Mommy Guilt

My iBook came with this strange feature. It's got this six foot chain with locking handcuffs that erupts clangingly from under the keypad every time I boot up. It locks me to my chair in Harry Potter fashion when I sit down to work on my high school book for Brave Writer (knowing that I'd bolt otherwise and go skip through the sprinklers with my cutie-pie daughter).

Even now, the restless clanking of the chains distracts me from the most riveting aspect of book writing (entering the copy editor's OCD edits... this woman needs a life!). I know it's important to get rid of widows and orphans (bet you don't even know what those are in the editing world... we send their sorry asses back to the projects), but does it really matter if the first three words on the left side of the page all have apostrophes? Do I have to realign the whole frickin' paragraph?

I digress.

So with ball and chain and computer, my eight-year-old daughter, who makes me laugh every day by quoting Seinfeld verbatim (you see how much I'm working lately?), is understandly an orphan herself.

Can you spell G-U-I-L-T???

Last night at her usual 11:45 p.m. Mom-neglects-me-so-I-stay-up-late bedtime, she asked me, "Mommy, how do you spell 'appreciate'?"

I rattled it off.

"That's a long word! I like it."

This morning, I woke up to find a sheet of paper slid under my bedroom door:

I love you Momy
I love you Momy
I appreciate you Momy
I love you mr thn ennything

Each letter "i" was topped by a heart and the whole group of lines curved in an arc like a rainbow until it crashed into a pool of overlapping hearts. My own heart crashed into a pool of guilt.

Then the most mysterious thing happened. This epistle of love gummed up the iBook's masochistic chain and cuff program and I'm free! Today I'm taking my girl to the pool for some swimming and Seinfeld quoting.

She's the best little orphan around. I love hr mr thn ennything.