Can we skip the part where I mention it has been nearly four months since my last post? Can we consider that glossed over for now? Maybe someday I’ll tell you about it. Not today.

Lately I’ve been more than content with my small, richly-concentrated life, but right this minute I’m swollen with one of those splutter-it-from-the-rooftops feelings and so I took it to Facebook but that just wasn’t enough for me and so here I am, at this old microphone, for anyone who is still out there. Are you still out there? It’s okay if you’re not. I just need to tell you this anyway. This is my valentine to myself.

Yesterday my 11-year-old daughter Gracie was drawing a picture. At one point she stood up, declared herself the suckiest artist EVAH, crumpled her paper into a ball, threw it and stomped off. I said something predictable about what an amazing artist I believe she is. She did something increasingly predictable and rolled her eyes to the beat of her stomps (how does she do that?) We all moved on.

Hours later, when Gracie was climbing up into her loft bed, we found her original picture there. It was all smoothed out, and next to it was a very large note.

“I found this in the garbij. I <3 it. It was a mastrpese.”

So right after my heart was finished swallowing itself, I sifted through my brain to catalog exactly what I was feeling (as I so often do these days.) My friend Neil actually helped me clarify it, and it is this: In my life today I am surrounded by people who will pick up my crumpled pieces, smooth them out with intention, and present them back to me with a gentle kiss on the head. I hope you have these people, too. I hope you are these people for your people, and I pray my daughters remain this way.

Not long after we found the picture, Eva herself woke up and mini-boomeranged her way back to our bed. When I tried to coax her back to her own room she said, all throaty and misty-eyed, “I just feel like I need to be next to you.” For the second time that night, my heart attempted to swallow itself. The thing is I have spent the last five months away from the person I belong next to. That time is finally over, and everything–my gut, my brain, my feet, my soul–feels clicked back into place. I don’t ever want to lose this feeling. This one where I know I have everything I need right here, and I am bigger for it. That the people around me make me bigger.

I opened the quilt like a Valentine card and she climbed up next to me. I sealed us in, and she promptly fell asleep.

I stared at her for a long time. And I knew, looking at her, that I was seeing something more than a girl freshly-turned-six on the edge of sleep on Valentine’s Eve. So I took a picture with my phone before I went to sleep myself, and when I looked at it again this morning it hit me.

I had no idea my heart looks exactly like a pastel stuffed seahorse.

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