We – Kyle, Emilia, Jasper and I – have never taken a vacation together. Not unless you count traveling to visit family during the holidays, which I do not, because no thinking human considers dragging small children across the country to sleep in Grandma’s basement – however wonderful and soul-enriching such visits with family might be – a vacation. Once, before Jasper was born, Kyle and Emilia and I went camping with the in-laws, which was an inch or two closer to something resembling a vacation, but that was three years ago, and, also: camping.

(Kyle and I used to go camping for fun, once upon a time. We would actually take canoe trips to remote beaches and set up a tent and pretend that we were the last people on Earth and it was really, really romantic. But we have kids now, and I don’t need a remote beach to feel like I’m the last person on Earth, scrambling to survive. I just need to spend an hour indoors with the kids shrieking and hurling Cheerios and the Apocalypse is right there.)

So today we’re going to Blue Mountain Resort, which has swimming pools and gondolas and a climbing wall and STARBUCKS, and we are going to hole up there for four days and we are either going to have the awesomest time ever, or the children are going to defeat us utterly and it will be like Lord of the Flies, except with room service, in which case, it’s been really nice knowing you guys.

My dad wore Brut aftershave, the kind that comes in that opaque green bottle with the fake gold medallion. He didn’t wear it a lot, but it was the only aftershave that he used when he did use aftershave, and so it burned into my psyche – along with cigarette smoke (Players) and aged leather – as the smell of my dad. After he died, and I went to work cleaning out his home, I spotted a bottle of it in his bathroom, tucked at the back of a medicine cabinet, coated with dust. I thought, that bottle is probably fifteen years old, and then I shut the cabinet and went back to sorting through his things.

He had, as I’ve mentioned before, a lot of things. I hired a dumpster that remained parked in his driveway, and the process of cleaning out his home was one long cycle of sorting and deliberating and carting and tossing. Some things were easy to sort and toss – the ancient tins of soup and boxes of spice and broken furniture and old bedding that was too worn for Goodwill – but other things were more difficult, like the little plastic baggies filled with clover leaves – he was determined to find his four-leaf token of good fortune, it seemed – and I found myself, too many times, hanging over the edge of the dumpster, second-guessing something that had been thrown away. I didn’t get in, though. Not until I remembered the Brut.

I don’t know what made me think of it, or why I suddenly found myself in his bathroom, looking for it, but there I was, scrambling through the toiletries that had been pulled from the cabinet, looking for that dusty green bottle, desperate to open it and just inhale, just breathe deeply and smell, knowing that it would smell like him, knowing that it would be an immediate and undiluted hit of memory, stronger than that afforded by his shirts and his jacket and his musty old leather hat. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there. I had thrown it, or my mother or my uncle had thrown it, into a garbage bag and into the dumpster, or maybe just directly into the dumpster, who knew? I had to find it.

And that was I found myself, one very hot day late last August, standing in a dumpster, rifling through my father’s discarded things, sobbing, looking for his aftershave. I don’t know how long I stood there – crouched there, actually; bent, awkwardly, sifting and sorting through old cans of tomato soup and flat brown pillows and cracked floppy disk cases as the sun beat down on my shoulders – or for how much of that time I cried, but it seemed an eternity, and I chastised myself mercilessly – this is ridiculous, ridiculous, it’s gone, it’s just aftershave, it’s just a smell - before finally giving up and climbing out and laying on the grass by the cedar hedges and thinking, that was stupid. And then crying some more.

“Everything okay?” My uncle, my dad’s brother, was at this point accustomed to finding me curled up in random places around Dad’s house, crying.

“Yeah. No. I don’t know. I think I threw out Dad’s aftershave. I didn’t mean to. I wanted to keep it a while.”

“The Brut? Oh, I saved that. I figured I should set it aside in case you wanted it.”

I never loved my uncle more than I did in that moment.

I eventually ended up throwing the bottle of Brut in the dumpster myself, but not before I’d huffed it about a thousand times and sprinkled it over one of Dad’s sweaters, which I kept. Oddly enough, it’s not that sweater that I go to, now, when I want to feel my dad; I go to his old leather hat, which I keep on top of the cedar box of his remains, and which still smells faintly of Brut and cigarette smoke and the ineffable fragrance of Dad. The aroma is faint, and grows fainter every day, and I tell myself that when it becomes imperceptible, I will open the box with the Brut-splashed sweater and let myself drown in the scent. But then again, maybe I won’t. Maybe I will continue to cling to the fading smell of the hat, fighting to hold on to the last molecules of its perfume, diving deeper and deeper into the dumpster of my heart, searching for the memories that I know are buried there.

(Leave your thoughts on sense-memory – share your sense-memories – here. I have to close comments on this one, just because.)

Let’s say that you go to the drugstore to buy diapers and tampons and Vanity Fair magazine, and while you are there, you buy one of those little tubs of Noxzema – not the big one, the one that slides to one corner of the shopping basket and tips it with its weight, the little one that fits in the palm of your hand – and you take it home with you, whereupon arriving you take it immediately to the bathroom, thinking, I will just open it up and smell it, because you know that the smell will transport you, you know that it will make you feel fifteen again, and who doesn’t want to feel fifteen again, just for a minute, to feel fifteen the way that fifteen feels when a fifteen year old is standing in the bathroom with a tub of Noxzema in her hand, listening to the clatter of her parents in the kitchen downstairs, believing, knowing, that the thick smelly cream, deliberately smeared – upward, upward, so as not to pull down on the skin – will lift all the dark crud from her pores and from her anxious, adolescent soul.

So you stand by the sink and you open it, and you lean down to inhale (why do you bend to it? Why do you not lift it to your face? You wonder whether you do this with toothpaste, too, and briefly consider brushing your teeth to test the theory, but the Noxzema calls, and so you make a mental note for later) and the tip of your nose brushes against the thin blue edge of the jar and you inhale the cold, antiseptic smell (minty but something more than, other than minty; not the mint of toothpaste, but a sterile, flavorless mint, the crisp menthol of Irish Spring and Windex and pine and paste; flavorless, but nonetheless inviting to the teeth, a smell that you can feel push up against your gums and your tongue, a smell the texture of which you can imagine in your mouth) and you resist the temptation to just push it right up against the smooth white surface of the cream, you resist, because that small, unbroken expanse of white demands to be probed by fingers, so that the thick cold of it can be pushed upward like plowed snow to be plumbed and scooped and spread thickly across the nose and cheeks where it will immediately cause one’s eyes to water.

And that is exactly what you do, you plunge your fingers – forefinger and middle – into the thick cold cream – a cream that is almost too dense to be called cream, but still – and you scoop it and you lift it and you spread it down the bridge of your nose and then across, under your eyes, to your cheekbone, and from the moment that it touches your skin you are transported, transported, and you are fifteen again and all of the beauty and fear and angst and warmth of that is right there on the other side of your eyelids, which are squeezed shut, of course, tightly, because how else are you supposed to ride this moment, this moment that has taken you so completely out of your forty-year-old diapers-and-iPhones life and left you somewhere else entirely?

If only they still sold Love’s Baby Soft. You might never leave the bathroom again.

*******

I’m sick, feverish-and-snotty sick, and Emilia has been asking about death again in that totally matter-of-fact way that sometimes unnerves me, and I am still struggling to work my way through all of the emails – some of which, weeks old – about and for Tanner and every one of those emails makes me cry – in a good way, but still – and I am exhausted, exhausted, and we’re going to have a holiday at the end of this week, just us, our family, and I’m beyond thrilled for that but I can’t be sick and exhausted for that, I can’t, so.

And then there’s Africa. I’m going to Africa in three weeks. (Someone could come with me. You could come with me. We could sing “We Could Be Heroes” to each other and try to be ironic about it. Then we’ll get there and cry a lot and be changed and we’ll try to not be ironic about that, either, because it’s lame to be ironic about that sort of thing, it totally is.) (I won’t have to try, actually, because I have a very hard time being ironic about anything, even though I have, at times, worked very hard at it. I am, at my core, sappy and credulous. I try to view it as a strength.) Anyway. I’m going to Africa. Lesotho. For this. It’s blowing my mind a little.

Not enough to stop my nose from running, though. That’s a real disappointment right there.

(/irony.)

******

What’s your best sense-memory trigger? The smell of Bonne Bell lipsmackers? The taste of Coke out of a glass bottle? Frosted Lucky Charms? New car smell? Old Spice? Share it in the comments. I feel like doing some sense-memory tourism.

I like to think that I’m the sort of person who doesn’t take things for granted. I know how fortunate I am to have the life that I have; I know, too, that the terms and conditions of that life include no guarantees against frustration and sadness and pain and loss. I know, even the most difficult moments, that I have much to be grateful for, that I lead a life that is, for the most part, what the old philosophers might have called choiceworthy. I know that it is choice, largely, that defines my fortune and privilege: I am fortunate enough and privileged enough to be able to choose, to some not insignificant degree, my path and all of its little detours, to choose my pace and my direction, to choose to linger over or to pass by the myriad distractions of life, to gaze into the gloom or to seek out the sunlight. I am lucky, I know this.

It is also a characteristic of this good fortune, this privilege, that I am vulnerable to frustration and sadness (and, possibly, to depression; I’ll reflect upon this further someday) when I am forced to confront my limitations, when I look down this path or the other and see no way around a certain obstacle – some figurative bog or rock or troll-ridden bridge – and have to stop, give up, go a different way. That’s the very definition of privilege, I think – the luxury of getting pissy about being thwarted. Not that those who are less privilege don’t get frustrated at the obstacles that they are forced to confront – it’s just that, I think, the fortunate are more likely to put their hands on their hips and stamp their feet and say that shouldn’t be there, how dare that be there? and collapse to the ground in a resentful huff.

Or something like that. All I know is, the tenor of my upset at certain obstacles and injustices in life sometimes takes on a sort of whiny, fists-brandished-at-the-sky quality: I can’t save Tanner’s life; what good am I? I can’t explain what is happening to him to my children; am I a failure? I can’t get over my dad’s death; why can’t I cope? Lo, I have suffered from depression; why me? I am special, my loved ones are special, why does that not inoculate us against bad things? Why must WE suffer pain? Why can’t I stop it? I should be able to stop it! I AM THE HEROINE OF THIS STORY, DAMMIT. WHY CAN I NOT SAVE THE DAY?

I take for granted the idea of my specialness; I take for granted my privilege, in the sense that I have this deep-seated – if entirely irrational – belief that it should keep me and my loved ones safe from suffering, and that if it doesn’t, that it should at least provide me with the weapons to fight whatever it is that is causing suffering. I am who I am and I should never be without resources. I expect that. It is my right.

Except that it isn’t. I am only human, all-too human, and I am as vulnerable to suffering and to the things that cause suffering as is any other human, and the idea that I should, because I am the heroine in the drama that is my so-called life, be able to ensure happy endings for myself and the characters that surround me (except for that guy over there, the one who is cracking wise and clearly a minor character and therefore likely to be eaten by aliens by the third act) is egotistical and absurd. But it has settled into the subtext of the narratives that I weave and fold, and it asserts itself when the threads fray or the knots unravel or I just plain fumble the loom. And it’s discomfiting, to see it there. It is.

I struggle with this. I’ve struggled with it a lot around Tanner, because it just seems so impossibly unfair that for all that I’ve been able to do, I’m not able to actually save him. Which is so self-centred that it’s almost offensive – that I should be the savior, that it’s somehow my job, my role – but there it is. I actually have to wrench myself, psychically, in some moments, to remind myself of how amazing and wonderful it is that this community came together to support me in my effort to do something to make what remains of his life happy and comfortable and we did it, we did it, and I can do it, and it will be done, because it is amazing and wonderful, it is so amazing and wonderful, even though it is not the most wished for thing – the impossible thing – the thing that we most want, to save his life.

Such a funny idea, the idea of saving, of being a savior, of being someone who saves, of being someone who can be relied upon to save, of wanting to be that someone. Such a selfless idea, it seems, and yet so selfish when you look at it really closely. Nietzsche would say, did say, that it is such a Christian idea, and he meant it in the worst way, but there’s something to the criticism that the act of saving or the desire to save are not as purely selfless as they seem. I know this. I know this because I feel it. I know that there is an undercurrent there, one that pulls, one that whispers, it should be you, it has to be you, no-one else can do this, no-one else but you.

Such was the current that led Buffy the Vampire Slayer to leap into the abyss that one time, those many times, to save her friends, her family, her sister, the world. She Saved The World, A Lot. Don’t we all want to be Buffy, in some way? Be the person who saves the world? And is that really so wrong? Where would we be, if there weren’t always someone, if there weren’t always a lot of someones, whispering to themselves in the dark, if not me, who? If not now, when?

We wouldn’t be anywhere good, I don’t think. Which is why I’m sucking up my anxieties about my privilege and about heroine complexes and savior impulses and all those things which, really, are not the worst things. Wringing one’s hands about the psychology of one’s desire to help and the politics of one’s ability to help and the condition of liberal post-modernity that nurtures guilt about helping just gets in the way of actually helping. Which is not to say that I shouldn’t continue to reflect upon all of this. It’s just to say that I shouldn’t let it prevent me from trying to make a difference, whenever and however I can.

For Tanner. For these moms and babies. For whoever needs whatever help is within my power to give. Because that impulse to heroism – that impulse to save, to rescue, to help, to make a difference, to make any difference – can make a difference, if it’s nurtured, and shared. And the ability to act on that impulse – in ways big or small – is something that we shouldn’t take for granted.

After all, according to the famous thesis, philosophers – and theologians and moralists and nihilists and idealogues and critics and hand-wringers of all varieties – have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

——-

I hope that you’ll help me with the moms and babies, just as you did – as you do – with Tanner. It requires so little – just a signature. And if you’re into it – if you, like me, have a predilection for leaping into the abyss when you think that it might make a difference – you could really take a running leap and see if you might get yourself to Africa with me. That’d be something.

I’m closing comments. In part because I want you to just go read about Africa and be inspired to do something about it, and in part because I’m still struggling with the yuck of having Tutus For Tanner snarked at the other week. So.

Hic Rhodus, hic saltus. (translation: here is Rhodes, jump here) – Hegel, Preface To The Elements Of The Philosophy Of Right (1820)

(The quote continues: “To apprehend what is is the task of philosophy, because what is is reason. As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present world, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over Rhodes. If a theory transgresses its time, and builds up a world as it ought to be, it has an existence merely in the unstable element of opinion, which gives room to every wandering fancy.

With little change the above saying would read:

Here is the rose, dance here.”

Hegel is awesome.)

(Photographosophy, German Idealist edition.)

(Unrelated: want to go to Africa with me?)

I labored over a post about this, about this dark anniversary, about how this year has changed me, about how I still cry. But the words were confused, the sentences messy, the paragraphs long, the ideas incoherent, and it occurred to me that I do not need to struggle to put everything into words. That not everything can be captured in words.

I said goodbye to my father a year ago. I am still saying goodbye. I am still sad.

I am still sad. I will always be sad, about this, this loss. There will be other sadnesses – and there will, of course, be many, many happinesses – but this, this sadness will stay.

It will not color all things, but it will be there, always. I just need to learn how to bear it, and how to accept it.

If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop? — Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication On The Rights Of Women (Chapter 3)

(Photographosophy, Pissy Feminist Edition.)

It was just one night, and one night, measured against the course of a lifetime, doesn’t seem all that significant. But it was a dark night, and I have never been able to shed the weight of the memory of it. I have never been able to put it, as they say, in perspective. I never will.

Jasper was not quite six months old. I had not slept in weeks. I lay awake as he stirred and fussed, bracing myself for the moment when I would have to rouse myself fully to nurse him or change him or soothe him. The darkness that night seemed particularly black, the kind of black that has a density, a weight. To say that it felt like it was closing in would be to use a trope that gets overused when writers are trying to describe dark nights and oppressive fear, but in this case it was true. The darkness was closing in on me like a heavy fog, like an army of ghosts, like a slick of oil, like night made solid and sinister. I couldn’t breathe. Jasper continued to fuss. I fought the dark.

I fought the dark. I think that I won. Even at the time, I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure.

Later, when I wrote about what happened, I couched it in the most delicate of terms. “I was groggy,” I said. “… (I was) confused, disoriented, as I held my squirming baby in my arms:”

He fussed, breathing heavily through a stuffy nose, truffling for the breast and then pushing it away. He squirmed and kicked and protested and snuffled and grabbed and pushed and with every kick, every push of his fierce little legs and arms I struggled toward wakefulness, needing to be awake, needing my strength and my composure but wanting oh so badly to just let the darkness overtake me and to slide back into oblivion. But he wouldn’t let me, he was too uncomfortable, poor thing, hungry and snuffly and demanding, he would not let me let me go and he would not let this be easy and in a flash, in one moment, I felt the frustration course through me like a current and there it was, for a split-second – a split-second and an eternity all at once – ANGER – sharp and hot and as I felt the tears prick my eyes and a sob burble in my throat I was overwhelmed by the brief flash of an urge to just drop the baby, just drop him to the mattress and throw myself off the bed and stomp away into the night.

I didn’t have an urge to drop the baby. I had an urge to throw him. And then to throw myself, right out the window. It was an fleeting urge, one that passed, as I said, in a split-second, but it also felt like an eternity, an eternity during which I was not in my right mind, and completely aware of not being in my right mind, and completely helpless to do anything about it. It was the most terrifying moment of my life. It was the moment about which I feel the most – the most everlasting – shame. In that moment, I was – or almost was – one of those mothers, those mothers that you read about, the Andrea Yateses, the horrible, terrible mothers who put their children in the car and drive it straight into the lake. I was a bad mother. I was a bad mother, the worst mother, the most horrifyingly terrible mother possible.

I sought help from a psychiatrist, but I downplayed the grimmer details. I am not a bad mother, I told myself. She will think that I’m a bad mother. I’m not a bad mother. Am I a bad mother? I denied parts of my own story. I denied having wanted to harm myself. She read me the referral report – reports intrusive thoughts… wanted to harm baby… – and I recoiled. It hadn’t been exactly like that. It was more abstract than that. I hadn’t been in my right mind. I hadn’t been in my right mind. But of course, that was why I was there, wasn’t it? In a psychiatrist’s office? I hadn’t been – I wasn’t – in my right mind.

Of course I wasn’t. I was depressed. I was suffering from postpartum depression, acute postpartum depression, acute postpartum depression bordering on postpartum psychosis. But even knowing that – even having a very firm grasp of that, having struggled with it for nearly three years; even having written at length about that – I was still ashamed. So ashamed, that I only went back the psychiatrist once after that. I took the prescriptions – leaving them unfilled, because I was still nursing, and shouldn’t a good mother continue to nurse her baby, regardless of her mental state? – and left after the second visit and never went back.

I didn’t have any more psychotic episodes. I continued to write about my struggle, which allowed me to gain – again, for lack of a better word – perspective on it, and which ensured that, in addition to my anxious husband, there was an army of sympathetic supporters – you, all of you – keeping an eye on me. But I still struggled with the shame and I tempered my stories, omitting the more depressing or frightening details of my experience; I hid my shame, I denied my shame. And I never went back to the psychiatrist. I was too ashamed. I was too afraid of talking, out loud, about whether or not I was a bad mother.

Even though I knew – even though I know – in my right mind – that I am not a bad mother, still… I came too close to being one of those mothers. I came too close.

And therein lays the problem. We still slip too easily into thinking of those mothers as those mothers, as bad mothers, as the worst kinds of mothers, as other. These are mothers who have fought depression and lost. These are mothers who didn’t have support. These are mothers who might have had support, but were too ashamed to ask for it. These are mothers who get described, in articles like this one posted today at AOL, as ‘psychopaths’ and ‘cold-blooded criminals.’ Bad mothers. The worst mothers. Mothers whose path, but for the grace of God and Ativan and the Internet, any one of us might have taken. I might have taken.

We have an emotional investment in characterizing these mothers as bad, as other. We want to keep our distance. We want there to be a clearly recognizable line between the mom who struggles and the mom who harms. We do not want to say, there but for the grace of God go we. We want to say, we could not possibly go there. That is a place to which we will not, can not, could not go. But in saying so, we put ourselves, and our children, at risk. In saying so, we create monsters, and in creating monsters – creatures that lurk in a netherworld that is foreign to us, closed to us – we shame, and in shaming, we close off the possibility of understanding, and of battling, the darkness that produces these so-called monsters, these so-called monsters (these monsters who are not monsters, who are not monsters; repeat, repeat, repeat) who might – but for the grace of God, but for the grace of good psychiatric care, but for the grace of community support – be us.

This is not to say that every mother who harms her child is struggling with postpartum depression, or any kind of perinatal mood disorder or non-perinatal mood disorder or depression or mental illness. This is not to say that there is no such thing as abusive mothers. This is not to say that there is no such thing – no such person – as a really bad mother. It is to say that blanket characterizations of mothers who harm their children as cold-blooded and shameful and bad – as does the horrifying, appalling article posted at AOL – can have a terribly – possibly deadly – effect on women struggling with the darkness, inasmuch at these deepen and perpetuate the shame associated with that darkness. A mom that is ashamed of what she is going through – a mom who fears being labeled ‘bad’ because she is battling darkness at a time when she is supposed to be – supposed to be! – dancing in the light – is a mom who might not admit to what she is going through, a mom who might not seek help, a mom who might not get help.

A mom who might find herself, in the dark of night, battling a demon that she cannot fight on her own, and lose.

*Apparently, AOL has edited some of the original comments out of the article. That there was such an article in the first place, one that focused entirely on one ‘expert’s’ claim that mothers who harm their children are all cold-blooded criminals, is still evidence of the deeper problem that I’m speaking about here. (See also Katherine Stone’s excellent post on the subject, in which she cites some of the original remarks.)

I wrote this post late last year, and it is testament to the force of its argument and its mantra-like qualities that I cannot even remember what incident it was that prompted me to write it. I’d now like to forget a confrontation with ugly that I had yesterday – ugliness that scratched the wound of an old ugliness, ugliness that was being hurled directly at the beauty of the other week, which meant that it had the potential to cause much hurt – which meant that it did cause much hurt, until I decided to follow the advice below – and so I am reposting it, in the manner of repeating it like a mantra, and asking for your support in asserting it, loudly and clearly and emphatically. Because.

How To Deal With Trolls: A Primer

Step 1: Ignore the trolls.

Step 2: Ignore the trolls.

Step 3: IGNORE THE TROLLS. Do not look at them, do not respond to them, do not point your finger at them and scream TROLL, because the only thing that trolls love more than the sound of their own voice (virtually rendered in the spaces of our community as unpleasant/derogatory/inappropriately critical/unnecessarily smug/indisputably bitchy words on the screen) is the sound of other voices responding to theirs. And what a troll hates more than anything else? The deafening silence that resounds when their words fall into the dark, empty pit of nobody cares, the dark, empty pit that rings only with the hollow echo of their mean spirits hammering against the walls of their vacant souls.

And in the space where you might otherwise have been tempted to put a rejoinder or rebuttal or argument or smackdown? Put love. Put friendship. Put community. Put laughter. Say something nice, something friendly, something clever, something ridiculous, something vapidly amusing, something about coffee or chocolate or how much you love person X or how much you admire person Y or has anybody seen that awesome thing that person Z wrote yesterday? or oh, look, roller skating babies!

And then move on. And forget that you ever saw that troll under that bridge because really, there are so many, there are always so many, always spilling out from the muck and the grime and reaching out with their spindly, warty arms and grabbing for attention, but they only have power if we let them, if we choose to see them, if we acknowledge that they’re there, if we let them seize that attention and hold it and turn it ugly.

Let’s not let them.

Let’s just not.

*I know, I know. I don’t always do this. This is as much a reminder to myself as to anybody else.

**And? I know that this can be hard to do. But I think that it’s the only thing that makes any sort of difference. Fight hate with love. Don’t give it space to grow. Shut it out. SHUT IT OUT. Plant these spaces with good seeds and sunlight and clean water and care and weed out anything that produces rot. That’s all there is to do. Really.

***We don’t even need to discuss why I wrote this. (ed. note: except for what I wrote above about why I wrote this.) Let’s just MAKE THEM GO AWAY by ELIMINATING THEM FROM THE VERY SPHERE OF OUR AWARENESS. (whips out canister of Troll-B-Gone) (pffssst-spray-pffssst). What trolls? Where?

****The claim has been made that it’s just critical commentary, and who is anybody to shut down critical commentary, and didn’t John Stuart Mill say something about how even bad ideas need to be permitted in the sphere of public discourse, yadda yadda…? To which I say, sure, and maybe this is something that we should talk about at greater length sometime. But John Stuart Mill also cautioned against words and ideas that cause hurt and harm, and I would argue that in the case of communities like ours – and we are a community, right? – we have a special obligation to ask ourselves, always, when we are tempted to take critical aim at each other, what is our intent? Is it to hurt? To discount? To silence? To cast aspersion? To make ourselves feel better about our own limitations? Where our intent is questionable, we should think twice.

Now, you: I asked this yesterday on Twitter, and I’ll ask it again here… tell me a happy thing. Tell it to me here, in the comments, or on your own blog, or in a photo or a tweet or whatever… just, give some light and air and space to happy things. Baby smiles, dry vodka martinis, meteor showers, Mad Men, chocolate, doing good, wearing tutus, peonies, shaggy haircuts on toddlers, double espressos first thing in the morning, Spanx, cupcakes, friends, butter, you name it. I want to hear it. We all need to hear it.

What’s your happy thing?