I’m sitting at the dining room table, working on my laptop with the background music of Little Bear on the television. Next to my laptop are two pairs of dance shoes–ballet and tap–that are too small for my daughter now. I never had the chance to take dance lessons when I was a kid, so I want to give her that opportunity, at least until I am certain she does not want to do it anymore. But for now she loves it. In a few years I’ll sign her up for piano lessons, but I won’t give her the option to quit that. I’ll be the mean mommy on that one, since it’s darn near impossible to learn to play the piano when you’re an adult. I keep telling myself I’m going to go take music lessons when I get some free time, but I doubt that it’ll be piano. More likely guitar. I’d love to learn how to play electric guitar. Maybe I’ll get my daughter into guitar lessons some day too. I don’t want to overload her with lessons, but there are a lot of things I want to be sure she has the chance to experience. I want her to choose her own path, but I want her to have lots and lots of paths to choose from. She’s just so damn cool and smart and beautiful, it makes me cry if I think about it for too long.

My husband is out taking his thirty minute walk around the neighborhood. He worries incessantly about his health, for several good reasons. He’s a good husband, and a wonderful father and he wants to do everything he can to make sure that he’s around for us as long as possible. He’s a vast improvement over my first husband, which really isn’t meant to be as much of a knock on my first husband as you might think. We got married for the wrong reasons, and stayed married for too long. Habit and momentum, he used to say. But the one I have now is my partner, and we got married for all of the right reasons.

The tips of my fingers are sore as I type, and I can feel my forearms already starting to ache. We went to the rock-climbing gym with my sister and her family again today, and somehow I got talked into trying a particularly difficult wall. There were about six times when I didn’t think I’d be able to climb any higher, but then I’d hear advice shouted from below on where to move my feet or which grab to go for next. Sometimes I’d feel the slack on the rope being taken all the way in and I knew I could cheat just a bit on the rope to get to next hold, knew that my sister was nudging me up past the rough spots. That’s what big sisters are for, right? And I made it to the top, managed to slap the black pipe, then gratefully let go and let her bring me back down.

I just finished posting some research advice on a writer’s forum I belong to, giving details about what a body looks like after it’s been in the water for a day. I’ve seen a few of those. I’ve seen them when they’ve been in the water for far longer than that as well. I’ve seen burn victims and car accidents, murders and suicides, heart attacks and strokes. I’ve seen babies as young as a few hours, and men and women in their nineties. I’ve seen what a fetus looks like at four months gestation. I’ve seen that death is not fair, is not patient, is not discriminating. I’ve seen that death does not allow you to get your affairs in order first, and does not care if you spoke sharply to your child before you left home.

I’ll have some time to write after my daughter goes to bed. I’d write now but I can count on an interruption every few minutes on the order of, “MOMMMMMMMY!” It wears on me, but I also hate it if she goes too long without calling for me. My agent’s been shopping my novel for a few months now–not long enough for me to get concerned about its lack of ability to sell since in publishing terms its hardly been more than a few minutes. But that doesn’t prevent me from having neurotic episodes where I begin to worry that at some point my agent will throw up his hands and shake his head and ask himself why he ever thought I had anything resembling writing talent. I do what I can to counteract the neuroses by writing more, but I know that having the validation of having a book sold will be the ultimate cure. Then I’ll get to trade up for a whole new set of neuroses about sequels, and book launches, and sales numbers. But hey, at least I’m being honest with myself, right?