I picked up Anna's kindergarten registration papers back in March and promptly put them in the pile on my desk that I ignore until it cascades onto the floor. After a few weeks I filled out what felt like a thousand duplicates of the same guardian, medical, and emergency contact information, and put the blue folder in a less cluttered spot in my office.

On Friday, I tucked a utility bill and her birth certificate into the front pocket and carried the complete set to Anna's kindergarten evaluation. I was having pretty standard feelings about the day; excitement for her new adventure — my girl, already riding a two-wheeler and minus one tooth — pride at watching my now five-year-old walk confidently into the school and take her seat in line, and the hope that even when she's too tall for these small, plastic chairs, she will not have outgrown the friends she's already made.

A teacher came and ushered our fidgety children into a classroom while a woman from the PTA educated us on boxtops and fundraisers, and the school principal assured me that even with a full-time job I'd find time to volunteer making copies or popcorn or whatever needed doing to support her staff. It was all so optimistic and exciting. She mentioned that the kids would go to the library and the gym, have lunch in the cafeteria, and it seemed so far from the two rooms where Anna currently spends her preschool days — these halls of a big-kid school smelling of glue and pencils, the rows of desks, the walls papered with art projects.

And as we took the tour, winding through the halls, peeking into the classrooms, a thought: What are the escape routes? I wondered for a second how hard it would be for someone bent on harm to move from room to room in this floorplan, to slip in unnoticed. I caught myself scanning for safe hiding spaces, for solid doors and emergency exits. When we circled back to our chairs, the woman from the PTA showed us a past yearbook. I thought, These kids are no different than those kids. Sandy Hook could have been anyone's kids, Sandy Hook was everyone's kids.

Early on a September morning I'll no doubt be negotiating outfits, cereal, and the appropriateness of her shoes. Anna will be anxious to leave, she'll ignore me when I ask her to slow down and she'll run headlong for the friends we'll walk with to school. We parents will have our smiles on but our tissues ready, we'll have comforting good-byes on the tips of our tongues, and just the smallest nagging worry in the backs of our minds. On the first day of kindergarten we'll walk our own children to school and carry twenty more in our hearts.

Every day when my husband comes home from work, he enters our side door, walks through the garage and to the door that leads into the kitchen, which I keep locked during the day. Every day, I hear him grab the knob, grumble when he realizes it's locked, and reach for his keys. Almost every day, he asks, "Why do you lock yourself in here like that?"

I don't know whether it's because he's a man and hasn't been trained to think this way — that he's a little more vulnerable working at home alone, even in a busy neighborhood — or whether he's just more laid back than I am. But we've had broad-daylight burglaries just a few blocks over, so the door stays deadbolted even when I'm home.

Ten years ago or so I left our cheap apartment in a pricey Boston suburb to take a three-mile walk. It was 11:00 on a sunny Saturday morning. I wore black yoga pants and a tank top, and back then carried an iPod that seems enormous now. I didn't yet own a cell phone.



I was almost done with my loop, walking past a gas station, pace set to whatever song was playing, when I felt a hand squeezing my ass. Though it didn't make any sense, I thought it had to be Steve or a friend playing a joke, and when I turned around to see a total stranger there, still grabbing me, I froze.

I don't know how I looked — furious, horrified — but he let go and as I silently walked away in shock, he caught up, put an arm around my shoulder and said, "Sorry, I thought you were someone else." I still wasn't really processing and half believed him. I slid out from under his arm and as he walked away he grabbed me again and said, "You got a nice ass, bitch." I yelled, "Fuck you!" at the back of his black t-shirt.

I didn't watch to see where he went — I think he was on a bike but there may have been a car. I walked the rest of the half-mile home sobbing, didn't stop at the police station as I passed, just needed Steve.

I told him what had happened and took a shower. Steve asked if I'd be okay if he left for a drive around the neighborhood. I assumed he wanted to find the guy and knew he wouldn't, and I said it was fine. I wasn't afraid to be alone, after all, it was just an ass grab, right? I felt silly getting so emotional about it. It took me years to become more angry at the guy for grabbing me than I was at myself for being slow to react.

Later we went to the police station and filed a report. The officer asked why I hadn't walked right to the station on my way home, and then rounded up any man in the vicinity with a passing resemblance to the description I'd given, but none were him. I learned that the way he'd touched me was a felony. That afternoon, I bought my first cell phone.

Sometimes I marvel at the difference in how Steve and I navigate the world; I don't know that he's ever wondered whether it's okay to walk home alone from a bar, or to take a shortcut through a wooded lot. I doubt he's ever peeked to be sure all the stalls are empty before using a public restroom, or quickly checked the back seat of his car before getting into it. I'm sure he's never owned a pepper spray key chain.

I don't feel unsafe in general, but I know when I need to be aware and alert. What I wonder is how to raise a daughter to understand that she should be able to take the shortcut, and feel safe in her car and her home, that she deserves to live in her beautiful, unarmed way forever, but that she just can't. How do I let her know what she's up against without darkening the world she inhabits?

It's a struggle to raise her with awareness but not fear, with optimism but not naïveté, with a wide-open, vulnerable girlhood in a world that's constantly tempting me to build walls around her.

Steve and I moved out of Boston when after ten years there he grew tired of city living. It's fair to say he dragged me from our sweet condo on the C and D lines and away from many good friends, though I knew it was either fight to stay and live with an unhappy spouse, or move — knowing I'd adapt — with a happier husband.

Most of those we left behind live within the limits of last Friday's lockdown. Some had their homes searched, they woke to SWAT teams in the streets. They heard shots, shouts and detonations. They were afraid of the potential danger but grateful for the police presence. I spent Friday waiting for updates from those I knew were closest to what I could only watch on television. I texted without expecting replies and though I knew they would all be safe, sat anxiously waiting for contact. It seemed impossible that there could be anything else happening in the world, and when friends in other parts of the country posted about their lunches or their weekend plans, it all seemed so out of context.


Taken from my friends' window Friday morning.

When they captured the fugitive bomber and residents took to the streets to thank those involved, I remembered how, from my condo, I always knew when the home team scored because cheers would erupt out of windows and ricochet off the sidewalks. I imagined how joyful that noise must have been in the living room of the old place and wished I could have heard it.

Throughout the week, people who I have to assume were distant from the events took to public forums to promote their own agendas; one Arkansas lawmaker's notorious tweet is by now widely known and ridiculed, but there's also a conspiracy theory about martial law that's wrapped in a pro-gun message and fearmongering over the loss of our personal rights. Seriously.

I haven't asked my friends who were told to evacuate their own home, carrying two little girls over a fence in the hours after midnight how they feel about the theories because it's an insult to their experience. But if I had been in their shoes, if we lived within the lockdown zone on Friday, where a fugitive who'd proven his utter disregard for human life was known to be hiding, I'd feel a hell of a lot safer seeing trained, armed SWAT teams and police officers from my window than roving, gun-toting conspiracy theorists wandering my streets.

There are true professionals with skills and training and the courage to put themselves directly in the line of palpable danger, and there are those who speculate about conspiracies from the comfort of their desk chairs. If you're at all uncertain who would be more likely to step up and save your life at their own peril, go ahead and ask someone from Boston.

I'll preface this by confessing that I am borderline phobic about flying. I avoid it whenever I can, and I enjoy a pharmaceutical assist whenever I can't. So maybe I'm actually phobic, shut up, whatever. I make up for it by being generally awesome otherwise.

Two years ago I had a work conference at Disney World. The three of us flew down. In addition to my normal stress I was hoping and praying that Anna would enjoy herself and not be a pest to other travelers. The last thing I wanted was for her to pick up on my own anxiety; I could have won an Academy Award that day. So I packed a laptop full of movies, any and all non-contraband snacks, a pacifier (she was three but cabin pressure something something), I'd filled my phone with kid apps and left my husband to manage the logistics of our duffel bag, carry-on, seven-million pound car seat, tipping the skycap, and remembering where I'd parked the car.



If you haven't been on a flight to Orlando, Florida, then you don't know what it is to wait at your gate behind several strollers, wheelchairs, children and high school kids going on a summer field trip. It's just about three hours from where we are to Orlando, and other than rapid-fire requests for snacks, more movies, more volume, and her refusal to let me open the window shade, Anna did amazingly well on her first flight. I did pretty well too, on this my twentieth-or-so flight, as did the woman flying alone with five kids across the aisle.

Can I tell you who didn't do so great? It was the class trip. As I sat wearing my best Turbulence is Awesome face, pointing out familiar land masses miles below us, and laughing myself onto a no-fly list reading Bossypants, most of the high school kids made dramatic "WHOOOOOOAAAAAA" sounds with each bump. There were loud "OMIGOD"s and then someone asked if they were going to die. I felt bad for those kids, because they couldn't even order in-flight cocktails.

I felt bad for those kids the same way I sympathize with parents who are equally unsure of how their flight will go, because "Will my toddler spend 3 hours kicking the seat?" is the parent equivalent of a teenager wondering how often planes spontaneously nosedive.

There's endless advice on flying with kids, ideas for how to make the trip less stressful for both parents and offspring, because there's a huge difference between remembering your passport, enough underwear, and shoes you can easily slip off at security and having to carry on the accouterments that keep the preschool set occupied for hours, on top of the worry that the mere sight of your child will result in audible sighs from 150 strangers.

So I implore my happily no-kid friends, the next time you board a flight to your no-kid destination, don't take to Facebook before taxi to post about your preemptive annoyance over the potential fussiness of the baby next to you. Consider that while you breezed through the terminal Starbucks, your row-mate had to traverse the airport like a sherpa whose client wouldn't stop sprinting toward peril. Try to imagine what it might be like to have to control someone else's bladder mid-flight. We are all using a very public mode of transportation, one that's not especially accommodating to us breeders. Know that we are stressed, uncomfortable, and hoping like hell our kids don't behave like marsupials.

And remember mostly that we were all kids once, and as adults we could stand to do a little less whining.

I've definitely been feeling like five is a big milestone. The last traces of baby cheeks have melted into defined features and long legs, and though she still trips over her own shadow, gone are the clumsy grasps of unsure toddlerhood.

As I always do, I took Anna's portraits this year, but I also spent her birthday documenting what she's like right now. I think I'll plan to do this every year.

Five wakes up and asks for the iPad. (Five still sucks her thumb.)

Five adds the sprinkles all by herself.


Five gets herself dressed.

And carries the cupcakes to school.

Five is still small enough to be carried.

And big enough for her new two-wheeler.


Five is a real kid. Five is everything good in the world.

I don't believe in soulmates. Based on pure population data, the chances that my husband is "meant" for me seem slim. And lately I've been a little bristly over the unrelenting stream of "true love" graphics coursing through my Facebook feed. The friends who post them are usually single, somewhere in their twenties. The images have quotes like, "If she's jealous, she cares," or "A real relationship has no secrets." I don't mean to be cynical because I believe in lasting love, I do.

Eventually I want Anna to experience what it is to be on that particular drug that makes her feel impossibly light, the one that pulls from the chest towards a flawless joy. I want her to experience what it is to have someone out-of-their-mind crazy about her, who loves her just for showing up. And when it's time, I also want her to know that this will fade, and that the chaos of love isn't something that can be summed up into the space of a viral graphic, that romance changes shape — at first it looks like flowers and picnics, and later it tastes like shared leftovers on the couch.



I hope her love starts in her belly, that it's flecked with hard kisses and torturous separations. And I hope it lasts into arguments over left-out dishes and forgotten bills. I want that one day she'll see that love is being able to hurt and then reconcile, that romance is sacrificing the better side of the bed or the last slice of cake, and that these are more substantial than all those movie-scene rushes to airports or boom-box serenades.

She should know that at some point she'll choose to stop looking, not because there's no one left, but because she's decided to make a life with someone. And when the day comes that she realizes this wasn't fate but a conscious choice, that she's still sure of herself.

I hope she'll understand that years of love can mean days of needing space, that the separations become more mundane but that there's always happiness in the reunions.

I want her to feel all of these things, so she understands that we don't find "the one," but that we work and compromise and nurture to create them.

I get emails from people all the time asking to guest post on this blog, or suggesting that their content is a 'good fit' for this audience (spoiler: it never is). Most of the time these letters are addressed to Blog Owner and while it's always nice to be thought of, I get tired of non-specific spam.

So when Chobani contacted me to say hey, we want to send you our new Chobani Champions and we think you're funny and we don't even care if you give us a review, I waited for the follow-up email telling me how to wire money to a Nigerian Prince in exchange for my yogurt. But it turns out this gig was legit. A few weeks later a box full of Chobani arrived at my house, and I ate one of the coffee-chip Chobani Bites with just my tongue before I'd even unpacked the rest.



All three of us loved the flavors; if it wasn't socially unacceptable for a grown man driving around in a city truck to suck yogurt from a tube, Steve would have gladly taken those to work. Instead he packed whatever cups I didn't hide in an effort to keep some for my-damn-self. Anna decimated the tubes in a day, refusing to eat just one at a time.

It's easy enough to go buy some Chobani at the grocery store, but why put up with the guy buying cigarettes in the express lane and paying with a check when you can win it in a click?

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