flawed but authentic

“Private party,” my son said to a kid climbing up the inflatable slide set up at the park for a friend’s birthday.
Uh-UH.
He said the words without hostility. I knew he was only repeating what he’d been hearing the other children say since the party crasher had jumped aboard, but still…uh-UH.
I called him by his first and last [...]

Have you heard of tiny Melinda Mae,
Who ate a monstrous whale?
She thought she could,
She said she would,
So she started in right at the tail.
And everyone said,”You’re much too small,”
But that didn’t bother Melinda at all,
She took little bites and she chewed very slow,
Just like a little girl should…
…and eighty-nine years later she ate [...]

In a 12-step program I practice, we tell newcomers if they stick around a while, they’ll eventually hear their own story. Some seriously doubt it. They are the ones who think they can’t be helped as others have, because, you see, they aren’t like others. We call that being terminally unique, and I suffered from it when I was a newcomer. The main symptoms are martyrdom, [...]

Flawed:

sloppily & impulsively throw a sit down fiesta for eight women together via email
have a budget of ten dollars
don’t leave yourself enough time to clean, decorate or cook
use dollar store shelf liners for table covering
make mexican paper flowers that more closely resemble cabbages
use whatever happens to be clean instead of proper margarita glasses
have the guest [...]

 My two older boys have been drafting their letters to Santa this weekend. They are six and eight, and their wishlists this year are overwhelmingly weighted toward technology: handheld games, console games, a new computer, new computer games, music players and robots. Nearly everything they’ve set their sights on has a triple digit price tag. [...]

Their house is a gaudy yellow and green cottage, set on a high corner amid vacant lots and neglected buildings, a bright dory hauled up on a landwash of rubble and ruin.
Being in it is tonic for me. It reminds me of Newfoundland: clapboarded houses tarted up with leftover boat paint, color combinations [...]

 I wrote this post last January, on my poetry blog. I remembered it the other day when I read this wonderful post  by Mme. Kennedy about slogging through the creative doldrums. I’d like to re-dedicate it to all the NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo warriors out there, headed into the home stretch this week. Yes, even you crazy NaMoShoeBlo’s. You go.  
Several years ago, I made [...]