a latchkey kid is still loved

when my mother was young, in her teens and early twenties, when she was a girl in love and then a young bride and then a new mother, she made things, pottery and jewelry and paintings, she crocheted scarves and cross-stitched wall hangings and redesigned dresses. and then she became an adult with a full-time job outside of the house and a family to keep running within it, and she didn't do those things anymore. in fact, when the choice was hers to make, she didn't do anything at all. she sat very still with a paperback romance in her hand, open but not really being read, and shushed us over her coffee or diet coke. our job was to pretend she was not there, because that was what she was trying to pretend herself. when i was old enough to understand that the woman i knew as my mother was not the only woman who had ever occupied that body, i wondered why she had let that particular transformation take place. why would you give up all of your interests and hobbies and passions? how could you let the world compress you into such a drab, hard, uninspired shape? why would you choose to put your free time toward doing nothing rather than something?

well, i get it now. for the first time i have a full-time job that requires that i do honest work all day, every day, and sometimes even longer, and i'm not unhappy with that. but i am not looking for something to busy my hands with when i finally get home, and i am putting more and more of my ideas inside of a little mental box, swearing that i will come back to them later . . . the odds of my doing so aren't even hopeless, because i don't have a husband and children to tend to, so my last few sparks of energy and vision are always actually mine. but you, my little chickens, between my scrabbling wall-to-wall workday and my thoroughly unreliable home internet connection, are likely to walk into an empty house more often than not. and i'm so sorry, for you and for me. sadly, this is the state of things in my modern world. of course, if you need help with your diorama or halloween costume or clay sculpture of mark twain, i will always be here for you, no matter what kind of day i've had. that's what love is all about.

i do want to let you know that the office tries very hard to reward us for our hard work and encourage our professional progress, and in that spirit they chartered a bus for about twenty of us this week and drove us up to a courier printing plant in massachusetts. i won't regale you with the intimate details of the book-binding process, but i was very excited to come across a pallet of unbound book blocks for stephen colbert's new book, i am america (and so can you!), due to come out october 9. i haven't had cable here in new york, and i am missing colbert and the daily show in a big, droopy way, so i was not shy about grabbing up one of those blocks and flipping through it hungrily. spoiler alert: there are two pages of stickers, making the book somewhat interactive, and the page edges are spray-painted a very fetching, all-american shade of flag-stripe red. i didn't steal a copy, seeing as how i was representing my company and all, but someone's book may be, um, missing a sticker. just one. think of it as finding the golden ticket, only in reverse. if you get that copy you can dust it for my fingerprints, and when you track me down i will give you the sticker, and maybe a cold drink too, depending on how far you've had to travel. if you live, like, three blocks up the hill or something, i mean, come on. i had to wake up at 5:30 in the morning and spend nine hours on a bus for that sticker.

and that is why i didn't post anything on tuesday. or wednesday. but i was thinking of you. i left some tvp chili for you in the fridge. and there's grapes, did you find the grapes? come on, sweetie, don't sulk, o.k.? it's hard for me, too.