I talk six-year-olds and diets and body image and well-intentioned but poorly executed bedtime stories on Owning Pink. If you have a wound child, I urge you to stop by and read this.

You can also find my essay, P is for Patience, on the Bob Books blog. I discuss my recent adventures with Buttercup as we both get used to new roles in her road to reading. I’m the teacher. She’s the student.

Or is it the other way around?

She looked away from the monitor to hang up on the incoming call. After setting her phone on silent, she lost herself with faceless friends.

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This post was written in response to the Red Writing Hood  weekly writing meme on Write On Edge. This week, writers were asked to write a short story using Twitter as our Muse and 140 characters as our character limit.

This is the second to last picture of my daughter with her grandfather.

It’s the day before my father will die. He’s in a hospital bed in the intensive care unit, hooked up to machines monitoring his vitals, with a light so bright hanging directly over him that I must force myself to think of things other than tunnels and what lies at the end of them.

My mother-in-law is sitting behind me on the bed. She watches with me as my father blinks, opens his eyes, and focuses them above us both. His eyes meet mine and he opens his mouth to speak a single word. But his mouth is dry and he cannot vocalize, leaving me to guess what he is trying to tell me. I offer him water, ask him if he’s cold, are the lights too bright? He closes his eyes in frustration and weakly shakes his head no. Then he raises his right arm as high as he can and points to the light above the very bed we will all stand around as a family tomorrow night when he leaves us much sooner than any of us had ever anticipated.

“So the light is too bright, isn’t it?” I ask again. He shakes his head no and points again, silently speaking the same word over and over, his mouth forming around the tubes going down his throat. My mother-in-law suggests I ask the night nurse for a pen and a notebook, so I leave and return, pen and paper in hand, only to discover he is too weak to write.

“We should go,” says my mother-in-law.

I kiss him. I tell him I love him. I tell him that I will see him tomorrow. I don’t realize that he won’t know we are there beside him. I don’t know that my father is pointing to the spirit of my grandmother floating above him. I don’t understand that he is trying to tell me she is waiting for him; that it’s time. And I should. He’s the only one who believed me when I told him she smiled at me when I kissed her cold cheek that day I thought she was sleeping when I was only six. She watches over us both, he has told me more than once. Her only son and her first grandchild. So many late night conversations about the spirit that bound us together, always grateful that he believed me when I told him she smiled at me that day. And yet, I leave, unaware that I should have stayed with him.

I don’t know that my mother-in-law suspected what he was trying to say. Or  that she sent me out of the room on purpose. And I don’t know that he nodded his head that yes, someone we couldn’t see was waiting for him or that this good-bye will be the last.

So we leave. I climb into bed with my six-month-old daughter and my husband. And I sleep a dreamless sleep.

This post was written in response to a writing prompt on Write On Edge. This week, writers were asked to write about their worst memory. Mine is not knowing what tomorrow would bring.

First, the stuff you may have actually noticed if you follow me on twitter, stalk me on Facebook, have circled me on G+, or you’ve stopped by here at least twice while sober: I’ve been doing a lot less talking and a lot more doing lately. Sure, I still tweet more than most some, but I’m pretty sure that if I could do math, my current percentage of time wasted sending out tweets and status updates into the universe with the hopes of The Agent of My Dreams stumbling across some of it, being blinded by my wit, and throwing a contract in my face JUST BECAUSE versus where it was when I started this whole crazy ride about two years ago? Probably down by at least 942.5%, or thereabouts.

Instead, I’m doing what the real writers do…which is, get this…write! Right?

I stopped tweeting every time Buttercup did something fabulous and got a regular gig with Owning Pink. I chose to focus on my platform instead of planting a Facebook garden and kept the ball rolling at Bookieboo. I reminded myself of my desperate need for a finger monkey instead of getting back on twitter to tell you how I did the first two things and got an official spot on the An Army of Ermas team and then wrote an essay that was accepted for publication in next month’s edition of Hippocampus Magazine…

And then?

I got word of another acceptance, wrote another essay that I’m planning on sending out into the world, applied for a book reviewer position with Hippocampus, GOT THE POSITION, and wrote back with an OF COURSE I ACCEPT before I realized what had actually happened. I’ll be reviewing non-fiction: memoir and craft books. So if you want to contact me about a potential review, I left plenty of clues in this post for potential stalkers to get in touch with me.

There’s dreaming and then there’s doing, people. I’m no social media writing expert and I don’t play one in my Twitter profile, either, but I will say this…

Doing seems to be a hell of a lot more productive.

Go figure.

I had never heard of Tracy Ross before coming across a short review of her new memoir, The Source of All Things, in a recent issue of Whole Living magazine. But the review intrigued me and I made sure the book was one of my purchases with the last gift card I had to spend from the holidays.

Ross tells a disturbing tale of sexual abuse at the hands of her step-father and the resulting self-destructive aftermath. Through it all, it was nature that helped Ross to heal and find the answers to the questions she was ready to discover. It’s not an easy book to read, but it’s a beautiful testament to the strength of Ross’s character.

What was also  interesting to me was what I took away from reading Ross’s book. As a writer and a reader, I closed the cover on my nook with the realizations that:

*Ross’s love for writing came after her love for nature and immersing herself within the elements on her many outdoor adventures all over the world. It might sound simplistic, but there’s writing without focus because you know you love to write and then there’s focusing on writing what you know. One will bring you great personal joy. The other will, too. The difference is that the audience won’t give a damn about the first.

*I am not as brave as Tracy Ross. I primarily write non-fiction but focus on the funny and hide the rest of the bits in layers of snark and chuckles. It’s part coping mechanism dealing with the crap I don’t feel like focusing on and mostly just the way my writing voice naturally manifests itself. But to go into the detail that she did, Ross had to expose herself and those in her story in a very real way. No pretty filters to alter reality’s image. Her ability to do so (and her family’s willingness to allow her the much-needed opportunity to tell her truth) is something to be admired.

*a great memoir will surprise you at the end. Even if you think you know the whole story. A great memoir takes you on the same journey the author has traveled. A great memoir is hard to put down.

*that the often-touted advice to get your work in print to bolster that all important platform is often-touted for a reason. The Source of All Things first materialized as a feature length article in Backpacker Magazine in 2007. I read the original essay and it left me wanting more. The rest, as they say, is history.

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