.