A few weeks ago, a friend sent this video. I watched it and was absolutely blown away so I thought I’d share it. Some of you may have seen this Sunday’s New York Times article about Jill Bolte Taylor which is good, but doesn’t even begin to convey the power of her experience.

I just finished Elizabeth Strout’s novel “Olive Kitteridge,” and will start it again before I go to bed. But for a few minutes, I just want to sit with the feeling of being completely satisfied. This is such a good novel. Everything about it–the pacing, the tone, the characters–is just right. I’ve savored every page. I feel like I’ve just polished off a glass of warm milk.  What I think I admire most (aside from Strout’s lovely writing) is her ability to convey such humanity and portray the entire span of a life.

On my first reading, I underlined and starred lots of passages and made notes in the margins. Now it’s time to go back to study how Strout works her magic.

Yesterday, a friend asked if I usually buy books or check them out from the library. “I always buy,” I said, without a moment’s hesitation. It’s a sickness, I know. But when I love a book as much as I’ve loved this one, I can’t bare the thought of not having access to it all the time.

Someone sent me this youtube video so I can’t take the credit. But it’s funny and as always . . . so true. Happy Mother’s Day!

14) You try to watch The Savages (staring your all time favorite actor Philip Seymour Hoffman) two nights in a row and fall asleep both times. The worst part is, you don’t even remember falling asleep. You just wake up at 2:30 am, turn off the DVD player and stagger to bed. In the morning, you take the unwatched DVD back to the video store.

I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty good mother, particularly when it comes to the question of open communication. I’ve tried to be honest with my girls, even when it’s uncomfortable. Take last year for instance. One morning before school, W let it slip that I see a therapist.

“You have a therapist?” H asked, her eyes wide with disbelief. She made it sound like I had a standing appointment at a methadone clinic.

I shot W a look that said, “And you wonder why I don’t tell you anything,” and then paused, trying to count of all the times I’d told the girls I’d be back after my “doctor’s appointment.” It was so quiet, I could hear the clock on the wall ticking away.

“Well do you?”

I swallowed, hoping to buy myself more time. But it was too late. I’d been outed. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“Is it a man?” H asked.

“It’s a woman.”

H thought for a moment. “Do you lie down on a couch?”

“I sit in a chair.”

“What do you talk about?”

“Whatever’s on my mind. She helps me figure things out.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Life stuff. Talking to her helps keep the lint out of my filter”

“Do you talk about me?”

“Sometimes.”

I’m not embarrassed to admit to other adults that I see a shrink, or “head cleaner,” as W calls them. Who doesn’t these days? I think of my shrink as part of my support staff. I have my dentist, my OBGYN, the guy who cleans my house every two weeks, my broker and my shrink. What’s the problem? Still, it was an uncomfortable moment. Something about revealing to my child that I talk to a “professional” once a week made me feel icky and way too touchy-feely. I like to think of my parenting style as a pleasant blend of 21 century open-mindedness and old school southern pragmatism: Yes, please feel free to express your feelings, just watch your tone of voice. I want the water in our channels of communication to flow freely . . . up to a point.

But in this case, what choice did I have? I want my girls to be honest with me which means I have to be honest with them, right? I’ve already gotten caught in a “little white lie,” (remember my tooth fairy post?) and had to work double time to restore C’s trust. I’m determined not to make that mistake again.

But the girls are getting older. Their questions are getting more complicated and my answers have to be more nuanced. I feel comfortable saying “I don’t know,” when I really don’t know, but there are times when the girls want an answer and they know I have it.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

This whole PG-13 movie thing is throwing me for a loop. Who would have guessed that a little movie about a pregnant girl (JUNO) or one about a girl trying to guess who her real mother is (Definitely Maybe) would prove to be parenting mine fields? But they were. There were Bouncing Bettys everywhere. In the opening scenes of Juno, I sat frozen with shock while the camera zoomed in on Juno’s feet as she stepped out of her bikinis and proceeded to straddle her boy friend in the LazyBoy. What the hell?! That little gem wasn’t in the trailer! I’d just exhaled when she she delivered another blow and rattled off some line about meat swords.

C nudged my arm and whispered, “What’s a meat sword?”

Thank God the theater was dark. I pretended not to hear her.

With Juno, I thought I’d done my due diligence. I’d read the reviews and had a pretty good idea what the movie was about. I’d even rehearsed my speech about the film being clever but somewhat unrealistic. “In real life, teen pregnancy is a serious issue. Sex isn’t something to enter into lightly.” But nothing prepared me for that scene or some of the others that followed.

I’d like to make two points here.

Point number one: I’ve paid my dues to G-rated films. I’ve seen more bad kid movies than I care to count. Disney, Dreamworks and 20th Century Fox have all gotten their fair share of my hard earned, after tax dollars. Remember the movie “Shark Tales?” I do . . . because I suffered through every minute of it. How about “Good Boy,” the movie about the talking dogs from outer space? It is, hands down, the worst kid movie I’ve ever seen. In our house W and I have something called the “Good Boy Meter.” It’s our own personal rating system for kid films. We ask ourselves, “is this movie we’re about to see better or worse than Good Boy?” If we think it’s going to be better, we both see it. If we think it’s going to be worse, we flip a coin. Drop by our house on any Saturday afternoon and you’ll hear a conversation that goes something like this:

“The girls want to see (fill in movie title here).”

“Oh yeah? Is it better or worse than Good Boy?”

“It’s got (fill in child star name here) but I think it’s going to be worse.”

“Oh no. No way. I took the bullet the last time. It’s your turn.”

Point number two:

Until Juno, we’d had success with Pg-13 movies. Last year the girls saw Little Miss Sunshine and loved it almost as much as we did. They laughed in all the right places and nodded thoughtfully when I explained that the bandages on Steve Carell’s wrists were caused because he’d tried to kill himself. Thankfully, the scenes with the grandfather’s porn magazines and drug use, pretty much went over their heads.

So you can understand why I thought I was prepared when I agreed to take the girls “Made of Honor.” After all, how bad can a movie about a man who realizes he’s love with his best friend be? How bad, you ask? I’ve got one word for you: Thunderballs. Actually, I’m not even sure that’s what they’re called.

We were well into the movie when we got to the scene where Patrick Dempsey’s character throws a wedding shower for his best girl and the featured entertainment turns out to be a sex therapist. I knew it was going to be bad the moment she opened her trunk and braced myself for the camera to zoom in on an assortment of electrical instruments. That didn’t happen. But just when I thought I was in the clear, the sex therapists whips out a string of glow in the dark, golf ball-sized beads which she drapes around an old lady’s neck.

That’s when Chloe leaned over to me and whispered, “What are those?”

My mind went blank. I tried the old “I can’t hear you trick,” but she was persistent.

“Mommy, what are those balls?”

I stared straight ahead and said the only thing that came to mind. “Adult toys.”

“Oh.”

For those of you who’ve ever followed the advice of the respected child-rearing experts, the advice that advises you to “be honest, but only give your kids as much information as they can handle,” I’m here to tell you, that advice is bullshit. Because while you might think you’ve answered your child’s question, you’ve only put it off. You’ve only bought yourself time. That question is rolling around in their minds like a snowball on a downhill slope. Sooner or later it’s going to come up again, and when it does, it’s going to be huge. Which is exactly what happened to me on Monday evening.

It was a light homework night. W was working late. The girls and I had finished dinner and were kneeling at the coffee table working on a jigsaw puzzle I’d bought for C.

“So what exactly were those balls that old lady had around her neck?” H asked.

“Yeah,” C chimed in, remembering all over again. “What were those?”

I floated my original answer. “Adult toys.”

H gave me that look she gives me when her bullshit meter detects something. “What do you mean ‘adult toys?’ What kind of adult toys?”

I tried to fake out like I was really interested in the puzzle. “Hey look, I found that piece with the leopard’s eye on it.”

“Come on,” H pressed. “What kind of adult toys. Tell us. We know you know.”

I started laughing, and not because I thought the situation was funny. I was laughing because I couldn’t BELIEVE my kids knew they had me up against the wall. I was laughing because I knew I’d chosen a parenting style that made no allowances for the phrase “I’ll tell you when you’re older.” I’d essentially backed myself into a corner without an escape hatch or eject button. I had no choice. I had to fess up.

“Okay,” I said. “But I want you to forget what I’m about to tell you because you’re really way too young to know this and it’s totally inappropriate.”

“Tell us! Tell us!”

“You promise you won’t repeat this at school? Because if any of your friends parents find out I’m telling you this, they won’t let their children play with you.”

“We promise! We promise!”

I took a calming breath. “They’re called Thunderballs. At least that’s what I think they’re called.”

“What?”

Oh my God. They were going to make me repeat it. “They’re called THUNDERBALLS.”

H and C looked at each other. Then they looked at me. I knew what was coming.

“What do you do them?”

By now, I was sweating. I’m talking sever hot flashes. How could I explain this in terms that would satisfy their curiosity but wouldn’t raise questions about my own base of knowledge? I didn’t want to get into that whole Pandora’s-box-of-a-discussion about how I knew how they worked and whether I’d ever tried them. I had to think fast.

Then I remembered the day, five or six years ago, when H asked how babies were made. The three of us were in the car. I don’t remember where C was–maybe at a friends. We were driving up Lake Street when out of the blue, H said, as if she’d been having the conversation with herself the whole time, “How do babies get into the mother’s stomachs in the first place? I mean, I know they start out as little eggs, but how do the eggs get in there? How does it know when to start growing in the first place? I mean, a mother can’t just say, ‘okay, little egg start growing.’”

Until that moment, I’d always thought I’d be the one to field the sexual reproduction questions. But for some reason I was totally blindsided. I couldn’t have been more unprepared. My mind went blank (hmm . . . it does that a lot, I’m noticing) and all I could do was stare through the windshield. I was the proverbial deer in the headlights. Thank goodness W took command. In a voice dripping with nonchalance, W said, “the man sticks his penis in the woman’s vagina. His penis has something called sperm in it, and when it’s time, his penis squirts out some sperm which swims up into into the woman’s body where the eggs are and fertilizes them. That’s how the egg knows it’s time to grow.”

That was it. End of story. His explanation was honest and but totally clinical, just graphic enough to gross H out.

I don’t remember how long it took for H to say something, but it was a very long time. I’m talking a few minutes. I don’t know whether she was sitting back there trying to translate what W had just told her into a cartoon, or whether her system had shut down entirely, but the backseat was really quiet. But she didn’t ask any more questions about sex for years, not until one day about two years ago when C asked a similar question and H leaped up and waved her hands like she was trying to land a 747.

“Don’t ask! Please, you’ve got to trust me, you don’t want to know.”

Back at the coffee table, the girls were looking at me. They’d scooted around to the other side now and were kneeled together, presenting a unified front.

I adopted W’s clinical tone. “Women push that whole string of balls up into their vaginas and then pull them out one by one.”

In the long silence that followed, H and C looked at each other, eyes wide as saucers. Their lips looked like they’d been stitched together. I braced myself for more questions. Then, to my great relief, they fell out on the floor laughing.

“Oh my God, that’s so GROSS! That’s so stupid.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.” Their laughter made me laugh.

“Why do they glow?”

“I don’t know.”

We rolled around on the floor for a couple of minutes, the girls laughing at the absurdity of it all, and me laughing at the rush of relief I felt to have passed another parenting test. After that we went back to the puzzle which was far more interesting, and the thunderball question didn’t come up again.

I’m not sure if the girls went to school the next day and told their friend what they’d learned. I hope not. They promised they wouldn’t and they’re really good about keeping their word. Today is Thursday, and there haven’t been any more questions, so I’m pretty sure they’re satisfied with the answer I gave them.

But I’m not going to kid myself into thinking they won’t have other questions soon. The world, especially for H, is just getting interesting. She’s steadily wading into the waist high waters of teenager-hood and I know there will be plenty of swells ahead. But at least for now, they’re happy to wash their puppies in the bathtub, and they still think it’s a thrill to sleep in our bed when W’s out of town.

As for me? I’m delighted to finally have earned my “get out of jail free card” from the world of G and PG rated movies, and there are lots of good PG-13 flicks I’m eager to see. I can’t wait for Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and of course, I’ll take the girls with me. And we’re absolutely seeing the new Indiana Jones.

I’m not a prude and I’m not a fool. I know I can’t block all the ways the girls are exposed to sex these days but I’m not going to throw up my hands in surrender. I just have to be the primary filter and continue to be as honest with them as I can stand to be.

I’m laughing as I end this post because right now, H and C coming up stairs chanting this song:

“Wake him up like sleeping beauty! Show him off with your red hot booty! You bring the funk and we’ll be bring the junk! Now it’s really time to shake that trunk. Shake, Shake, shake, shake. shakeshakeshakeshakeshakeshake, Woo!”

These are they lyrics to the Broadway show, “Legally Blond,” which the girls have on their ipods.

My God. It never ends.

Last night at our writing group, my writing pals and I talked about ambition. The subject came up after we’d discussed both stories and we turned our attention to helping K figure out what her next project might be. She a great idea for a non-fiction project but was daunted by the notion of having to do extensive research in order for her story to be more than a personal tale. “The market is tough,” K declared. “I just don’t want to write another novel that doesn’t get published.” There were nods of sympathy all around, but almost immediately after making her declaration, K began qualifying her statement. “I mean, I love fiction, don’t get me wrong . . . ” she said, and went on to explain that she didn’t have to be a New York Times best selling author (although that would be nice) but she didn’t want to be Emily Dickinson either. “Is it wrong to be ambitious? Is it wrong to want people to read that thing we’ve spent so many years of our lives working on?” I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but you get the point. K was asking whether it was okay to believe that she had something to share with the world, that she believed in herself and her abilities as a story teller. Was it wrong to have an ego when it came to putting words on the page and wanting someone to read them.

The truth is, this writing life is filled with humbling moments. Every day when you sit down at that computer, you have to face your skills but also your short comings. For every word or sentence that you dare to think might be decent, there are hundreds if not thousands you edit out and kick yourself over, telling yourself they aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. You’ve GOT to have some kind of ego to keep writing. You’ve got to believe that with some wee bit of talent and a whole lot of persererance you can pull this off. Otherwise you’d shut down the computer and walk away. That, or slit your own throat.

But as the group decided last night, there’s something else we’re all searching for. Something bigger and far more satisfying than seeing our names on the best seller’s list or the hope that our books will one day appear in the local bookstore window. Ultimately, what we’re all seeking is the deep satisfaction of finding that right word. We’re all chasing the joy we feel when when all the elements of a story, a story we’ve been slaving over for weeks or months, falls into place and it’s exactly and sometime better than the story we’ve held in our heads. It’s the inexplicable desire to ask and answer the mysterious question of how to make meaning of our lives, our yearning to make sense of it all. It’s a high I experienced just often enough to keep me in my chair day after day, week after week, year after year. I don’t know how else to explain it.

I invite you guys to check out this video. It’s Amy Tan talking about the creative process and where creativity comes from, and she does an much better job of articulating the joys of the creative process than I have. It’s 22 minutes long, so watch when you have a little chunk of time. I guarantee you’ll find it interesting and hopefully comforting too. I did. Because it reminds me why I got in this game in the first place.

My Ragdale letter arrived in the mail over the weekend. Hurray! It looks like I got the dates I requested and will be spending two uninterrupted weeks working on my novel in July and early August.

Another bit of good news: I won a small fellowship to the SLS Conference in Kenya. The only problem is the conference takes place over the Christmas holiday. I could probably convince the family to make a vacation out of it, but it’s also when H will be working on her high school applications and I can’t exactly ask her to write those in the Nairobi airport. I think I’ll ask the SLS folks if I can postpone my participation until next time.