My cousin Jana visited with her family yesterday and we went to the beach and as always I loved every minute with that good woman. (Of course, academically I know she is a woman with three children--including a teenager--but in my heart she will always be a
girl...in skinny black pants sitting on our apartment floor listening to
The Titanic soundtrack on repeat while she writes letters or crafts). We talked about our expectations of our children at special moments, and how they surprise and sometimes disappoint us with their agency and their defiance. What they remember, we tell each other, no matter what they manifest in the moment when their feet feel hot and sore, is happiness. Liv, for example, longed for America all throughout Denmark. Now that we've been home a few months, she longs for Denmark. Or, more accurately, Tivoli.
When they look back on these Sunday mornings and say,
sometimes Mom stayed home from church and wrote on her blog, what will they think of the choices I made--what I decided to include from these days and years when we were together and we glutted ourselves with hugs and kisses and shouted sometimes and we took so many pictures?
Today I'm making this editorial choice: all the blurry pictures. The seconds. All the ones that are maddeningly
off yet capture a moment that would otherwise be gone. Here they are: the Top 40 off the bottom of the pile.
