This is the fourteenth post in “A Month of Reading”
I saw on Facebook that Kelby Carr is doing a “Best of 2012” round up of posts from the parent-blogging world on Type A Parent. I decided to throw my hat in the ring, so I poked around my blog starting from January 2012. These are my favorite posts on this site:
My Complicated Relationship With Football
Adventures in Microblogging 2012
Sh*t I Say: “And, Scene!” (features a video of my cousin, the actor)
Moms Have a Harder Job Than Dads
A Month of Reading – Day 1, Wild
But I decided that my best post of 2012 was one that I wrote somewhere else: A Year of Being Blonde, on Girl Body Pride, so I sent in that one. There was also a lot of great response to How LASIK Is Just Like Childbirth on MomsLA.
Even here, I thought it was interesting that I chose posts from the beginning of the year and from the end of the year, but nothing in the middle. I wonder what that means about the middle of the year. The summer months were doldrums for my blogging? I was writing more elsewhere? I know I wasn’t writing as much. I was doing more consuming. That’s okay. I’m still in that phase.
Anyway, I’ve been reading Anne Lamott‘s Help, Thanks, Wow which is a short, almost pamphlet-like book about prayer. I’m just a tiny bit disappointed because it is different from her previous collections about prayer, like Plan B, which I loved so much. Help, Thanks, Wow is more preachy and explanatory and less riddled with anecdotes from her own life. Still I loved her style so much and passages like this one really hit home with me in this time of my life:
This one truth, that the few people you adore will die, is plenty difficult to absorb. But on top of it, someone’s brakes fail, or someone pulls the trigger or snatches the kid, or someone deeply trusted succumbs to temptation, and everything falls apart. We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It’s all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens and it’s all part of the big picture.
Every night when the kids go to bed I’ve been reading a chapter, or half a chapter, of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Brady doesn’t pay very close attention, but I’m hoping the storytelling gets into his brain just because he’s in the room. Kyle loves it and asks questions and takes longer to fall asleep than I would expect. Our copy of the book used to be Lisa’s. It’s paperback, and very well-loved. In fact, it’s missing the cover, and the title page is on top now, and she wrote her name in many of her books so there it is, reminding us every night that this is a little gift from Auntie Lisa. One of so many.
Loved the Salmon of Regret post!