Today's #BlogHerWritingLab prompt is: What food do you always reject on the holiday table? Why?

Well, remember how I said I loved the German cookie springerle? I really can't stand the German candied bread that can be used as currency in my family. Like currency, like I can trade it like cold, hard cash.

Stollen takes approximately seven years to make and is full of candied fruits and raisins. You make it into little loaves that my father hoards like bricks of gold. It can be eaten at any time of day, for breakfast, as a snack, with dinner, as dessert (like bacon).

And I can't stand it. Maybe it's the taste, maybe it's the texture of things being embedded in my bread (I don't like raisin toast, either), maybe it's rebellion against the idea that we must all love this crazy-ass holiday food.

I also won't eat mashed potatoes, any vegetable topped with marshmallows, cranberry sauce or gravy.

You?

Today's #BlogHerWritingLab prompt is: Finish this sentence with your favourite food: "The holidays are not complete without..."

My answer is: springerle. They are German cookies that have cool patterns and I never liked them until my mom made them a different way about ten years ago and suddenly they were fluffy instead of hard and I fell in endless love with them. I remember we had both the embossed rolling pin and the little wooden blocks. I have yet to make them myself because my mother is still making them for me, but she bought me my own rolling pin for when the day comes I have to fend for myself. Which I will, because even though I'm the one in the family who rarely eats the sweets but hoovers the Chex mix, springerle is important to me. Here's my rolling pin.

The #BlogHerWritingLab prompt today is: What dish transports you to a different place and time in your life?

A new restaurant in a small town is life-changing. When I was growing up, my small town was dominated by the local Pizza Hut in a way that hasn't been realized there before or since. All the cool kids in high school worked at Pizza Hut, and after football games we'd all head over to cram seven people into each side of the booths and try to make it out of the restaurant afterward with red plastic glasses smuggled under our sweaters for no good reason except our frontal lobes weren't fully formed.

Then, one day, a new pizza place opened on the square: Breadeaux Pizza. Whereas the Pizza Hut preferred pan crust contained a cup of oil, the Breadeaux crust was kind of tossed around with varying degrees of mastery by its high school employees, one of whom was my friend Jack. I remember going to visit Jack while he tossed around pizza dough and answered the red phone that hung by the door to the back. There was no seating in Breadeaux, so one could hang around relatively easily. It's kind of sad that in a small town hanging around your friends while they are getting paid and you are not is a popular pastime, but it did happen reciprocally when I worked the concession stand at the swimming pool, so I didn't mind too much.

The Breadeaux crust was based on the concept of French bread, so it was chewier and sort of sweet, which had a good balance with sausage. That pizza place went out of business years ago and I haven't had Breadeaux since high school, but I can still remember the taste pretty easily. It's the taste of high school Homecoming float building sessions with chicken wire, napkins and spray paint in someone's Morton building or barn; the taste of slumber parties and family get-togethers on Sunday nights.

Oh, and the Breadeaux employees had to wear French chef hats. That was also pretty rad.

Domestic Why Do I Bother #6,000

I have cream-colored carpet. It's really squishy and feels good under your feet. We knew we were taking a risk when we moved here in 2007 and installed light-colored carpeting with small children around, but we thought, you know, maybe it would be different for us. Kind of like how I thought we'd only have educational, wooden toys and watch less than an hour of Nickelodeon every day.

And I know, you're all wondering why we didn't just put hardwood in the living room instead. We put it in the library when we pulled out that awful carpet (and the one time I begged to use the nail gun is the one obvious screw-up in the wood, another Domestic Why Do I Bother). Hardwood is all the rage, you don't have to vacuum, you don't get stains. Yeah, I know, I know. But I've lived with hardwood throughout twice and there are other issues. It gets scratched. Stuff gets embedded between the boards. It needs to be swept almost daily. It fingerprints (and toeprints). Hardwood is not magic, though after this latest cleaning fiasco, I'm ready to rip out the living room carpet and lay pebbles if need be the minute someone hands me $12,000.

I digress. So our cream-colored carpet has suffered eight years of high traffic, children thundering in and out from the deck door no matter how many times I implore them to use the garage door, stay off the carpet, take off your shoes, for the love of all that is holy. Most of it looks okay after I steam it, but there are certain spots on the landing of the stairs, right next to the couch and on the threshold between the kitchen and the living room that have developed a grayish tinge that isn't quite a stain but more the carpet giving up on trying anymore. Steaming doesn't help. The Little Green Machine doesn't help. Woolite doesn't help.

In my desperation, I consulted Jillee and found this post on using vinegar and baking soda to clean your carpet. Last Sunday while everyone else was outside, I tried it. At the very least, it was super satisfying to listen to the whole thing sizzle. I dried everything as well as I could and went on with my life.

Only, it didn't really dry. That was Sunday. Now it's Tuesday. And it's still wet.

Not only is it still wet, my daughter keeps walking through it then walking all over the tile that I mopped to a high shine also on Sunday. I can see her little toeprints glinting in the sunlight. Twice I've scrubbed them off the floor, and twice they've reappeared on her next pass through the house.

I tried appealing to my husband, who thinks putting vinegar on the carpet is up in the top five of stupid things I have ever done. He just shook his head. "This one's on you," he said. "It smells like salad in here."

So now my carpet is less stained but I have little sticky toeprints all over my tile until this fucking vinegar dries.

Why, again, do I bother?

Today I'm writing at SheKnows.com!

#WhatDoITellMySon is something I've never had to ask myself, and I'm sorry

4 hours ago

Image: Rita Arens

I have no idea what it's like to raise a black son in America — this is what I can offer

Dear James, I can't and won't pretend to understand what it's like to raise a black son ever, let alone in our current 2015.

I'm not sure I can tell you what to tell your son. You're a strong, capable father, and I have faith you will guide him in the best way possible.

Here's what I know: I was once a white person raised almost solely among white people. This became problematic because even though my family and friends didn't talk about other races, their body language suggested that the other was different — perhaps to be feared. Since I grew up in a town of 5,000 people who were 99 percent white, I didn't have to think about race much until I went out into the world.

It might be important to say that many, many white people can live their whole lives without interacting with anyone but white people. There are enough pockets of the country that are mostly white for this to be true.

Read the rest at SheKnows.

At the beginning of the school year, I instituted Library Tuesdays. On Library Tuesdays, I and anyone in my family who wants to (or needs to) come with me heads out to the public library with novel-in-progress or homework or book in tow. I get there, I set the timer on my phone for an hour (longer would be nice, but I have to be realistic about how late I can push dinner since this is after my full-time job), I put on my headphones and I work on whichever novel I'm focusing on at the time.

This is my latest iteration of Project Find Time to Write. Last year, my husband traveled so much I tried instituting Saturday blocks of time for myself, even going so far as to put them on both my and his calendars, but life didn't cooperate. There were always family plans or birthday parties or something that cut into my writing time until I was never getting anything done and feeling more and more lethargic about fiction and guilty about not writing.

The year before that, I tried to have Tuesdays after dinner be my writing time, with my husband taking over bedtime duties for our girl, but then sometimes he had a late meeting and sometimes we ate late and sometimes I couldn't bring myself to sit at the same desk where I spend ten hours a day at my day job and write more.

The year before that, my daughter was still in ballet and I used the hour and a half of her classes twice a week to write, and that was kind of nirvana for writing me, but it was awful for parent me because she ended up hating ballet so much she cried every time we made her go. (Still, writing me was pretty sad to have that custom-carved two blocks of time a week dance away on little abandoned ballet slippers.)

In the eleven years since I became a working parent, I've tried so many things in the name of finding time to write. I've booked meetings with myself in abandoned conference rooms over my lunch hour. I've holed up in Panera for five or six hours at a time while my husband and daughter hit a state fair or lone trip to visit his family. I've written on six-hour roadtrips, headphones planted in my ears while my husband listened to sports radio and my daughter napped or watched a portable DVD player as she got older.

One thing that has never grown easier: finding the time to write. The location changes, but the struggle lives on.

After more than a decade of living this struggle, I've realized finding the time comes down to making  necessary changes in two areas: location and methodology.

One: I can't find time to write fiction at home. Some may find this unusual since I work my fulltime job as managing editor of BlogHer at home, but normally during my workday the only folks home are my cat and occasionally my husband, but he is also working and thus not trying to distract me. However, if I try to write on a weekend or weeknight, there is a child who would like my attention, please, but there are also a zillion other chores and events that must be squeezed into nights and weekends in order to keep the house from dissolving under a pile of trash or my child from walking around with her toes sticking out the ends of her too-small shoes.

Two: I can't actually write fiction on a computer anymore. I used to be able to pull out a laptop in the car or what have you, but I just don't have it in me now. After almost twenty years spent sitting at a computer for the bulk of my workweek days, the last thing I want to look at in my copious free time is another damn screen. So, I don't draft on the computer anymore. I type up what I've written after the fact, but I don't compose with a cursor these days.

My current way of separating out Library Tuesdays and my novel writing from the day job is to write longhand in a notebook preferably at the library but at the very least somewhere that is not my house where I am not surrounded by my family.

I've temporarily abandoned my third novel-in-progress to go back to THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES, which I realized isn't done yet after seeing a pattern in query rejections and getting some insight from a novelist friend.

A few Library Tuesdays ago, I emailed the manuscript to my Kindle and went through the whole thing making notes, highlighting parts to cut and figuring out what sucked. Then I compared the Word document against my Kindle and cut 7,000 words and made a bunch of notes. Then I printed out the manuscript. And now I haul the printed manuscript plus my notebook and headphones to the library, pick a section I've marked to rewrite, elaborate upon or grow a new head, and write longhand for one hour.

When I first started doing this, it was hard to get to an hour. It felt like a chore. I questioned whether to abandon PARKER CLEAVES altogether. It wasn't until after I made those deep cuts that it started getting fun again and I was surprised when my alarm when off.

The hard part about writing novels on top of a day job (though I'm sure it's hard on top of any sort of life) comes, for me, in finding the pay-off. At first I thought the pay-off would be financial or in reputation. Then when neither of my first two books blew the roof off the publishing world, I thought the pay-off would be social, in that it would be give me something to talk about. Then I realized when I'm in the thick of it, I don't want to talk about what I'm working on at all. Finally, I realized the pay-off comes at the end of Library Tuesday, when I pack up my stuff and count up the new pages and realize that I am four baby steps closer to another finished, published novel.

It comes when I sit down to type what I wrote and think maybe it's a little better than what I cut.

It comes from looking at the stack of paper I just printed and thinking that even though it might be done yet, I did that, and I am doing that, and I'm doing that even though it's not my job to do it, and it's not my public's voracious appetite for my next work to do it.

I'm just doing it because like it.

Remembering you're doing something because you like it makes it easier to prioritize.

See you at the library next Tuesday.

So tonight I was wearing a shirt like this. (I love you, Raygun. Keep it klassy.)

So then we tried to explain Prince to my daughter.

(Cannot be pronounced. Screw you and the contract you rode in on, Warner Bros.)

Then we tried to introduce her to the greatest Prince song of all time, Seven.

Then we tried to explain the '80s phenomenon of Purple Rain.

Then we found THIS.

(hang in until the one minute mark)

And that concludes this evening's lesson on being awesome.  Congratulations, Eva. Goodnight, children.

Note: I wrote this on the plane on the way to #BlogHer15, so this post is already ten days old. After consulting some friends, I decided to publish it anyway. I don't really care if it doesn't win me any popularity contests. This post was springing from my fingers as I was still reading Coates' book, and that hasn't happened to me in a long time.

I didn't know President Obama planned to speak today. I flipped to NPR out of boredom during the hour-long ride to the airport.

Obama talked about a deal America had forged with our "allies and partners" -- I assume "partner" in this sense is less romantic than what some of my friends call their lovers -- in order to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.

I gripped the wheel tighter as my default inner voice asked, "Why shouldn't they have one when we do?"

Because, removing all nationalism from the equation, this hardly seems fair.

Stay with me a moment.

The more I learn about our brains from scientists and our souls from writers and artists, the more I realize what I grew up accepting to be true is a rationalization to benefit whoever is telling the story. They weren't evil in telling it, either -- it's what they were taught or came to believe.

In sitting with my own feelings, I now believe there are no universal truths or common histories, there are only the stories we tell ourselves. Which, in and of themselves, are so divergent no two people witnessing an event ever agree on all the details.

All we can do is take the information, go forward, and try to be a good human.

I got to the airport and started reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME. It's an extended letter to his son about living in America as a black man, but maybe more importantly, it's about how we came to the concept of "black" in the first place.

This book is perhaps one of the best explanations of white privilege I've seen, but Coates doesn't call it that. He calls it "The Dream."

To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.

The Dream tells white people that when black boys are killed by the police, they must have done something to deserve it, because otherwise holy shit, what kind of police academies are we funding here to pull people over or frisk them or God forbid shoot them for something as antiquated as skin color?

The Dream tells white people that the default of beauty is blonde and blue-eyed and there must be something not good about an all-black school.

The Dream ignores Howard University, where Coates found his Mecca.

I understood The Dream. I've equated the scales falling from my eyes to the moment when the red pill is swallowed in The Matrix. I don't want the world to be stupid or ugly. The Dream can hide that for me, for my white family.

The Dream is tempting for those who can afford to believe in it. As Coates points out, believing you should be able to take without regard has nonracial applications. 

The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.

Coates admits he himself imagines a world where he has The Dream, then realizes he has unintentionally also marginalized others. That helps me believe other white people ensconced in The Dream might be able to let Coates in. We have this thing in common, you see: the human desire to dominate those around us. Having that desire in our bodies doesn't make us bad.

Acting on it makes us bad.

Acting on it brought whites to decimate Native Americans, colonize Africa, sell black bodies as property.

How did we do it? By convincing our white selves that our fellow people were not human. How can we do that? Maybe if they had some identifying characteristic ...

Perhaps being named "black" had nothing to do with any of this, perhaps being named "black" was just someone's name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah.

What is "race"? It used to matter what kind of European you were ...

But a great number of "black" people are already beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead races (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose -- the organization of people beneath and beyond the umbrella of rights.

Separating the concept of black and white from American, my mind wandered back to Obama's press conference.

Ignore Obama's race. He's the Commander-in-Chief right now. He's 'Merica. And he's forged an agreement with our allies and partners that say we, America, and they, have the right to make decisions about who should and shouldn't have nuclear weapons.

I'm not going to debate whether Iran is a problem or even whether America is a problem. We're all problems to people who don't agree with us.

The question is how do we make our decisions, which ultimately are made with emotion more often than reason?

We make ourselves, Americans, freedom fighters and protectors of the world when we need to in order to justify our own decisions.

We make ourselves white when we want to live The Dream.

In everything when we find ourselves falling back on a default explanation for the way things are -- we should question that.

I do believe Obama and co. questioned the Iran situation and decided the goal is to prevent Iran from getting nuclear bombs, the end. Who cares if it's fair, really? Because, holy shit. Right? Um.

I do not claim to know the answer to this question. I'm just asking it.

I do believe that many white Americans still live in The Dream and believe it's justified and are honestly befuddled with people like Coates.

To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this.

But, Coates points out, we are also befuddled at earthquakes, and so we insist they are the same, race relations and natural disasters -- impossible to control, hard to blame, something that's always been there and that we are helpless to change.

And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgement of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed.

But people are not earthquakes, though we can be disasters. We can wreak havoc. But we also have free will.

People have the capacity to plan for the future and to reflect on the past and to change the present.

In my lifetime, I've watched the majority of American attitudes on LGBT people make, if not a 180, then at least a 120.

Frankly, I'm shocked. Shocked that it happened so fast and shocked that the black/white chasm has yawned in that time, or at least it has yawned more publicly.

I asked myself how the LGBT shift happened. In my summation, it happened through art, literature, movies and television. Storylines emerged on TV shows and in movies. People I knew came out. Commercials showed same-sex couples. YA novels featured LGBT romances and relationships.

We are not at a loss for black art, literature, television and movies.

Why is this so hard for white America?

The Dream.

To move on, we have to be prepared to see the matrix, to wake up, to stop looking the other way.

To shed light.

To not worry what our employers will think if they read our blogs.

To realize that handy identifying characteristic our white ancestors used to dominate others holds no place in modern society. Seeing black skin as anything but black skin kicks back to a dead time, a time we must acknowledge existed and consciously move to work past. We must look slavery in its face and spit.

We must promise to move forward and do no more harm.

We must interrupt the signal consciously, and it must be a constant and conscious override or The Dream will continue to inflict pain on all of us.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an atheist and would not want to be blessed, so I'll call this a salute. His gift for organizing thoughts and studies and history into a slim book so easy to understand should not be underestimated. He could've used that gift to tell any story, but he used it to tell the story of us.

How will we act on it?

My daughter is in between needing daycare and being able to get a job during the summer, and we are sort of flummoxed about it. She has alternated between staying with me as I work and attending a parks & rec summer camp that is unfulfilling but what we can afford. We can't afford a nanny. She doesn't need a babysitter.

She's at the age that I remember loving summer the most, when the little kid stuff -- like swingsets and trampolines and splash parks -- is still fun and nostalgic but she doesn't need me hovering around her to enjoy it. She's at the age of flashlight tag and being able to light fireworks and riding your bike to the pool and walking down to the creek to look for frogs alone.

This summer we've patched together help from my parents (bless them), the parks & rec camp, a week of horse camp and a parent or two working from home, but I need a real solution for next summer, the summer of twelve, and the summers afterward until she can get a job. I don't even know how old you have to be to get a job here. I think I had to be sixteen in Iowa, though there was that one sketchy restaurant in town that hired fourteen-year-olds.

What do you do with a summertime middle-schooler? Is camp really the only answer? She's not interested in the parks & rec, she doesn't play sports, and the really cool camps are either too far away to commute to and still get to work on time or cost way more than we can afford to pay.

I'm frustrated. Finding childcare has been really the only part of parenting that I loathe. My daughter is wonderful. I don't want her to dread summer because she hates where she has to spend her days while my husband and I work, but staying home all summer isn't really an option. Why is this so hard?