Emilia and I are on a grand adventure. Most Disney-related adventures are grand – most of everyday Disney is grand, which is part of what makes it Disney – but this one is particularly special. In part because it’s part of a very cool Disney event (an event that crosses worlds and lands and time zones and the human/monster divide), but also because it’s us time. It’s me, and it’s her, and it’s us together, and we’ve had too little of that in recent months.

Also, there are going to be monsters. (Not yet. Soon. There will be a post entitled ‘The Monster At The End Of This Adventure’, and it will be awesome.) But for today, it’s us.

And that’s pretty special.

(The broad strokes on what’s to come: we are at Disney World now, and tomorrow morning we will start the day at the Magic Kingdom, here, and then finish the day at Disneyland, waaaaaay over there. One day, two coasts, three parks. 24 HOURS OF MAGIC.)

Today, Jasper is five. I’m not sure quite how this happened. Just yesterday, he was one:

Anyway. Today he is five, and my heart is kind of bursting. So I let it burst out all over a Story, because, really, narratively-driven heartbursts are the very best kind…

Happy birthday, little man. I love you more than you will ever know.

This.

This poem makes my heart burst, of course. And throb and ache and all those terrible, wonderful things that hearts do when they are confronted by raw love.

It’s worth noting that I don’t ride a bike to school – or anywhere – and that I don’t make lunch. I understand why she decided to go with with ‘Smunch’ as a nickname – her real nickname doesn’t rhyme with ‘lunch’ – but again, I don’t make lunch, so it really wasn’t an issue to begin with.

But whatever. What are facts in the face of poetry?

She is my heart – ‘my hart’ – and I am hers, and that is all that matters.

Dear Mom,

Thank you.

You’re rolling your eyes at me as I say that, I know. Oh, honey, you’re saying. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times since I became a mother myself, and it has always plays out in exactly the same way.

Thank you, thank you, I didn’t know, I couldn’t know, how hard this was. Thank you, I say.

And you say, you have always been the joy of my life, sweetie; I always wanted this, even when it was hard.

And then you say, I’m really glad that they gave us tranquilizers back then.

That you so loved motherhood was your greatest gift to me. That you were irreverent about motherhood was your second greatest.

(Read the rest over here.We’re celebrating Mother’s Day by celebrating leaning in to motherhood, and by recognizing the extraordinary women that are our own mothers. We hope that it will inspire you to thank your own mother, or the mother who most inspires you.)

My mother was a stay at home mom for most of my childhood, and an enthusiastic one at that. She cooked and baked and sewed and invented games and activities and stories and basically created a home environment that was rich in play and imagination and the smell of chocolate chip cookies. And she loved it, every minute of it; by the time I was in my teens I’d lost count of the number of times she told my sister and me that being our mom was the most rewarding work that she could possibly imagine. But she would also say, in the same breath, that she wanted us to find our own rewarding work, our own source of joy, and that it might not be staying at home with kids. You can be anything that you want to be, darlings, she would tell us. Never forget that you can do anything and go anywhere and have any life that you want.

Which suited me just fine. Even though I witnessed, daily, my mother’s joy in her work as a stay at home mom, household management artist and domestic creative director (she would have loved the age of Pinterest, and dominated it), I had no interest in being a ‘mommy.’ I was going to be a marine biologist, an astronomer, a ballerina (tragic, that one), a stewardess (they were still called that in the seventies) and a writer. Note the ‘and:’ there was no ‘or’ in the equation of my future. Mom said that I could be anything that I wanted, and so I was going to be all the things.

This was all fine and good for most of my adulthood, young and otherwise. After some globe-trotting and adventure-seeking in my early twenties, I landed on a career track in academia and pursued it aggressively. I deferred the matter of children into my thirties, ambivalent about whether I even wanted them. When I did decide that I wanted them (yes, I decided, unilaterally, as my husband will tell you), I declared that we would have them, and then set about integrating pregnancy and childbirth into my carefully planned academic career schedule. I planned down to the week, using every fertility tracking tool at my disposal and giving us a three month window for conception to allow me to wrap my pregnancy while finishing my doctoral dissertation and balancing a teaching schedule that would only really permit a four week break between classes. Once we successfully conceived, I declared, like Marissa Mayer, that I would only take a few weeks maternity leave. I had shit to do; the children would just have to come along for the ride.

We know, of course, what happens to all the best laid plans. Emilia arrived late, and I had a harder time – a much harder time – with new motherhood than expected. I extended my maternity leave, I rearranged my schedule, I looked at the bright vista of my new life and blinked, confused and disoriented. When I returned to my university (only a few weeks later), I confessed my disorientation to my advisor. It’s going to get worse, he said. When you start teaching again, you’re going to become keenly aware of the fact that you are teaching other people’s children. Not your own. And you are going yearn to direct your energies to your own.

He didn’t mean my energy-energy. He didn’t mean that I would resent getting up in the morning for the benefit of people who were not my children. Well, he didn’t mean that mostly. What I would most resent would be the displacement of my intellectual energies, of my creative energies, of my intelligence, of my talent – toward the benefit of someone else. In this case – the case of teaching philosophy to 18 year olds – to someone else’s kids. And he was right. That first year of teaching after the birth of Emilia was brutal. I spent much of it aching to be with her, wrestling with the suspicion that perhaps my energies would be better spent with her, the way that my mother’s (my brilliant, extraordinarily creative mother) were with me. Although in my case, I’d be bringing to bear advanced degrees and top-of-field expertise in the arts and humanities and a specialization in a tangentially relevant sub-field. I could test the principles of Rousseau’s Emile toward actually raising a good citizen (never mind that he said mothers shouldn’t do it)! I could provide my children with a Socratic education! I could make them my work! I would be a feminist housewife and philosophic mother!

I never ended up actually doing this – devoted myself entirely to the care and nurture and education of my children – although I still sometimes fantasize about it, especially when Emilia brings home homework that baffles and insults. (Making text-to-self connections in Matilda? What about the semiotics of Matilda? Why are we not talking about Matilda as a readerly text? WHY AM I NOT HOMESCHOOLING?) I did stop teaching, and left academia, mostly (I leaned back, as it were; more on this below), and stayed at home. But Emilia stayed in daycare and I found another career-facing path, adjacent to the path of motherhood (overlapping it, really) as it happened, but still: career-facing, not child-facing.

And that has been very good for me. I was never – am not and never will be – cut out for dedicated stay at home motherhood. But I do understand, deep in my gut, why some women (and some, altogether too few, men) choose it. I understand why some ambitious women choose it. I understand why some – many – women would choose it, and call it a feminist act to choose it, as a couple of ‘feminist housewives’ did in New York Magazine last week. It is, as I said in a post at Babble last week, a noble choice. It is, as some of my old philosophers would say, choiceworthy.  It was almost choiceworthy to me. That I chose a different choice does not change that.

Not everyone agrees. Tracey Moore, on Jezebel, wrote a piece called ‘”The Feminist Housewife” Is Such Bullshit.’ She argued against the idea that cleaving to domesticity could be considered feminist. She insisted that what most frustrated her about the NY Mag piece were the repeated references to ‘traditional gender roles’, and I agree with her that essentialist language around the work of the family and childrearing can be problematic, especially when it characterizes women as only suited to that work. But does decrying outmoded gender stereotypes require that feminists disallow or disapprove of any gender-associations applied to the experiences or lifeworlds of women? (Sidebar: that title? Ugh. Even with the qualifiers in the article – “feminism and housewifery are not mutually exclusive” – one can’t help but see the third-wave feminist side-eye in it. Housewives choosing their choice? Yeah, right.)

Part of what makes the ‘gendering’ of the work of home and family problematic is that that gendering has long devalued the work of home and family because the gender attached to that work is female. Caregiving and the raising of children isn’t inherently boring or undemanding of skill or creativity (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in fact, insisted that it is difficult and important work,  on a par with – or exceeding – being a lawmaker); it is only perceived as such to the extent that it is considered ‘women’s work.’ Scholars fight for careers that allow them to teach young people – as a university lecturer, I was in a pretty high-prestige position. Sure, teaching university students isn’t quite the same thing as caring for toddlers or teaching tweens (although I had days when I might have disputed that), but the distinctions become fuzzier as those toddlers and tweens get a little older. Is there really such a great distinction between the woman who taught me, in tenth grade, to appreciate Jane Austen, and the men that taught me how to closely read Plato? Was the time that I spent teaching Machiavelli’s writings on ancient Rome to freshmen eighteen year olds worth more than the time that my seventh grade teacher spent teaching the history of ancient Rome to me? Was any of it more valuable, more character-shaping, than my mother’s engaged care of me as a child? Here’s the thing: the ‘care of the young’ associated with university teachers (and, in an earlier time, private tutors like the kind Rousseau praised) isn’t directly associated with women, and so it doesn’t suffer from gendered associations (there’s more to it than this, I know, but bear with me.) Moreover, it’s not associated with the family, or the work of the family, which has been traditionally held (for millennia) to be the work of women, which is devalued, etc, etc, and so on and so on – a vicious cycle of gendered snobbery that undermines all of us individually, and collectively.

We devalue the work of the household, and of the family, inasmuch as it is associated with women. And I have my doubts that the best solution is to scrub that work of all associations with women.

Because until we can look at the traditional work of women with the same admiration and respect that we have long (forever) looked at the work of men, we’re not going to open up, meaningfully, the opportunity for men to respect that work and embrace that work for themselves. We need to be able to say: my mother / grandmother / aunt / feminist idol did this, and rocked the hell out of it. We all need to respect that work, and celebrate that work, so that our boys grow up considering it as a robust option for their future. So that we get the kind of equality in the household and the family that Sheryl Sandberg hopes for in Lean In. So that we can fulfill the expectation of great philosophers like Rousseau that this – taking the rearing of children seriously – will be the key to unlocking all the potential of our communities.

And that means supporting any woman who decides to be a stay at home mom, regardless of her reasons. It means valuing that work as critical to the well-being of society, and recognizing that it’s challenging work, regardless of whether it is freely chosen. It means pumping our fists when one of our peers says, I’m an at-home parent, and a feminist. It means pumping our fists when a dad says it, and pumping our fists even harder when he says that women have been his caregiving role-models. It means supporting and celebrating this kind of work as work, and as more than ‘just’ work.  It means declaring to the world that this shit is important, and that it has always been important, and that women have been doing this very very important work for millennia and doing it well and that, goddam it, it matters that women have done this work for so very long. It means recognizing that the work of home and family is something that both women and men can lean into – if the leaning in is done intentionally and reflectively – and that promoting the idea that we can (and that some of us should) lean in to that work is critical to our collective future.

It means validating that choice for everyone, no matter how they characterize it. Can we just do that?

(Further to this conversation. You can tell that my head is pretty stuck in this space.)

The thing that I’ve always loved most about the story of Cinderella is the shoes.

The prince is fine, of course, as is the magical pumpkin-carriage and the fairy godmother and the castle and the happily-ever-after. But fairy tales are full of happily-ever-afters. And they all have magic and castles and, usually, princes of some sort or another. What the story of Cinderella has that’s different is shoes. Beautiful shoes, of course – glass slippers, according to Disney’s telling, which is taken from Perrault’s 17th century version of the story; earlier iterations of the story had shoes of gold or silver or white squirrel fur – but it’s not their beauty that makes them special. What makes them special is that they are made for and uniquely fitted to the feet of Cinderella. They are her shoes; they can only be fit into and worn by her. Unlike other magical objects of myth and fable – magic wands, enchanted swords, golden rings of power – Cinderella’s shoes are only magical when they are on her feet.

I thought of this when I fitted the first shoe on the first child that I sat down with in Dufrene, a community in the mountains of Haiti that I visited a few months back with CrocsCares, Feed The Children and Ladies’ Home Journal. We were surrounded by shoes – Crocs, of every imaginable size, shape and color – and by other children and – even though we were way up in the mountains, far away from the sound and chaos of Port au Prince – by an escalating buzz of noise. But in that moment, that first moment, of crouching down before this tiny little boy with scarred and dirty feet swimming in worn, overlarge shoes, the sound and the activity around us seemed to fade away and there we were: me, kneeling before him, tiny perfect shoes in hand, and him, clutching the hand of his big brother – the two of us, a latter-day gender-swapped prince and Cinderella.

Crocs are not glass slippers – they are not even shoes of white squirrel fur, which I’m pretty sure that you can get at Saks – but for a child who has never had a pair of shoes of his very own, shoes that fit his feet properly, as if they were made for him, Crocs are as magical and powerful as the slippers that changed Cinderella’s life. Proper fitted shoes enable a child to walk properly; every parent knows this. For a child in Dufrene, who has to walk an hour over rocky mountain roads to get water, proper fitted shoes are lifesavers. They make the ordinary, everyday challenges of living possible. That the little girls whose feet we fitted with bright pink or purple ballet-slipper Crocs thrilled at the prettiness of their new shoes – the first new shoes they’d ever owned, as beautiful to them as Cinderella’s glass slippers would have been to her – was just an added heart-lift.

There’s much that could be said here about the things – like shoes – that we take for granted until we are confronted by someone else’s lack of those things. There’s much, too, that could be said here about how it feels to step into that lack and to do something about it. But those are old and obvious stories – as old and obvious as evil stepsisters and fairy godmothers – stories that you’ve heard before. Our shoe drop in Haiti is not a fairy tale; no wands were waved, no carriages conjured, no castles loom promising in the distance. The children, the hundreds of them that we fitted with shoes that day, will continue their lives in conditions that are at some considerable remove from our own. And we will – I will – remain in my own castle with my own children with our closets full of shoes. We will remain here with greater awareness and greater understanding and a much keener interest in doing something, anything, whenever we can, to make a difference, but still. We will be here, and they will be there, and our stories will continue to diverge.

And yet. The magic of the Cinderella story that we participated in in Haiti is a real magic, and it is a magic that goes further than life-altering shoes. That magic resides in hope: the hope that small differences yield big dividends, the hope that one smile turns into more smiles, the hope that that one moment in which someone knelt down and offered the shoe that fit ripples forward in a million tiny magical ways. The hope that there is some good – some real, meaningful good, whether that means just (just!) healthy feet or something more – in the ever afters of all of the Cinderellas that we served that day.

There is that hope. That hope is everything.

You can help spread the hope. You can join the “5000 likes 5000 shoes” initiative. You can tweet about the 5000 likes 5000 shoes initiative. You can have a look at what my fellow travelers – Nicole and Jennifer – wrote about their experiences on that trip. You can also pick up this month’s Ladies’ Home Journal and read about the story there, and also find out more about what you can do to help foster hope.

And you can think about these Cinderellas the next time you buy a pair of shoes, and be thankful.

Dear Beatrix,

Do you know I’m your bestest bestest friend? I hope we can have another play date or even have a sleepover. I hope we have fun at school today. Should we have a sleepover at my house or your house? Maybe at the sleepover we can watch a movie.

Maybe you and me can have a race outside today. We will race from the place where we line up to go into the playground to the place we get out of the playground. I will say “on your mark, get set, go!” and whoever wins will get my special treat.

I hope we can play together outside besides the race, like hide and seek or hopscotch. I hope we can get together and play. Maybe even sleepover for two nights and I can come to school with you.

Sincerely,

Emilia

Emilia wrote this letter, last night. It’s to her best friend, Beatrix. She labored over all of the words – on a keyboard, because she wanted it ‘to look important’ – asking for help with ‘the spellings’ and making sure that she said everything that she needed to say and that she got every word just right. Because she wanted it to be special, for Beatrix.

I’ve read it a dozen times now if I’ve read it once, and every time, I cry. I cry because her love for Beatrix is so simple and so deeply felt. I cry because her experience of friendship is so pure. I cry because, oh, to have the heart of a seven year old.

Oh, to view life through the lens of questions like, when shall we play? Where shall we race? Who shall bring the treats?

Aristotle distinguished between three forms of friendship, or rather, three bases of friendship: friendship based on utility, friendship based on pleasure, and friendship based on good, or virtue. In the first case, friends love one another for what they can do or provide for one another, in terms of what is good for themselves; in the second, friends love one another for the pleasure that they bring to each other, based on what is pleasant for themselves. In both, the love is self-facing; the measure of what is good is one’s personal experience – what is good for oneself.

But in the third form of friendship, in what Aristotle calls ‘complete friendship’ – friendship based on the good, fully understood – that friendship is for the sake of the good in itself. That is, it’s a friendship in which friends love one another for the good that they bring each other, in terms of the complete good. Not what is usefully good for themselves, or pleasurable good for themselves (although this third form of friendship does contain these things), but what is truly good for each other. It is friendship “between people who are good and are alike in virtue, since they wish for good things one for another in the same way insofar as they are good, and they are good in themselves” (Nichomachean Ethics, Sachs transl.) It is friendship between good people, wishing good for each other, and achieving happiness in that good.

Children, obviously, can’t wholly orient themselves to the good (classically understood), because they’re not intellectually mature enough to understand, in any reflective sense, the concept of the good-in-itself. But I think that they do have a sub-reflective, emotional understanding of that good, and so in their friendships – however fleeting, however juvenile – live out a very raw, very roughly immanent experience of good-in-itself, and so experience a very simple form of complete friendship, one that is some ways more pure for being sub-reflective, if less perfect – in the Aristotelean sense – for that sub-reflectivity. It is the friendship of just wishing to run and play, of wishing to be near to each other, of wishing to bring joy to one another, of wishing to experience joy together.

It is a friendship that is so hard to experience in adulthood, at least in modern adulthood, or adulthood in the condition of modernity, wherein we are so very concerned with utility and pleasure. Wherein some friendships are deep but fleeting, and others are shallow but long-lived. It is tempting to say something about how this has worsened in the age of the Internet, during which time friendship has yielded to ‘friending’, but I’m not entirely convinced that this is true. I’ve received much comfort and support from my online friendships; more importantly (because ‘comfort and support’ might be regarded as matters of utility, as self-facing goods), they have been sources of the kind of unrestrained joy that my daughter seems to experience with her friends (we play, we race, we share our treats.) Again, these might be regarded as self-facing goods – aren’t these just different forms of pleasure? – but I prefer to think of this as joyful in the purest sense, in the sense of the experience that extends out beyond one’s self (that is only fully felt if it extends beyond one’s self.) All of which is to say – putting aside the meat of the argument for another time – that I have experienced what I think is something close to complete friendship online. But it’s still virtual friendship, for the most part, which means that the sleepovers and playground races and hopscotch tournaments – or their grown-up equivalents – are thin on the ground.

Our day-to-day relationships are more likely to be utilitarian than they are to be friendships based on a shared experience of the Good, or even just a shared investment in one another’s joy (if these are, in fact, different things.) Which isn’t to say that they’re not of value, just that they don’t lift the heart and the soul. We need to have our souls elevated. We need to lean toward happiness in the fullest sense, the Aristotelean sense, in the sense of eudaimonia, or wellness of spirit. We need to strive toward complete friendships, wherever we might find them. We need to find and keep those friends, and let those friends know that they are such friends (did you know that you are my bestest bestest friend?)* and then challenge them to races, at the end of which are treats.

Or maybe, sometimes, we just need a hug. I probably just need a hug.

(*you know who you are, all of you. Thank you for being you.)

I’ve been away from kids for over a week now, and I miss them. I miss them something fierce. I miss their little hands and their little arms and their sweet little faces and their sweet little voices telling me that they love me.

And then I pull up pictures of last weekend and I take a moment to appreciate the absence of their little brand of crazy.

No, really, I do miss them.

I just don’t miss that. Does that make me terrible?

Oh, hey. Remember me? I used to post to this blog.

I haven’t posted since last year, which sounds terrible when you say it out loud, but of course it’s only been eleven days since last year, so it’s not that bad, really, until you realize that eleven days (plus whatever number days passed between my last post of 2012 and the New Year; let’s not count those) is actually eleven months in Internet time. Which is to say: I’ve taken slow blogging to a new, totally inert level.

But whatever. I learned something during my time off from the Internet, a fair chunk of which was spent at sea, where it is easier, for some reason, to forget the Internet. I learned that it is totally fine to have time off from the Internet. And some other things:

1.) The horizon is an amazing thing.

I’d never been on a cruise before. I’d never really been interested in cruises, in part because the very idea pushed all sorts of claustrophobia buttons: you’re confined to a ship with all these other people; there’s no way out, except straight down into the deep; you cannot escape! But here’s the thing: being at sea is being in a state of always orienting yourself toward the horizon. The infinitely blue horizon. Which is to say, it is all space. There is you, and there is the sea, and the sea stretches out to the sky. And apart from those times when you are nearing or departing a port – or when you can see Cuba in the distance – that is all you can see. Limitless blue. Looking at it is like looking at a clear night sky, full of stars: you kind of can’t help but get lost in it. In a good way. I’ve never been much for meditation – my head is very committed to being busy – but sitting and watching the blue was something very close to meditative. And one of my commitments to myself in the new year is to look for those horizons wherever I might find them, and take the time to fall into them.

2.) Even when you’re still, you’re still moving.

That is to say: the world keeps turning, the sands keep falling through the hourglass, the tides keep moving, the continents keep drifting… even when we are at our most still, our most inert, we are still moving. There is no such thing as FULL STOP. It’s easy to remember this when you’re at sea, sitting still on a deck chair, watching the sea go by. You’re still, but you are nonetheless en route, getting closer to whatever destination is next. Maybe I’d drunk too much tequila when this thought occurred to me, but whatever: we have many destinations that we’re traveling toward, arriving at, moving on from. Life is a journey, blah blah blah. But it’s too easy to get caught up in thinking that because life is journey, we have to keep moving, keep racing forward, keep ahead of schedule, move. And that’s just wrong. We can stop. The journey doesn’t stop because we pause to catch our breath and look at the horizon. The journey is ongoing, whatever our pace. So it’s okay to just slow down.

3.) It’s okay to just slow down.

Or: slow is an adjective, and also a verb. Which is just another way of saying what I said above: moving forward is not always about speed. ‘Slow’ is an action. It is a meaningful action. Your journey doesn’t always require you to move at a rapid pace. Sometimes (as, say, on a cruise) it doesn’t require you to move at all. I got further ahead in my reflective work – personal and professional; figurative and literal – sitting quietly on deck chairs for seven days than I generally do in seven weeks – seven months, even – racing around New York City and Los Angeles. By slowing down, I was able to let my mind saunter and wander, rather than race and scurry, and you discover so much when you saunter and wander.

I need to find more time for slowness in my life.

4.) Your job is not your life / you are not your job.

We were on a Disney cruise, and I am – as we say – a ‘Cast Member’ of the Walt Disney Company. But I didn’t tell anyone, not even in passing. I didn’t talk about my work – as EIC at Disney Interactive, or as the author of this blog – once. I took that cruise as a guest; I was there as me, Catherine, wife/mother/vacationer, and not as an executive or as a writer or as an digital media ‘brand.’ I was just me. Which was a little disorienting in some early moments – I’m so accustomed to comporting myself within the context of one of my professional identities that it was difficult to not posture, to not frame the experience according to the lights of media sharing – but I adapted, and came to love it. Being me meant doing what I wanted, and not what would produce the best photos or anecdotes; being me meant not framing every experience with the context of a narrative (which is not to say that I don’t still think that ‘narrating’ one’s experiences don’t add a layer of richness, just that it was liberating to not do it, for a while. And being me meant just being Emilia and Jasper’s mom, and Kyle’s wife, and that woman over there with the book, enjoying her solitude, because goddamn it can be nice to just be by one’s self sometimes.

5.) Damn, it’s nice to be by one’s self sometimes. Like, really.

By which I mean, it’s nice to be disconnected. It’s nice to not think about who’s trying to reach you, what conversations are happening on Twitter, who’s commented on your blog, whose e-mails you’ve neglected to answer, what discussions you should be part of, what’s happening that you should know about, have you updated your Facebook status today, have you updated your blog this week? There’s a lot of noise in the digital space. It’s hard to shut off that noise. Even if you set yourself policies, as I do, about not checking email or social media between certain hours or in certain situations, the noise is still there, in the background, pressing against you, demanding that you turn back to it and give it its due. Shutting it all down, more or less entirely, for over a week was tremendously freeing, because when you know that you can’t turn to it, it – the noise – kinda just goes away. For a while. It was nice.

6.) Ten minutes of air hockey never hurt anyone.

There are lots of things to do on a cruise, a Disney cruise especially. There are pools, there are shows, there are shops, there’s a spa, there’s ping pong, there are movies, there are restaurants, there are ports of call to explore – and that only scratches the surface. You can completely avoid stillness, if you want (I, obviously, didn’t want.) And you can busy yourself, and your children, with all variety of ‘virtuous’ activities – crafts and science experiments and dancing and swimming and quality time. Or, you could go to the video arcade, and play Moto Racer, or air hockey.

Emilia, of course, really, really wanted to spend time in the video arcade, in large part because I didn’t want her to spend time in the video arcade. It’s a cruise! We should be swimming! Or dancing! My inner overfunctioning mom recoiled at the idea of spending any time on a sunny day at sea, on our vacation, in a video arcade. But you know what? The couple of times that we did – because I am weak, and Emilia pled – we had a blast. Sure, it’s silly, mindless fun, and there were other more enriching things that we could have been doing, but it was fun, and no day ever suffered for having ten or twenty minutes of its time devoted to silly mindless things. And, it turns out, Emilia is a kick-ass air hockey player, so.

7.) There’s beauty in the family portrait. (Or: being part of the picture is sometimes better than being in front of the picture.)

I’ll always prefer to be behind the camera, rather than in front of it. And I’ve always disdained conventional, ‘posed’ family portraits for being contrived. The true visual story of a family – the authentic visual story of a family – is best captured in movement, right?! But as I’ve said repeatedly here: stillness has a value, too, and posing is just enforced stillness. It’s taking a moment to say stop, look, smile – and then holding, and capturing, that pause. It’s stopping and making a declaration -  here we are, here is us – and meeting the gaze of the unknown viewer as we make that declaration.

So. Here is us. Here we are, paused, enjoying the moment of pause as we continue along, moving, ever moving, chasing the horizon.

Here is us:

 Happy New Year, all. May you find stillness/slowness/movement/us-ness this year.

This. This is a reminder that no matter what else might be happening in the world, this is a season for joy, and that the expression of that joy is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Joy is hope, and hope is joy, and we should seek it and celebrate it wherever we can.

Let’s do that.

(Happiest holidays to all of you. May your days have joy.)