Transphobes See Children as Possessions

I think almost everyone has read this appalling essay by Tess Morgan, whose life was apparently ruined because her adult son got a tattoo. (Or, as she put it, had his "precious skin" inked like a "pig carcass.")

Reading the essay, most people can't help feeling that Tess has some very clear issues. Her son -- her adult son -- is not a person to her. He's a possession, a perfect object that she's spent time creating and polishing, like a fine cherrywood desk. How dare that desk have an image engraved on it against her will? How dare this creature -- her possession -- act as though he's a creature with autonomy?

This is the same reaction we see from certain parents who find out that their children are trans. They describe themselves -- as Morgan did in her essay about her son's tattoo -- as heart-broken, as crushed, as unable to sleep or eat. They say they have "lost" their children. They say their lives are now "horror films." They describe their children as "mutilated," as "damaged forever," as "contaminated."

They speak of ROGD -- rapid onset gender dysphoria, an entirely fictional "disorder" not recognized by any reputable clinician, and claim their children are trans because their teachers or peers or "the media" brainwashed them.

They are supported in these delusional beliefs even by people who claim to be trans-supporting. (That link is to one advice site, but I could give you dozens of other so-called progressive advice columnists who say similar things.)

Almost all of them also claim that their children "never" showed any sign of being trans or unhappy before this sudden announcement. As the parent of a trans child, and as someone who knows many trans people, I entirely understand how someone could convince themselves that this is true. My kid was happy, if anxious, before he hit puberty. If I was someone who wanted my possession child to remain the cherrywood desk that I had ordered and polished for years, maybe I too would insist that this (imagined) three-year-old was the "real" child.

Here's how I did react, when my kid told me he thought he was trans: I was interested, and I was cautiously pleased. 

Because no, being trans does not come out of nowhere. Nor does it have a "rapid onset," no matter what some parents are telling themselves. My kid was unhappy from puberty on. His misery increased, almost daily. He would cry in his room every single night. He was suicidal. All of this, even though he had parents who loved him and therapy and everything else we could think to try.

Once he knew he was trans, and once we found a therapist that would work with him on how to understand what trans meant -- and especially once he began taking T-shots twice a month -- all of that went away. Though he still has some anxiety, and some bad days, he is so much happier, and so much better, emotionally, socially, and physically.

So I was and am pleased. My kid is no longer being tormented daily. My kid is able to be who he is. My kid is becoming his best self. Why would I not be pleased?

Yet many parents aren't. When their kids finally come out to them, when they finally say, hey, here's the truth about me, these parents react very badly indeed.

Many of them speak of "losing" their son or "losing" their daughter -- as if their child had died. As if a trans child is not the same child they always were.

Many of them insist that their children are "mutilating" themselves, by taking HRT or by getting surgery. "My beautiful daughter chopped off her breasts!" they wail. (Have a look at that verb. That verb -- like so many of the violent and inaccurate verbs many of them use -- is not an accident.) "My son is destroying his fertility!" they insist. And of course so long as a child is in their power, they will refuse that child treatment, even at the expense of the child's life. Like the anti-vaxxers, they'd rather have a dead child than the poodle child they didn't order.

None of this is new, of course. This is how parents reacted thirty years ago to children who came out as Lesbian or gay. Their children were sick, they insisted. They were delusional. What about my grandchildren? they cried.

Notice that all of them locate the problem in their children. It is the children who are at fault; the children who had misbehaved and done horrible things, even though the parent didn't say they could do it.

*** *** ***

What about their claim that their children "never" showed any signs of being unhappy with their assigned gender before "suddenly" declaring that they were trans?

I don't believe them. I don't believe them because that is not how it happens. 

I don't believe them because so many of my kid's trans friends will write about how they wish they could tell their parents the truth, but they know their parents would reject them, would kick them out of the house, would refuse to believe them.

I don't believe them because being trans never comes out of nowhere. Looking back, I can see all sorts of signals I should have recognized, ways my kid was broadcasting that he was trans. I missed them or I assumed they were just signals that he was genderqueer, or that he just liked dressing like that or wearing his hair like that. I am 110% trans-supporting and I missed those signals. A parent who thinks being trans is a sin, or a disease, or a mutilation -- do you think they will see what their kid is showing them? 

Or will they deny everything they don't want to see?

*** *** ***

As with Tess Morgan, these are parents who have control issues. (Very often they will describe a doctor or other professional gently advising them to get therapeutic help, and they explode in fury -- because there is nothing wrong with them, they insist. It is that very bad child who should be made to understand how evil and wrong they are!) 

These parents frequently control how their children dress, and what they eat, and what they read, who they talk to, what emotions they can show. (No lie, one kid I know is not allowed by their parents to show unhappiness, or anger, or even boredom. Only happy, contented emotions can be expressed. Anything else, and the child is punished.) They punish and beat children who don't comply. (Gee, why would children hide the truth from such parents?) 

These parents lack the ability to understand that their children are not possessions. They are not toys. They are not objects to be shaped into whatever form the parent desires. 

These parents can't accept their children as human beings, with all the rights to self-determination that any human being has.

My kid is not a possession. Nor did he become some "new" child because he transitioned, or because he changed his name. (You would not believe how many of these people are furious because "their" child choose a new name.) He's still the kid I raised, the one I loved then and love now. And he was always trans, though for years he didn't understand that, and neither did I.

You can read more here.

Score!

So my kid received a comment from someone on her currently running comic asking if she could make it "a bit more obvious" who is male and who is female in the comic, since the reader was having trouble deciding this important issue.

My kid's reply: (a direct quotation here): "nah the gender binary is bullshit my friend"

Yep, I do parenting right.

Exiled From the Academy

So we're driving home from the Harps, my child and I, last night, one of these long sunny nights in Fort Smith, Arkansas, with storm clouds on the horizon, but no actual storm clouds, talking about the issues we talk about, art and being artists and trolls on the internet and the latest iterations of QC and I was telling the kid about how much I too loved the smell of books and how one of the happiest moments of my life was the morning I got off the bus onto the campus in Fayetteville, Arkansas, after three years working a 9-5 job, and in the cool fall morning I caught the scent of books coming clearly from the basement of the library -- which vented right there by the bus-stop -- and I knew I was back in the academy.

"Back where I was meant to be," I told her. "The happiest moment of my life so far."

She burst into tears.

"What?" I said. "Baby, what?"

"I..miss...Fayetteville!"

"Oh...sweetie."

"It's a real university! I miss going to a real university!"

"Oh, baby-cakes. I know. But you'll be at a real university again some day. I promise."

"Fort Smith isn't anything like a real university!" she sobbed. "The buildings are so ugly! They don't have any Greek and Roman influences at all!"

That's It, Folks

I have done submitted my final grades for Spring 2012.

The semester is therefore concluded.

I spent the day -- most of it -- writing and writing and writing. I love that moment when I know where a story is going and how to get there: when the Muse is chasing me, rather than me kicking her up the hill. (My Muse is a scruffy crop-haired urchin, who is sometimes female and sometimes male, and spends most of its time sulking under the table or in the corner, and has to be cussed at and coaxed into working at all. Lots of coffee works, or failing that, a bit of rum. But today! Hah!)

Toward evening I quit, because the kid turned 14, at exactly 6.27 p.m. We had chicken gruel and cheesecake, and discussed her infancy and early childhood. Also what she had been drawing, locked away in her room all day. She is drawing humans now, because if she is to be a real animator, she feels she must learn to draw humans.

Tomorrow she's going off to spend most of a month with her grandparents. While I will miss her -- Moar writin time for me!

Hunger Games

(Cross-Posted on FanSci)

The kid and I went to see Hunger Games, finally.

It's far from a flawless piece of work -- not exactly brilliantly shot, and with some skids in the pacing. Nevertheless! Boy, did it make my revolutionary heart pound!

(MINOR SPOILERS.)

And it had some nice moments, too. The character of Haymitch was one of my favorites in the book; Suzanne Collins did a great job developing the drunk ex-winner/survivor-now-mentor of new tributes, and Woody Harrelson plays him well. The minute at the dinner table when he glances from Peeta to Katniss and realizes that this year he might have a chance of bringing a kid home alive is just so nice.

And when Katniss volunteers to take Prim's place, and her district raises its hands in salute to her -- how that sets up, so perfectly, her raising her hand in salute to those in District 11, whom she can't even see. Wow.

And the scene at the end with the crystal bowl full of berries. Deliciously evil.

I took my kid to see it, and she loved it, too (probably even more than I did ), though she had to hide under my arm for the very violent bits (and there are some very violent bits).

On the way home, she asked me, and here is why I like the movie so much, "What if that happens? What if our country starts doing that?"

"Seriously?" I asked her. "You know science fiction is mythic, right? Do I need to give you that rant again?"

"No," she said. "No, no, no, no, please don't."

A brief pause, as we drove.

"But seriously," I said.

"Mom."

"Mythic means it's not about the real world."

[Despite what this guy and FOXX news think.]

"Mythic means it's a metaphor which will help us think about the real world."

By this time my kid is sighing and slumping against the car window. But she is listening, too, because she's that kind of kid.

"That means Suzanne Collins is already telling us about the real world," I explain. "No, it's not going to be like Theseus and the King of Crete*. We've already got the hunger games, going on right now. What else is it, when my students have to join the military to get health care, or pay for college, or feed their kids? Sure, it's not last-man-standing, but it's their lives on the line anyway. What do you call it when people have to sell their futures to have any hope of a decent life? While Cheney and his friends make billions off the deal?"

"Only it's not on TV," she said dubiously.

"Right," I agreed. "They keep that part off TV now, the death part. They've gotten a little smarter since Viet Nam. Winter's Bone," I said. "That's the other movie Jennifer Lawrence was in. It makes very nearly the same point, in an entirely different way. Ree, her character in that, she's planning to join the Army. That's how she's going to keep her brother and sister fed. How they're going to stay alive. That's the choice we give our citizens these days. If you weren't lucky enough to be born among the 1%, what are your options? Sell drugs, starve slowly, join the military, or hope you can win the lottery**."

"So we need a revolution," she said, knowing how all my rants end.

I sighed, and slowed down before we got to the first of the speed traps which is how, apparently, Fort Smith is funding its police force these days. "So we need something to change," I agreed. "Let's hope it doesn't come to straight up revolution. No one really wants that."

"Not even you?"

"Not even me."

*Which, by the way? Everyone who says Collins is stealing from Running Man or Battle Royale? Shut up, because both of those stole it from Theseus and the Minotaur, who probably got it from some other guy, and look up archetypal time, will you?

**Sell a novel, sell a screenplay, invent an iPad, win Dancing with the Stars, whatever. How many people are going to do that, out of 400,000 Americans? 28?

Parenting! Too Much Work!

The kid broke a bracket off her braces.

And she needs a haircut.

And she needs (rather urgently) to see an eye doctor. (Sadly, we are too broke for both she and I to get glasses this year, which means I get to squint for another year. Our health insurance -- of course -- does not cover vision.)

And she wants to see Hunger Games this weekend.

And she needs new jeans, having grown yet another inch.

This is only with one kid. How do parents of multiple children makes this work?

Jeez.

Stormy Weather

We seem to have vaulted right past spring into summer, here in Fuck Smith.

Also the kid has vaulted straight into madolescence.

I picked her up from acting class at five today. "I need ice cream. Can we get ice cream?"

"Ah. Well."

"PLEASE. I can't eat anything else, with these TEETH."

(She'd had her braces tightened at dawn, so she had a point.)

"Um," I said. "All right, I suppose. We can stop at Harp's. How's that?"

Giant grump. "Target?"

"Why Target?" Not that it actually mattered to me, but...

"They HAVE ice cream at Target."

"Well, yes, but."

"Plus I can get an Icee at Target."

I ruffled both hands through my hair. "I thought you wanted ice cream?"

"Now I want an Icee." We had reached the car and she growled at the door when it was locked. "A BLUE one."

Once we were in the car she cheered up, telling me how lovely acting class had been. The fun things that had happened. One of the kids who went to her Montessori school is in the class. The teacher is great. And so on.

At the actual Target it was cool -- I actually got her to buy shoes (I cannot tell you how amazing that is) and they were shoes on sale which we could afford (they were falling off the rack, and she could make a joke about shoes committing shoe-a-cide, plus they were a color she liked, so I think that helped) but -- on the way home --

Suddenly she was near tears.

"What?" I said, panicked. "What?"

"I want to fall in love," she said, mournfully.

"Jesus Christ," I said. "Galloping fuck biscuits. Are you serious?"

"I haven't had a crush on anyone in," she said, wiping at her eyes, "I don't know, forever."

"Where did that come from?"

"I was sad about it before," she said, and slurped some Icee, "but the Icee distracted me."

"I'ma kill you," I said. "I'ma kill you, I'ma stuff you, I'ma drag you behind me on wheels."

"No, you won't," she said, and offered me some of her Icee. A green one. They were out of blue.

The Kid's New Favorite Site

Many of these jokes I do not get.

But I'm told they're very funny.

Fall! Yay!

Woke to cool winds and gray skies this morning. Fall! My favorite season. Next to February, of course.

Last night, the kid and I stopped at the Harps on the way home from school. She's sitting in on my WLIT I night class this semester.

Wednesday is my long day at the university -- I'm there from seven in the morning until 8.30 at night, teaching all day, mostly, although I have a five hour stretch between my last afternoon class and the start of my evening class, which I use for prep and office hours. Yesterday, though, this got taken up by a lengthy and boring, ah, I mean extremely useful meeting. My, do I enjoy academic meetings. So useful. And so many things get done at them which can't be more efficiently done though e-mail!

Where was I?

Oh, yes. After a 14 hour workday, the kid and I stopped at Harps, so that there might be something to eat in the house for once, as well as to get something for dinner.

As we're rounding the dairy aisle, I said, "What about yeggs? Do we have any yeggs?"

"Yes," she said, in her best sarcastic voice, "we have EGGS, MOM."

"Okay," I said. "Don't get EGGS, then."

"Why do you always say that. Yeggs."

"Because it's what your dad always used to say. It's an old joke."

"Well, there's no Y on the word, you know."

"Jeez. Really? Thanks for pointing that out."

We rounded the corner to frozen food, and suddenly she laughed. "Ow!"

"What?" I said.

"Nothing. I just rolled my eyes so hard I think I sprained my eye muscles."

My kid, folks. Thirteen! She'll be here all year.

Poetry!

The kid, cashing in on the zombie craze sweeping the nation, has written a zombie haiku.

Here it is, for your enjoyment:

Zombie Hitler

Evil when he was alive
Now really, really evil 'cause he's a zombie
Where are the zombie hunters?

Goodbye, Summer. I said GOODBYE!

I've had enough of this summer. Over a hundred here today all day, plus humid as an armpit, forecast says 102, 103, 104 for the next five or six days, nothing below the high nineties as far as they're bothering to look. If this weather was a dog, I'd take it out and shoot it.

Meanwhile, the semester has begun, so I'm working like a dog. Grammar and comp, WLIT on the side. Haven't met my Fiction Workshop yet -- that's Thursday night -- but the rest have me booked and overbooked, especially since I'm doing Aikido and writing the novel at the same time.

Good thing I don't sleep anymore, I suppose.

Seriously, what is it with the insomnia? Ever since about July, I seem to have lost the ability to sleep. I don't fall asleep anymore, and even when I do get to sleep, I wake up after only about five hours. It's not because I don't need sleep, either -- I'm worn out all the time. I'm blaming the weather, because, you know, everything is the fault of this suck-ass weather.

Meanwhile the kid is having the same insomnia. I blame her adolescence, though. Because everything is the fault of her being 13.

Back to prep work.

Somebody Stage An Intervention

I'm over there on FB picking fights with strangers again. WTF. Not like I don't know better.

My kid is always coming to me -- she has a Deviant Art account -- saying, Ma, Ma, this idiot says this about Furries, this troll says this about women, Ma, you won't BELIEVE what this ridiculous, he says this about, what should I say back?

And with her, oh, I'm so Socratic, I'm so reasonable. Darlin', I say, someone is wrong on the internet? Really? That's what you want to waste your afternoon on? Please. Read a book. Draw something. Let's make some bagels. Arguing with a troll? Not so much.

But when it's me -- oh, the shoe is on the other keyboard then, I see.

Weekends

We had a big party yesterday, saying goodbye to one of our friends / ex-students who is going off to Minnesota to an MFA program. Now it is raining (again!) and I am working on editing stories.

And my child has an ear infection.

Now you may think this is no big deal. What kid does not have an ear infection from time to time?

Well, mine. That's what kid does not.

She has hardly ever been ill, per se, in her life. Not that she hasn't been sick -- from age seven to about ten she was sickly, as the 19th century used the term. Failure to thrive, as biologists might call it. Once we determined she was allergic to something about corn syrup -- which this is as far as we ever got, thanks to my useless clinic and even more useless health insurance, which did about thirty thousand dollars worth of tests while discovering nothing at all -- but once we, by which I mean I, took her off all foods containing corn syrup* her symptoms disappeared and she began to thrive at last.

Where was I? Sorry. I'm still miffed about the corn syrup issue. They didn't even test for allergies. Gah.

Okay. So except for that, she's hardly ever been sick. Bronchitis when she was two. The flu when she was six. Croup at eight. A stomach virus at eleven. I can literally count the number of times.

The effect of this is, whenever she does get sick, it's full mode panic on her part. A fever, to her, literally means she's going to die. "What's wrong with me?" she cries. "Does any terminal illness start with an ear ache?"

"It's an ear infection," I said. "We'll go to the clinic tomorrow."

"Am I going to die?"

"You're going to take some Tylenol."

"And then I'll die?"

"And then you'll go lie down. Ai."

I'm not even sure it's an ear infection, frankly. I think it might just be the weather. Another big front is coming through, and my bones feel like someone's been hitting me with sticks all night anyway.

Meanwhile! I'm reading a book Dr. Skull brought home, Earth Abides, written in 1947. Sort of a mid-century The Stand. Only without the religious whackatude. A super-measles wipes out 99.99% of the population, and...absolutely nothing happens. At least so far. I'm about halfway through the book. It's very well written. And historically interesting. Not sure it's any good yet. But it is making me feel very feverish.


*It was the blogosphere that helped me diagnosis her! When the useless clinic was doing no good at all, and she had lost 12 pounds (at nine years old) and had chronic stomach pain, and would not eat anything, and could barely move around most of the time -- she spent all day sitting in one chair in our house -- I put out a blag, even before blags existed, and got all sorts of excellent suggestions, and that was one of them, that she might be allergic to corn syrup. We had already taken her off wheat and red dye, so taking her off corn syrup was, frankly, a snap.

Wait, what? Raptors?

My kid is very edgy about this whole rapture thing, even though I keep telling her it's ridiculous.

OTOH, a couple of my students, even though they live in Arkansas (rapture central) have never heard of the idea of the rapture.

So here's a link! In case you care. Everything you wanted to know about the Rapture.

Which, as I keep telling my panicked child, is a totally invented piece of bullshit.

(Yeah, like other bits of religion aren't, I know. I am just more exasperated with this one because of how much it's scaring my kid. What a tool this guy Harold Camping is. Makes me wish for an actual God just so he would have to account to him someday.)

Fun fact! Rapture and rape come from the same Latin root! Rapio, rapere: to seize or to snatch away, to take for your own.

Why, Look Here!

It's a story by me! At Strange Horizons!

You'll be glad to know that the kid has pronounced it interesting, but strange.

Almost Mother's Day....;

...and my kid has returned from New Orleans, where she was visiting our family.

And she has come back with purple hair!

She is so cool.

This is something she's been wanting for about three years, but since I am not a trained girl, I had no idea how to go about it -- even with instructions from several blog friends, I could not make it happen.  I even went so far as to take her to a "beauty" "salon" one time, when she was eleven, I think, but though they were very nice, they claimed they could not do such a thing.  (I was dubious, even if this is Fuck Smith.)

Luckily!  She has an aunt who is not only a trained girl, but who used to work doing hair and such.  She has connections!  She arranged for the work ( after first talking the kid's grandmother into letting her have it done) and went with her to have it done.  It's beautiful, I have to say -- not all of her hair is purple, just a wide thatch on the right, above her temple and eyebrow; and very dark purple, just brighter and lighter than the brown of her hair, so that you don't see it and then you do see it and then you say, ooo, that's pretty.

"It's so pretty!" I said, when I saw it.

"I know," the kid confessed.  "It's making me narcissistic -- all I want to do is look in mirrors."

Joys of Homeschooling

I took the kid for her NCLB testing today -- mandatory, but much less painful when you're home-schooling, for I guess obvious reasons.  We're not trying to get funded or get pay raises, so the stakes aren't high.  No real stakes at all, in fact.  And the state, therefore, only tests our kids on reading and math.  The whole test, in fact, only took a couple hours -- from 9:00-11:15.

The less positive, though interesting bit, I suppose, was the mix of people I got hang around with in the parents' waiting room while the kid was doing the test.  As you might expect in Arkansas, almost all of them far-right Xtians; almost all of them had between six and 7,000 children. One of the women sitting on my sofa apologized abjectly to another of the women for only having four children. "I got cancer, there," she said delicately, "after my fourth, and had to have it removed."  The woman she was talking to had had eleven children.  "But three of them are with God," she explained, and then proceeded to describe, at the top of her lungs, in a room filled with toddlers and young children and young adolescents -- because all the kids who weren't getting tested that day, and that was all the kids not in the 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7th grades, all those kids were hanging out with their parents -- this woman described in extensive detail exactly how her three dead children had died.

She also explained how DHS is "owned" by the devil, as is the Fort Smith Police Department.  As are women doctors.  As are Public Schools.  She knows this last because they don't say the Pledge of Allegiance, because it has the word God in it.  

Meanwhile, she had an actual child with her, her youngest, about four.  This child she was totally ignoring.  He kept trying to climb in her lap, and kept asking her for something to eat from the giant Wal-Mart bag she had brought along.  She ignored him as wholly as though no one had been with her at all.  Earlier -- she had five kids with her, three other boys, and a older girl -- the girl with her had been taking care of this little boy, who had started just beating the living shit out of his Down's Syndrome brother, who was about four years older than him, maybe?  She ignored that, too, though it went on for about 15 minutes.  The older sister kept trying to make the little boy stop hitting his brother, but she got no back up.  When she asked the mom for help, the mom ignored her too.  The brother getting beat up did not defend himself at all.  He just let his little brother beat him up.  And I mean this kid was hitting him hard.

One of these kids was in my kid's testing room, the sixth grade.  She said he seemed nice.  Another kid was in there, too: a Buddhist from New York.  She said that one (who gave my kid a pencil when her pencil broke) asked everyone what religion they were.  He seemed pleased to discover my kid was Jewish.  She's the first Jew he has met in Arkansas, he said.

The other kid said he was Christian, but that it wasn't a religion, it was a relationship.

"Which," my kid said, later, on the way home, "okay, that's just sick."

"Yeah, it is a bit," I agreed.

"What," she said, "is he hanging out with Jesus?  Do they go to the mall?  Do they make-out?  What?"

"He's a Jesus 'shipper," I said.

She gave me a withering look.  "Mo-o-om.  That is not what shipper means.  Shipper is someone who says two characters in a work should get together romantically.  Like if someone thought the Doctor and Amy Pond should get together -- they'd be a DoctorXAmy shipper.  Jeez."

"Ah."  I considered.  Then, maybe a tiny bit sarcastically.  "Thanks for clearing that up."

"I spend a lot of time on the internet!  Don't judge me!"

Hot Off The Presses!

The kid's new animation!

A Warrior Cats AMV.

She says to tell you it will make more sense if you've read the Warrior Cats series.

Okay, Well...

I said I wouldn't have time to blog today, but...

Yesterday evening the kid approached me warily (she knows my, ah, strong feelings on this issue) and asked, "What would be an okay reason for a woman not to get an abortion?"

Which struck me as an odd way to frame the question, but I answered it as carefully as she had framed it. "Listen, sweetie. The choice is entirely up to the woman. That's what pro-choice means. Whether or not to continue a preganancy, any pregnancy, is up to the woman. That's the end of the question. It's her body, it's her choice."

She gazed at me, obviously not satisfied by this answer.

"If you're asking under what circumstances I would get an abortion," I said, "I would abort a pregnancy if the fetus was so damaged it could not survive, or if its brain was so damaged it was not technically alive, or if my own life were at risk. But that's my--"

"What if she, what if the woman couldn't afford--"

"That's my point," I said. "Every woman has to make these decisions for herself. No one can make the decision for anyone else. Your body, your life, your choice."

She kept staring at me, thinking this over.

"That's how it has to be," I told her.

Well, except for Eric, over at RedState. He thinks he should get to decide, for me and for my kid. And if he doesn't get to decide? He's going to start a Civil War and start shooting people.

Because one massacre in Arizona? That's not enough.

Snow

Oh, a bit of good news for once!

Snow, snow, snow here has caused the university to cancel classes tomorrow.

An extra day of winter break for me, me, me!  I can spend all day tomorrow writing instead of greeting freshmen!  Yay, yay, yay!

The kid is not as happy as I am, since she was hoping to visit her BFF, who lives near the university.  But I made her some brownie batter, which she is eating raw with a spoon (yes, at nearly midnight, I am an APPALLING mother) which has cheered her up.  A tiny bit.

Yay snow!