Two years ago, I sold all my gold jewelry to buy my daughter an iPod Touch for her birthday.

It was nicer than my first iPhone, but she wanted to say she had a phone, anyway, even though she admitted the Touch is shinier and faster and yes, better. It didn't matter: Semantics are what they are.

Six months ago, my husband told me even phones not connected to a plan can call 911. That night, I cleared out my old phone and handed it to her.

*crickets*

I have worked in online publishing in one format or another since 1999. I've read danah boyd. I've talked to friends with older kids. I always knew a day would come when my girl realized she could use those iThings to talk to her friends whether we gave her phone service or not via the glory that is wifi.

I'm sitting here on the couch with her phone and iTouch charging next to me while her father reads with her in bed. She's not in trouble; I'm just enforcing the rule I made in my head three years ago: Once she starts emailing and texting, from 8:40 pm to 6:40 am those devices stay with me.

I've just never had to do this before. I'm flummoxed.

My girl will be eleven next weekend. She asked tonight if I had trouble resisting the siren song of my first smartphone, and I was all, "Well, I was 34 and had better impulse control, so not so much."

I remember, though, the giddiness of having Liz Gumbinner show me Twitter for the first time at a conference and realizing we could totally pass notes in class without booting a laptop and OMG THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.

It wasn't so much the tech I was excited about. It was the friends on the other end of the tech.

So here I sit with my girl's devices, smiling, because no, I don't trust her impulse control to resist texting all night, not this child who inspired me to call a book "Sleep Is for the Weak." But I'm excited for her that she has friends who want to talk to her, that she has something to be excited about. That's part of the human condition, wanting to connect.

It's why I'm writing to you, after all.

What girls had to say about people who insult them ... and then pretend they didn't really.

We need to let kids know it's okay to be upset. I'm going to show this to my daughter right now.

I read somewhere that if you want to be happy, take five minutes every day and fix something that bugs the shit out of you. I may be paraphrasing.

This week has been insanely busy. The little angel had a science fair project due Monday, a variety show performance on Tuesday, last night was dedicated to constructing a box for the class Valentine's Day party and nineteen homemade valentines and tonight she has riding lessons. My parents are coming to stay with us for the weekend, and they will be here tomorrow. Also, this week I had a huge work deadline.

I'll admit it. I'm stressed out when I get this busy. I don't like chaos. I like my life to be a summer afternoon in a hammock. Don't we all? I am, though, maybe even worse with chaos than your average bear.

So this week, I've also taken it upon myself to fix some little annoyances, though some of them took more than five minutes to fix:

1) I organized Hoggincraft, the craft room that the little angel and I share. She has a church table covered in glitter and other crafty things on one half, and I have a wooden desk and a sewing machine on the other. We share the craft room with eleventy billion craft supplies, a filing cabinet, a dehumidifier, a large stuffed horse, two tubs of loom supplies for the hand loom my daughter inherited from her late grandfather, gift wrap supplies, a doll bassinet that now functions as a piggy bank drying station, a few lamps and at least 30 pieces of inspirational art made by my daughter. Sometimes she goes in there with her friends unsupervised, and then later I stumble down there before I've had coffee to find something and kick over the large glass bottle of beads she left on the floor. And then maybe I leave it there. And then maybe later that day, I realize I haven't seen the cat in a while and it turns out he's been locked in Hoggincraft for eight hours and took a shit in the beads he apparently thought were kitty litter in the perfect darkness of a windowless basement room. This may have happened on Monday. Obviously, I cleaned up the cat poop when I found it. But knowing Hoggincraft looked like a nuclear wasteland weighed on me until last night when I abandoned the overzealous Valentine's Day box and homemade valentine project to right the wrongs in Hoggincraft. When I stepped back to survey my organized and vacuumed surroundings, I realized my heart felt light. Seriously.

2) One of the lightbulbs in the pendants that hang over the breakfast bar burned out last week. It has driven me mad since then. I bought a damn lightbulb today.

3) My mouse was acting up. Changed the batteries. Used the last AA batteries. I bought more damn batteries so the next time this happens I don't take my own name in vain.

4) The printer's almost out of ink. Every time I go to print I hold my breath the same way I sometimes do when I check my checking account balance. Today I bought ink. HELL YES I DID.

5) My company sent me a new laptop. (Yay!) I needed to send the old one back, but instead it's been sitting amidst a huge pile of cardboard boxes and packing materials in the middle of my library where I spend all day. Today I took the old laptop to UPS and recycled all the rest of the things.

6) My present for Steph's daughter was 99% done. All I had to do was write her name on the little chalkboard paint plaque with a piece of chalk. We have tons of chalk in the garage and in the playroom. All I had to do was walk to find the chalk, write her name on the gift, and put the chalk back. I fucking wrote that name on that chalkboard paint like a boss and put the chalk back.

7) I washed the disgusting bathmats.

8) I figured out how to hook up the VOIP phone my company sent me. Today I listened to a conference call without twisting my neck in half on an iPhone when my husband was working from home and I didn't want to disturb him. My neck thanks my company, and I thank myself for figuring out how to hook up the phone to a data line.

9) I found my slippers. I've missed my slippers.

10) I put the reusable grocery bags back in my trunk.

I am still missing the workout room key and my iPhone armband. I have been looking for these two items for several weeks. Their absence remains a minor annoyance, but look at all those minor annoyances cleared since last weekend! Made dealing with the overwhelm this week just that much easier.

It's the little things, y'all.

Next week, back to writing. I have only done Rita Time once since I posted about it. I must get better. My parents will be here this weekend, but I'm starting again next Tuesday night. I am admitting this to the Internet so I will actually do it.

PS: It appears THE OBVIOUS GAME is stuck at 99 cents on Amazon Kindle until my publisher changes it back to $2.99. I'm going to email her tomorrow. So, just sayin'.

Respite.

I stepped outside tonight to feel the wind upon my feet. Today, January 28, it was 73 degrees in Kansas City. Winter will return in a few days, with cold and snow, but tonight, tonight! I heard a barn owl amidst the wind rustling through the branches in my backyard. Something small and furry lives under my deck. I heard it turning in its bed.

I remember sitting on my best friend's graduate school balcony in February 1997. It was a miraculous 70 degrees. I was living in Chicago at the time. I thought Kansas City must surely be a magic place, so close to my parents but yet so mysteriously warm.

I moved here in 1998.

I'm not sure I could live somewhere completely without seasons. I'm not sure I could appreciate the wonder of a 70-degree January day if my skin weren't acclimated to zero degrees.

Everywhere I went today, I saw people baring winter skin in shorts: jogging, popping into the grocery store, playing in yards. We all smiled at each other, because we know what is coming. That this is a respite from a normal Midwestern January. We got a gift we weren't supposed to have.

Fifteen minutes ago, I cradled my daughter's head in my arms as she drifted off to sleep.

"Never leave," she said.

"No," I said. I didn't promise, because I can't promise. The only thing assured of all of us is that we will eventually leave.

"Not yet," I thought, instead, to myself.

I thought about the pictures I saw online recently of children climbing across broken bridges and up precarious ladders to get to school. I thought about the conversation I had with the woman who cuts my hair about how when I was a girl they didn't even have seat belts in the back of cars, let alone five-point harnesses and rules about snowsuits and car seats. And yet, even then, parents were promising their children they would never leave.

That we persist, that we survive, is a gift of chance and in my mind, God.

As I felt my daughter's head grow heavier, I said thank you.

As I felt the wind on my feet to the background of the owl's rough song, I said thank you.

Heart beats fast, colors and promises.

How to be brave
How can I love when I'm afraid
To fall
But watching you stand alone
All of my doubt
Suddenly goes away somehow.

"Never leave," she said.

And from the scary parts of life, from the boring parts, from the hard parts ...

being her mother is a reprieve. She is a 70-degree January day. She is my heart on the outside of my body.

She is my life's work.

The noise was incessant. I mentioned it to my husband, who was working from home. "What is up with that BIRD?" 

We noticed Kizzy staring intently at something just outside the window. 

It was a baby bird. A fledgling goldfinch, fat as a tennis ball with tiny little legs.

And it was cheeping its heart out.

At first I laughed at Kizzy's interest, knowing he couldn't reach the bird.

Then I worried. 

I called the nature center. They said no biggie, the parents are feeding it. It's just learning to fly.

I googled some things. The Internet said leave it alone.

I had lunch. I took some calls. I worked.

The cheeping continued.

My maternal instincts said something was wrong.

I moved outside to see if any parent birds were coming.

They were not.

I wondered how many hours the fledgling had been alone without food.

The baby bird tried to hop. He fell over.

I called the nature center again. I said, "There are no parents."

She said, "Are you sure he's a fledgling? It's late for that."

I said, "Yes. I'm positive."

She said, "Bring him in."

I went and got a shoe box and lined it with an old tshirt. I put on a garden glove and picked up the baby bird, who cheeped at me. I put him in the box. 

I drove to the nature center.

I talked to the baby bird the whole way there. I told him it would be okay.

When I got there, I opened the box. 

The first thing I saw were his hooked little feet. Hooked in a way they should not be hooked. His eyes were closed.

"Oh, no!" I gasped.

The nature center worker took the box, barely glancing at it. She patted my arm. "I'm so sorry," she said.

I gave her the box as the tears started streaming down my face. I did not want the dead bird's coffin anymore. 

"I'm sorry," she repeated again as I turned to go.

As I drove home, tears streaming down my face, I thought about ISIS and ebola and genocide and war.

But I did not care.

That baby bird was in my backyard. On my deck. And if I had acted faster, I could've saved him.

I felt like we got to know each other a little.

He was my baby bird, and I failed him. 

Her hair flies back in the wind because the motor's almost shot in Vicki the convertible so the top stays down now. It has to be helped up like an old man out of a chair, and most of the time, we don't feel like dealing with it. We leave ourselves exposed to sun and sky and wind because the sun feels good when it's not raining.

We are talking about growing up, and I tell her the thing my dad told me about SEEs, Significant Emotional Experiences, the thing I put in THE OBVIOUS GAME, how you have to have two SEEs before you can really contribute to society, how some people go their whole lives without having two. You need two to understand other people's anger.

"You've had your two already," I say. "When Grandpa died and when Bella and Petunia and Buttonsworth died."

"Did you have two when you were a kid?"

"Yeah. When Grandma got cancer. And then when it came back. And then when my gran died. All that happened before I left for college."

"I've had more than that," she says, and her hair whips again around her face, her eyes shaded with sunglasses.

"What was the other one?"

"When Ka'Vyea got shot."

Oh. Yes.

I've been wondering how that affected her. We haven't talked about it. I've been waiting. She was such a trooper every visit to the hospital, and I have never been so proud of my daughter as when she walked into a room to see her friend with a feeding tube in his nose unable to sit up in bed and act completely natural, to play Connect Four instead of staring in shock at the machines surrounding him.

"Yes. That was really scary, wasn't it?"

She nods. There's more to say, but neither of us knows how to say it now. He's back at school part-time. He didn't die. We're very glad about that. But it's still not fair he can't walk. None of this is fair, and we are both gobsmacked every time we start to talk about it. So we stop.

I keep driving. Her hair streams out behind her.

In preparing to write this post honoring my friend and activist/entrepreneur, Katherine Stone of Postpartum Progress, I searched my gmail, which has also archived my old hotmail account, to see when we first found each other. I dug up an email from Katherine dated April 15, 2009, which would've been a few weeks after my daughter's fifth birthday and about a year after I started getting help and taking medication for my anxiety disorder. Katherine wrote:

This Mother's Day - Sunday, May 10 -- Postpartum Progress will host its first annual Mother's Day Rally for Moms' Mental Health.  Each hour, on the hour, for 24 hours straight I will post a different "Letter to New Moms" written by survivors of and experts on perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.

That email signified just one of Katherine's countless efforts to make moms suffering from mental illness feel more normal. I did write that post, and Katherine and I have written for one another on the subject of maternal mental health again and again, knowing we can prop each other and even strangers up over the miles with our voices. 

The first time I remember clearly having a long conversation with Katherine in person was at Type A Mom in 2010. She was a little intimidating with her long, red hair and tall, lanky self and these totally adorable sparkly heels, which she later said her kids bought her. The kids and the shoes stuck, because it's important to remember even people who present as physically beautiful and loomingly tall and effortlessly stylish are people with insecurities and doubts. It's easy to meet people at blogging conferences and think they are perfect, but nobody is perfect, and everyone has her struggles. Katherine embodies that dichotomy for me.

Here is this person who looks completely pulled together but who is so willing to share her pain in order to make the rest of us sitting around in our yoga pants and flipflops feel human again. For that, Katherine, I salute you.

Last year, while covering the Olympics at BlogHer, I had to come up with a group of bloggers who fought for their dreams, and the very first person I thought of was Katherine, who said:

I always felt I needed to do something meaningful with my life but continually struggled to figure out what it was. Then I was struck with postpartum depression and I had this gut reaction – the kind that nags at you that you can only ignore for so long until you must act – that I needed to help other women. It's hard to imagine something so awful could lead you to your avocation, but it pushed me toward focusing my life on being a voice for suffering pregnant and new mothers.

It's been my great pleasure and honor to watch Katherine over the years blossom and grow and fight to become the owner of the most widely-read blog on PPD in the world. Thank you, Katherine, for all that you do. You are amazing. Congratulations on ten years at Postpartum Progress.

I arrived back from my aunt's funeral around six. We'd planned to rent a pontoon all day, enjoy the lake before camping. That didn't happen, but death comes when it comes, nothing to be done about that. My aunt was a wonderful woman, and despite the Pick's disease that robbed her of her speech, what I remember most from her was conversation.

I returned from the airport still in my funeral dress and immediately changed to camping gear. We managed to pitch the tent and get down burgers and s'mores before the rain came. In my grief I went straight for sleep, but within a few hours I awoke in a puddle where the tent leaked. My daughter slept through hours of thunderstorms when my husband and I sat stark awake, hands pressed against the leaky tent walls, wanting to make it to morning for her on her first night in a real tent.

When the thunder peaked, she awoke and hid in her sleeping bag, and I pulled her down to me on the mat off the cot and felt that feeling a mother feels when comforting her young no matter what the age.

That feeling might be the meaning of life.

I woke this morning with the tent rocking in a 20-mph wind, but in the midst of my grief and exhaustion was the memory of comforting my girl with my physical self against the wind and rain, and the knowledge I would not let anything come between her and me.

My girl and I were watching The Voice tonight when suddenly there are ads for all manner of terrifying television and movies. Ghosts, possessed mirrors and Rosemary's Fucking Baby.

Hold the phone.

Rosemary's Baby? The show? Episode six: Baby with Reflux Steals Souls.

In all seriousness, that was one terrifying movie. I saw parts of it as an adult and could barely bear the concept. I looked over at my daughter who was not even able to sit through the first twenty minutes of The Lord of the Rings and wondered what happened to my ability to share a few hours of Adam Levine throwing Blake Shelton under the rug. What the fuck is wrong with the sales guys for NBC? There are usually ads for reality design shows and Fords, not Baby Pampers Prince of Darkness.

At bedtime, my daughter asked more about the baby and the show and worried that she might be scared. So I dug deep and did what I do in these situations: I made shit up.

I told her that when they were making the original movie, they would have contests to see who could put the funniest thing in the stroller and then pretend it was scary. A Cabbage Patch Kid. A puppy. The winner was Mia Farrow, who used a watermelon. It was a renowned contest that went down in Hollywood history.

Pay no attention to the man in the corner with a gun.

Pray for Rosemary's Watermelon. And NBC, go back to your blood pact with Cadillac.