This week, some stuff happened that caused me great anxiety. As the stress washed over me, I tried to ride it out like a wave. I tried to put it in perspective. And actually, for one of the first times, it worked. Not to say I haven't gone back and forth a bit, but life is like that, and human beings aren't static -- nothing about us is static.

I talked to a few friends and family members about my reaction, which I have learned in the grand scheme of things is actually more important than the event -- the repercussions of my reactions last far longer than the crises. The general consensus seems to be that 2011 Rita is really handling things far better than 1992 Rita or even 2007 Rita. Wow, 2011 Rita, they said. You get down with your bad self.

I thought this morning as I was driving home from dropping off my girl at summer camp that great friends are like that: They are our mirrors. My friends reflect back to me not a glamorized version of myself flawlessly executing under any degree of pressure, but the real version, the version who sometimes wins and sometimes loses but is always someone they regard with love.

Because they accept me with all my flaws, it means even more when they tell me they are proud of me. Because they have seen every iteration -- in one case, every iteration since I was three years old -- they are even better judges than I am of my progress or lack thereof.

Having these people in my life -- my husband, my family and friends -- brings forth the best me, better behavior than I would exhibit left to my own devices in the depths of my psyche (which would far prefer a bag of Doritos and a stack of John Hughes movies or perhaps a baseball bat and some windows). I recognize all the time that wanting to show these people I love that I can do it keeps me moving forward most of the time.

It's weird that I was thinking all this before this latest series of events occurred when I wrote my review of Terry McMillan's Getting to Happy (it's the sequel to Waiting to Exhale) for BlogHer Book Club. Even then, I wrote:

And that's what I found with the women of Getting to Happy. You get to happy, then you get to sad, then you fight your way back to happy again. The triumphs don't last any longer than the falls, but the reverse can also be true.

Normally I would've tried to find some witty way to tie back this post to a review that I wanted to tell you all about anyway, but today it's so organic as to be shocking even to me. We are all trying to get to happy. And it, by definition, is elusive, because it, by definition, is relative.

We've been going through the annual hatred of summer camp at the Arens house. She hates bowling. Rather, she hates the fact that her team never gets any strikes. She's sick of swimming with the babies and hasn't passed the swimming test yet. She doesn't want to get up in the morning.

And she blames me.

"I promise I won't bother you," she says, noticing for the 800th time that my office is in our house.

Beloved reinforced it had nothing to do with that. "You know why you have to go to summer camp."

She splashed water up the sides of the bathtub. "Because Mommy thinks I'll bother her here," she said, making the mad eyes at me. "But I'll be really quiet. I just want to be home like a normal kid."

"What are you talking about?" I said. "Almost everyone you know goes to summer camp. All your friends from your old school, all your friends from this camp, nearly all of your cousins. You are not the only child in the world who has two parents with jobs. You are completely normal."

She started crying. "I just want to stay home with you."

I didn't react well. For a variety of reasons, yesterday was a shit day, and that sort of knocked me over the edge. I picked myself up, put myself in time out in my bedroom and sobbed into the pillows.

She knocked on the door after a little while. "I'm sorry I made you cry," she said.

I tried to tell her it wasn't her, but I could see she didn't believe me.

In the wee hours of the morning, she woke up with the pirate nightmare and I woke up with puffy eyes and a crying hangover.

I don't know what normal kids do. I just know what we do, how we adjust and react.

I'm pretty sure it's normal to want whatever it is you don't have.

This morning, a friend alerted me to an article on NPR's Shots blog. The headline: To Curb Childhood Obesity, Experts Say Keep Fat Babies in Check.

It immediately pissed me off, of course. This formerly disordered eater worried incessantly about my fat baby girl. The girl people stopped me on the street to comment about. I've been watching with interest the comments on a post on BlogHer about fat talk around children. Some people are adamently opposed (as am I) and some people think it's our job as parents to limit kids' eating and make sure they don't gain too much weight.

My daughter has been "normal" weight since she was about two, and she's always been able to stop eating when she's full -- even if she's halfway through a chocolate shake. I've always praised her for stopping when she's full, but I've never stopped her from eating dessert. I don't want her to have a weird relationship with food. I just want her to eat when she's hungry, stop when she's full, and mix in some vegetables.

However, the NPR article was talking about babies and toddlers, and here are some of the tips they gave:

Cut down the time children spend watching TV or using the computer or cell phone.

We are talking about babies and toddlers. My baby was off the charts for her first full year, and I swear to you that she only used the computer or her cell phone for an hour a day.

Make sure kids are getting the right food portions for their age.

I monitored my daughter's milk intake like a hawk for that first six months. I don't care how hungry she was! I pulled that bottle or boob out of her mouth the second she hit her age-appropriate limit.

So parents and child care providers can do small kids a favor by not letting them get too big, even if that means turning off Nickelodeon.

I'm working on a post for BlogHer (I'll share a link here when it goes up) regarding an interview I recently did with a PPD/ED specialist at UNC. We got to talking about body types and how they impact eating disorder recovery. She told me some of her patients have had to eat thousands of calories a day to recover from anorexia. I gained weight very quickly just by returning to 1200 calories a day -- what would be considered dieting for most women. "I'm a very efficient food storer," I told her. "I would do well in a survival situation. I'm just not often in them."

We talked about how every body is different; every body processes food differently. And I am really sick of the media admonishing new mothers and bequeathing upon them personal responsibility for every aspect of their children's health. The degree of personal responsibility is getting ridiculous.

Yes, duh, parents shouldn't give their toddlers a straight Diet Coke, tequila and Spam diet. Yes, of course we should encourage our kids to get outside and play. But hello, world -- some kids are genetically hardwired to be a little bigger. Sometimes they slim down naturally with age, sometimes they don't. It may have everything to do with what they eat and! It may have nothing to do with what they eat. Weighing them and admonishing them and making a big deal about their weight when they are eating the same or less as the stick-skinny kid sitting next to them in the cafeteria is not helpful. In fact, it can be extremely harmful.

And. Telling a nervous new mother that she holds the keys to every aspect of her child's health -- that it is all her fault if the baby is fat -- is a great way to program a weight-watching, harping mother who will ultimately give her child a complex about food.

I really wish the media would take more responsibility for objective reporting when it comes to health news. In politics, we generally get two sides of the story. These health studies are so one-sided, so judgy. Yes, there is a childhood obesity problem in the U.S. -- I acknowledge that wholly. But I look around my racially diverse but economically homogenous neighborhood, and I don't see one obese child. Not one. I go to Midtown Kansas City, where it's racially diverse and economically diverse, and I see tons. In addition to genetics and diet, childhood obesity has a lot to do with economics -- whether kids have access to sports and camps that allow them to run and play, whether they have access to yards and bikes and streets safe to ride bikes on. Whether they have access to fruits and vegetables that don't come out of a very salty can. Whether they have something to do besides watch TV while mom and dad work.

Childhood obesity isn't necessarily something we can blame on personal responsibility of the parents. We, as a nation, owe kids safe streets and bikes and subsidized, exercise-and-fresh-air-oriented childcare and camps. We as a nation put everything on working parents -- we don't help out with childcare, we don't help out with healthy food, we don't help out with transportation to camps and sports for kids whose parents don't have cars or can't get off work to take them.

There are two sides to every story. One side of this story is personal responsibility of the parents to not let their toddlers exist on a steady diet of Ho-Hos. The other side of the story is access. We like to ignore that side, because it's a much harder thing to face. The media needs to start covering that side of the story, because until we acknowledge it, we won't do anything about it.

Despite the fact that I didn't have time to do it, I met a long-lost friend for a chat today.

I was twenty minutes late because my GPS took me to a house seven miles from the coffeeshop.

I burst through the door, beyond stressed, to see her cheerfully sitting there waiting, looking as chill and summery as a blossom.

We ended up talking for about an hour, and as our conversation wore on, I felt my pulse slowing from the being-late thing and the never-enough-time thing and enjoying the breeze and the sunshine and thinking how wise this friend was with all she had learned over the past year.

We talked about our ex-mutual workplace and the trade-off between time and money. Sometimes money equals time and sometimes time equals money and sometimes, though very rarely, they have nothing to do with each other.

While I still very much like money, I like it mostly because it means I can pay someone else to do the stuff I don't want to do so I have more time. It all keeps going back to time. I want time. I crave time. There seems to be no time. How does that happen? I looked recently at how I spent my day and tried to figure out what I did that was unnecessary. I came up with watering the flowers. Of course, if I stopped, they would die, but then I have to figure out how much I value the flowers -- which I think is a lot, because they bring me happiness and a sense of accomplishment.

So really, not that much is unnecessary.

So I'm starting to think time is the new money. What do you think? Which is more valuable to you right now?

Is this because I'm getting close to forty?

Last night, she swam the length of the pool, pausing only once to flip over and rest on her back.

Tonight, I took her back and braved cold water and only 80-degree air to practice again. More making it, more tired and heaving breaths from the little redheaded duck, who this week seems to be exerting herself physically more than ever before.

I am too tired to finish this post.

But there will be swimming.

Last week, the little angel started crying at bedtime. Howling, actually. Because she was the only kid in her summer camp class that failed the swimming test.

Swimming has been a challenge for her.

My heart broke, again, as it does every time. I'm not a great swimmer myself, and I know that feeling of being the one who can't seem to get it in the pool. I manage to get across the pool and back, but part of my paranoia about her in the water stems from my marked inability to save anyone from drowning, almost not even myself.

The next morning, I talked to the swim instructor at camp. I asked what we could work on with her. She started to tell me, and I started to seize up, because I knew I would be useless at teaching my daughter what to do -- I hardly know how to do it myself. I think the instructor thought I was trying to convince her to let the little angel go with her friends even if she wasn't ready, but I wasn't. I was asking for help.

She offered to give the little angel one emergency lesson before she goes out of town on vacation for three weeks and before the little angel's two-week intensive swim lessons start in mid-July. I thanked her, moved some stuff in my schedule around, and girded my loins for the water. The lesson is in a few hours.

This morning, the little angel tried to talk her way out of the lesson. She said she didn't care if she was the only kid with the babies in the shallow end. She said she hated swimming lessons. But I know she was upset this weekend when I made her wear her life jacket in the deep end when none of her friends had to. And she commented at least eight times how happy she was that everyone was wearing their life jackets when our neighbors took us out for a surprise boat ride last night.

"It's done," I told her as we got in the car this morning. "You have to. There are a few things in our family that are nonnegotiable, and wearing your seatbelt and learning to swim are two of them."

After I dropped her off, I started thinking of other things that are nonnegotiable in my brand of parenting: reading/writing/arithmetic, learning to drive, learning about credit, basic first aid. Then there's a deep gray chasm filled with things I want her to master: how to cook, how to sew on buttons, how to iron and do laundry, how to break down sales pitches, how to blog -- but these things don't fall into the life-and-death arena for me.

Swimming does.

She'll hate it, I'll hate it -- but this? This could be the year. She is so close. She can dive for rings and dog paddle -- she just can't do the crawl across the pool yet.

Hoping for salvation this summer.

Dear Beloved,

I had this great plan. Well, my first plan was that we would go back to the beach where we got married and, you know, renew vows and eat cake and drink champagne. Only that sort of didn't happen.

Then I told all my girlfriends I was going to have someone take a picture of me in my wedding dress, you know, sort of arty snapshot thing, that I could give you, only I would look okay in it, not totally thrown together. I had it lined up and planned for the day you were going to be working, but then you didn't work. Oops.

So then I started trying to think of back-up ideas, and the pressure of the ten-year anniversary gift started to freak me out every time I thought about it. You know how much I like ritual. I wanted something kind of formal and fantastic.

Then, just now, as I was getting out of the shower at 3, which I know is an extremely endearing quality about me, much like my inability to get out of bed and the fact that my feet stink, I decided to just take it. I didn't even wait for my hair to dry.

Only I forgot I got sunscreen on the lens of the phone camera at Worlds of Fun and didn't realize how heinously blurry these were until I emailed them to myself and opened them up, and dammit, I have a conference call in a half hour and then I have to go get the little angel, and you know this is how it is, this life thing that keeps happening while I'm planning the fabulous things I'm going to do for you.

But the carpet almost looks like the sand we stood on.

And the little beads still remind me of stars.

I couldn't get the whole dress no matter how I stretched and thus gave myself double chins. Another endearing quality: I have really freakishly short arms.

Maybe if I leaned over? Nope. Not going to happen.

Baby, I love you. I really wanted to get you something amazing, something heartfelt, but I realized I do have this blog, and maybe telling the Internet how lucky I am, how amazing you are, how astonished I am that our lives turned out so perfectly after these ten years, how much more comfortable I am in that dress than I was that day when I was so worried about the details and the sand and our relatives and friends, that today when I put on that dress all I thought about was us, and you, and how there's no one I'd rather see at the end of every day and when I first wake up and when something bad happens and when something good happens and when nothing happens at all.

I love you. Happy anniversary.

She stood on her tiptoes to put the Father's Day cards in the mailbox, her pigtails so long they hung halfway down her back, blowing occasionally in the hot summer wind already sweltering at eight in the morning. From the back, she could've been my seven-year-old sister back in 1984.

 

Most of my childhood memories are of summer -- on my grandparents' porch or under the weeping willow, visiting Gran in the hairdryer heat of Arizona or running around my own yard barefoot. Hot wind blowing through my pigtails.

Sometimes, when the wind is just right, the memories come back with such clarity, I can taste the rhubarb pie or feel the upholstery of my gran's ancient car. I can see the firefly jar.

What will she see when the hot winds blow on her at 37? I wonder.

Today the little angel and I and two of our dear friends ventured down I-70 to Heins Farms, a working dairy farm about an hour outside Kansas City. They supply Roberts. We had a grand old time, extended NY subway version to follow, but please to enjoy this cow video for now.

Here's a link to all the cow pics and videos that I took while on the Heins farm.

And!

• Why Vampires Make Bad Boyfriends -- my review of Deborah Harkness' debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, for BlogHer Book Club
• Like Jane Austen? The folks at Penguin and BlogHer are giving away five sets of two awesome books: A Jane Austen Education and Jane Austen: The Complete Novels (yes, it's all of them in one book). Comment to win!
• There's still time to sign up for my author/blogger workshop this Saturday at The Writers Place. Hope to see you there!
• Tonight Jill Miller Zimon and EM Zamotti will be live blogging the Republican debate at BlogHer. You can feed your tweetstream into the live blog or just read Jill from the left and EM from the right. Should be entertaining, to say the least!