Let Me Make Something Absolutely Clear

I did not in fact cancel summer.

(Is that even possible, even for a mothereffingmother?)

Life goes on, as it has for me. Kids go sailing, kids play sports in heat that could cook them, I drive from place to place to get them, to save them. I am nice for a minute.

Hurl your towels on the porch railing, I say; don't leave your stinky life jackets and your lunch pack filled with the food you didn't eat in my car!

"Dear man, my sweet boy," I say, "It's a new car! Remove your stank!"

No one listens. Nothing's changed. I haul bags and clothes and debris of all kinds in and out every day.

WHAT'S NEW? I just kicked off getting emotional here in a column they pay me for and I got downright Politely Fictional here writing about what happens to people after the worst does. Starting tomorrow, I'll be part-time working for a living money so little money even my college diploma shrugged. And it's good.

But let me make something perfectly clear: in the whirlwind of busy and heat waves and work and fiction and towels and laundry and lunch -- in the tornado of husbands and family and friends and all the other things I find it impossible to be good enough for -- in all the ways I sink and swim and yet never swim with my kids...

I know this one thing to be true:

And I hope you do to.