Crazy Little Thing Called...Life

I read Catherine Newman's Wondertime Article yesterday and immediately ordered this book from Amazon. It sounds really good and hopefully will help in easing the discomfort and I drop the kids off at daycare every day. Just the few excerpts online made me tear up a little bit. I’m a sap.

I was actually just commenting over at Catherine’s how being a mom puts everything in quite a different perspective. Things that would not have affected me before kids do so profoundly now.

Speaking of books, I just finished “Me and Emma” and the author escapes me right now, but it is about a little girl, Caroline and her little sister Emma who live with their imbalanced mother and severely abusive stepfather. The story is told in the voice of Caroline and is so incredible vivid that I had to put the book down several times because I was bawling uncontrollably. How he put chains around their necks and makes them eat dog food. How he molested Emma but not Caroline. It was incredibly heartbreaking. In the end it actually turns out that there is no Emma and that Caroline sort of made her little sister up as a way of coping with her daddy’s death and the abuse she endured. I sat for a long time last night, so profoundly affected by this book---this piece of fiction. I just don’t even know what to make of it.

I was telling my mother the other day that being a mom has turned me in to a complete chicken (I am taking my first plane ride EVER in a month and am freaking out a little bit) but it has also turned me in to a sensitive soul when it comes to children-real or fictional apparently. I can’t stop thinking about it even today, and I think it’s because even though this was a piece of fiction, there are kids out there who go through this and much worse every day.

I am absolutely beside myself.