So I've been on about a ten-day social media cleanse. I drove home from Chicago two Sundays ago after BlogHer '13 with my sister. I was home just long enough to unpack, repack, pet Kizzy and kiss Beloved before the little angel and I drove up to Iowa last Monday to stay with my parents for four days, just basically hanging out with family, reading, writing and not working. 

We took shelter from a raging monsoon in St. Joseph and bought the little angel her first adult-sized pair of cowgirl boots.

We helped Blondie bestow extra BlogHer swag on our parents, who can't say no to a free coffee cup.

I went jogging in two different places on two consecutive days, and y'all, I ran wind sprints on my high school track, which is something I could not do in high school. I was so fucking proud of myself, yes, I was.

The little angel and I went to the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha.

She got some slippers shaped like flamingos, because really, why not?

My parents took the girl to see a dinosaur named Sue, and I spent three hours working on PARKER CLEAVES. We had aunts, uncles and cousins over for ice cream.

We drove back down to Kansas City on Thursday. We saw cousins and my uncle on my mom's side. My parents came with us and stayed Thursday and Friday nights. We made popcorn after dinner.

On Saturday after my parents left, we tried to go geocaching and got all full of bugs, so we ended up at the swimming pool instead. On Sunday, we went to the Kansas City Toy & Miniature Museum while it rained outside. The little angel and I watched The Great Outdoors AND Summer Rental and wished we could vacation with John Candy. I told her all about the eighties.

Today, I came back to work, remembering clearly what life was like before the Internet. 

It wasn't a total cleanse, because I did look at the mentions column of Tweetdeck and responded to anyone who talked to me. I hate leaving people hanging. And I checked my work and personal email a few times to delete spam and just keep things organized so today's re-entry wouldn't be too painful. And then I actually worked for a few hours last night, again in the interest of minimizing re-entry pain. 

Since I still used Google every 1.5 nanoseconds during my cleanse, I can tell you for sure I'm completely unable to delay information gratification anymore. If I don't know an answer, I get very agitated if I can't just look it up. But as much as I enjoy the social media part of the Internet while I'm working, I didn't miss it while I was away. I love all my friends, but I wasn't worried they would forget who I was or anything if I wasn't around for a few days. I didn't feel that lonely why is there no one to talk to weirdness I sometimes feel if I'm away from Twitter during the work day -- please tell me I'm not the only person who has ever felt like that?

I am coming to the conclusion it's vital for my continued forward motion to slam the lid on the laptop and use the phone as a phone for a few days every quarter or so. I can feel the beeping and zipping and zapping start to get to me at about the ninety-day mark. I'm really glad I stepped away for a little bit, especially right after the emotional and intellectual disco ball that is a BlogHer conference. I feel more equipped to deal now, at least for another ninety days or so. 

The Internet is a tool, not a life, right?

Setting: Waiting for school bus

Her: Your breath smells like coffee.

Me: Your hair smells like hair.

Her: Your coat smells like cold.

Me: Good one.

When we were dealing with Petunia's diabetes diagnosis, my best friend told me about Ira Glass and his dog, Piney. I guess Ira's dog bites people and has crazy allergies -- he has to eat a different protein/starch combo every eight months until he gets allergic to it. Steph said she heard Ira interviewed on NPR, and he was talking about how taking care of Piney had kind of become his life.

Yesterday afternoon, I called the vet to check on Buttonsworth, who had been there all day getting enema after enema. The vet said the first one had worked, but nothing since then, and he was trying and trying but getting nothing, and the next step would be to put him under and, I don't know, dig it out of him, but that had risks, and he'd found some medicine, but it cost $60 a month and needed to be given three times a day, and there was really no guarantee it would work.

I started crying. I called Beloved. We talked about two shots a day and three pills a day that might not work and all the enemas and the fact that Buttonsworth had developed megacolon and it might just never work properly again, and I realized I was becoming like Ira Glass. I've been at the vet's office more times in the last month than the grocery store. I'm was watching Buttonsworth like a hawk. My anxiety is through the roof.

And I can't make him poop. At some point, you can become obsessed, and I was becoming obsessed, perhaps even to the detriment of poor Buttonsworth, who probably did not like all the enemas or the pain of constipation.

We made the decision not to even bring him home, because if we brought him home, I didn't know if I could bear to take him back. I called the vet back, told him to stop with the enemas, we were coming in to say goodbye.

I told the little angel, who had been prepared that this might happen. The child is growing very resilient to pet death, much more so than I have. We got in Vicki and drove to the vet's office. They brought out Buttonsworth, and the three of us covered his face in kisses and told him how much we loved him and how proud of him we were. Then we donated his insulin and syringes. Beloved and the little angel stopped for ice cream on the way home, even though we hadn't had dinner yet. I called my family and sobbed my way home. The little angel and I watched two episodes of Clean House. I had to go downstairs during book time because I couldn't stop crying. I looked at all my photos of Buttonsworth and asked myself how, again, I keep picking these sick cats? But as I looked at the pictures, I couldn't regret adopting him, even though the final total on this month was nearly a thousand dollars and he still died. He kept Beloved company during the months of unemployment. He taught Kizzy to sleep on the little angel's bed. He taught us to not be afraid of cat diabetes like we were before. He wagged his little Manx tail and rumblepurred and gave us so much love and happiness for the short four months that he was here.

So, farewell, Sir Charles Buttonsworth. We will miss you. And we are proud to say the day you died, we had finally stabilized your blood sugar. So in that we did not fail you.

"I feel anxious," she said, as I opened the book. Then her face turned red and she asked if Daddy could leave the room.

My heart dropped into my stomach.

She told me she'd been at a friend's house and they'd been watching music videos on YouTube. They came to the P!nk video for Perfect. She thought it would be okay because I've showed her P!nk videos before -- the lawnmower, the acrobats -- I don't blame them for thinking it would be fine.

This one was not fine.

In the video, the girl carves "Perfect" into her arm in the bathtub. Blood everywhere.

"I didn't know you could cut yourself on purpose," my girl sobbed. She couldn't stop crying, and she couldn't unsee the bathtub scene.

We prayed. I sang to her. She kept crying. I didn't know what to do.

"You know what? Sometimes you just need your daddy."

I went and got him. She was afraid he'd be mad she'd watched the video. He wasn't. We talked to her about not watching things on the Internet when we're not around, because the Internet is full of things that are very hard to unsee. Then he held her until she fell asleep.

I went downstairs, watched the video three times, called my sister.

In the morning, I told my girl I'd watched the video. I told her the storyline was actually about a girl who'd had a bad childhood but grew up to get married and have her own little girl and how she saved her own childhood bear for her little girl and in the end, everything was okay. The little angel smiled. "I think the bathtub scene was in the story to show just how bad things were before they got better," I said. "Writers do that. It's called 'conflict,' and it's a device. The video wasn't real -- it was a story to go with the song."

(Which is why it's easier for me to read fiction than nonfiction. I can always tell myself the conflict is just a writerly device.)

She went to school, and I spent the rest of the day trying not to think of all the other things she would see and not understand. All the things that would eventually chip away at her innocence until she would have to choose, as I have, to believe that 99% of people mean you no harm and the world is not a horrible, scary place unless you believe it is one.

Remember when you didn't know people could hurt themselves on purpose? I had forgotten there was ever a time like that.

Since we went through that unemployment thing this fall and winter, I haven't bought the little angel any new clothes since the beginning of the school year. She has a penchant for wearing the same thing over and over, and lately she's been looking like Little Orphan Annie with holes in her leggings. All this forced me to do what I loathe doing, which is digging through all her clothes figuring out what to donate, what to give away and what to toss before I go buy her some leggings that don't look like they belong to the cast of Les Misérables.

While she was in the shower the other night, I attacked her dresser and closet. She walked in just as I was putting a purple shirt in the paper grocery sack filled with hand-me-down play clothes for the littler neighbor girl.

And she burst into tears.

???

"You can't give away the purple shirt," she wailed.

"But why not?"

"It's what I was wearing the day Petunia died."

And then I felt tears spring to my eyes, too.

"Well, then, of course we can't give it away. But it doesn't fit. Hmm."

My little girl has her father's beautiful blue eyes. They're huge and deep and I can get sucked in to their gaze, either one of them. But she has my own father's eyesight.

My dad has always been able to see stuff I can't on the side of the road. Owls, eagles, deer, raccoons, cranes -- you name it, he points, I see nothing unless it's moving. And he's the one driving. 

"Look, Mommy, is that a boy deer or a girl deer?" she asked last night as we drove to the library. I tried to look and yet not rear-end the car in front of me. I saw nothing. 

"Um, did it have antlers?"

"No."

"Then it's probably a girl."

I focused on the road. 

"What's this time called again? Not dawn?"

"Dusk. Dusk is the time between when the sun sets and when it actually gets dark. Deer love dusk."

"Yeah, look -- there are three more."

I turned. I saw nothing. Except maybe my father.

Today's post is in response to Addy's writing prompt, thank you, Addy! 

Changing seasons means the holidays are coming. What are your plans, hopes, fears and dislikes for that time of the year? Do you make resolutions or just watch everyone else break theirs? Will you have a neighborhood celebration this year? Too many questions?

I like parties. Thus, I like the holidays, even though I always shrug them off immediately after like a wet coat. (I have been known to take down my Christmas tree first thing in the morning on 12/26 if I am close enough to it.)

The thing about holidays: they make you realize another year has gone by. And yay! Right? I mean, you're still alive! Consider the alternative! But at the same time I get bittersweet and nostalgic, which I hate. Hate? Here's why: If you focus to much on how great things were years and years ago, you miss out on how great they are now. I find myself getting really nostalgic for when I was a kid instead of focusing on making my daughter's holidays ones that she'll be nostalgic for later. I have to remind myself this is her childhood. These are her memories. Get out of your head, Rita.

The holidays, now? Are not about me. I don't sacrifice my whole life for my child, but holidays? Yeah. Sort of do. I'm okay with it, because from the minute that little redhead appeared in my life, life has been different. I can try to tell myself it's not, but yeah, totally is. Before I had a kid, did I consider 8 pm to be crazy ass late to be out, driving, on a road?

There's not as much downtime. Not as much money. Not as much freedom. Initially I felt sort of sorry for myself because of that, then a few years rocketed past and I realized how much life there will be on the other end of this childrearing business when she's off in her own apartment calling and asking how to boil water and I'm finishing work and looking into a full evening of Whatever the Hell I Want. (That does seem unfathomable now, as I type it.)

So I will subject myself to lines and crowds and uncomfortable sweaters and too many cookies and TV specials I've seen 1763 times in order to give her something to be nostalgic about.

The five of us sat outside -- Ma, Pa, Blondie, the little angel and me -- trying to capture the sound of birdsong and my parents' bubbling fountain in the background over our voices lovingly reading each other stories. (Disclosure: this isn't a review, but I did receive the books free from Hallmark when I attended a blogger event there on Friday -- more on that later.)

I had three of the recordable storybooks. Pa is the bedtime story reader in our family, so I wanted him to read one. Then we were all going to take turns reading the other two -- one for Blondie and one for us. On our first run-through, Blondie misted up a little and it was a poignant moment what with the birdsong and the bubbling fountain and that unicorn that came over the ridge right at the moment the last word was pronounced.

Then we tried to play it back.

Somehow we'd kept the recordings of certain pages and lost others, and the little angel kept scraping her chair and walking around with what she clearly thought were gossamer steps on the pavers but actually sounded like a bull elk wandering through Macy's.

Finally, we took the books inside. There was apparently some trick to laying them perfectly flat and perhaps daylight affected the little light-sensitive holes? So we recorded all three books over again, and when you press stop, it plays it back to you, then if you REALLY WANT TO BE SURE, you must then play the entire thing over when you are done, so all in all by the end we had listened to each other read these books approximately 32 times, yelling at Pa and Beloved every time they tried to have a conversation because OMG WE ARE RECORDING HERE and CAN'T YOU JUST WAIT ANOTHER 54 MINUTES?

Then we were done, and Pa wrote on the opening page of the book that he read "recorded on September 11, 2011," and I realized we hadn't even planned it, but it seemed entirely appropriate to be together on the ten-year anniversary of the scariest day in recent memory, recording our voices so we might always hear the inflections of love. Even though we came for the weekend not to commemorate September 11 but to help my parents fix a leak in their bathroom, but maybe that makes it even better.

The little angel will probably always wonder why 9/11 is such a big deal in the same way I could never understand why people could remember where they were when Kennedy was shot. I hope she never has a day in which she remembers exactly where she was when some horrible scary thing happens that rocks her faith in leadership or in humanity. It's not possible to protect her entirely, though, so ... the books. We wrap our children in as much familial love as we can, and we hope that shield of belonging and strength will be enough.

Five minutes ago, it was Friday night and I was cleaning my house at 10 p.m.

Then it was Saturday, and five of my friends and I threw a shower in the morning and a bachelorette party in the evening for our bride getting married in two weeks. I laughed and cried alternately and with equal force for more than 24 hours straight as the seven of us worked through the happiness of the upcoming celebration and the grief of concurrent personal tragedies.

Then it was 2 a.m. on Sunday, and I was drifting off to sleep in my friend Kathy's house on my air mattress.

Then it was noon on Sunday, and I was hauling downed tree branches out of the yard in preparation for our end-of-summer neighborhood barbecue. That my daughter and her friend unexpectedly invited more people to than I realized. Note to self: Don't hand a seven- and eight-year-old invitations and tell them to go deliver them unsupervised. It was, of course, totally, fine, but the shock, I tell you.

Then it was 9 p.m. on Sunday, and we were dragging back inside the tables and food and laughing about nine kids playing swords and shields while hiding behind the protection of every umbrella in my garage.

Then it was 11 p.m. on Sunday, and I was realizing how many memories we packed into two days, and their bulk shoved aside any other thoughts in my head.

Then it was 8:30 a.m. on Monday, and I sat down to write this. I'm literally shocked it's already today. My conscious mind is still stuck back on Friday night, which is the last time I wasn't swept along completely in the moment.

Life isn't always linear. Not really.