This post was titled: Look out, I am reaching into my drawers again…

(No, it isn’t as bad as it sounds… I was talking about my drawers full of old, hand-written and often half-finished scribblings of stories and poems and ideas and stuff)

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Here is another bit of writing from the old days, or at least nine years ago. My older daughter, Jessica, brought home an assignment from school. This homework was for the parents. The new teacher wanted us to write a brief note describing our child so she could get to know the kids. I think this is an awesome thing for a teacher to do. But, as usually happens when someone asks me to put words on paper, I got a little carried away.

This is also interesting because our younger daughter, Mollie, is now twelve.

I called it…

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A brief note on the care and maintenance of a 12 year old humanoid.

To whom it may concern, and believe me, you are right to be concerned;

My daughter, Jessica, is blessed with an incredible memory, but sometimes she forgets that. Like most 12 year olds, she can faze effortlessly from one extreme to another, swinging from mood to mood like a pendulum in a hurricane, or a monkey on a vine outside of a Starbucks. In moments of selflessness, she will be brought to tears at the mere thought of the plight of the homeless and destitute, and without hesitation will volunteer to accompany her mother to Mexico with their church outreach program to build houses for those less fortunate than herself. This same young woman will begin to verbally assemble her Christmas wish-list for the following year while actually in the middle of unwrapping this year’s Christmas gifts.

She has far-reaching plans and all-encompassing goals, which sometimes leave me in doubt as to whether her future career will involve designing sporty spacesuits for the woman astronaut on the go while performing open heart surgery on alien life forms, or being the first woman President of the United States to create an anti-cancer vaccine while choreographing a free form ballet done to live poetry. Whichever way she chooses to proceed, I have no doubt as to not only her success, but to the overall improvement of our species as well. She will easily solve the world’s problems, just as soon as she figures out how to keep her room clean.

If, on occasion, she seems to not be listening, it could perhaps be due to the medical problems that have plagued her right ear, and led to the loss of that eardrum.

If she once in a while seems to be distracted, well, there is no good medical explanation for that one. If you come up with one, please let me know.

She is full of love, so if she glares at you like she wants to bite a chunk out of you, she probably does not mean anything by it.

Aside from the normal physical stresses brought about by being 12, many of these fluctuations in behavior may well be the result of genetics. The sad and beautiful truth is that my daughter has a whole lot of me in her, which is both a blessing and a curse, as I so well know. Both her foot-size and the emotional smorgasbord she serves up to those around her are all part and parcel to the seething mental stew bubbling in the cauldrons of our minds. Just be glad she got a healthy dose of my wife’s down to earth, reality based logic side of the brain, and do not judge her too harshly.

As to my expectations in regard to you this year, just please keep Jessica safe, and remember that even though we are all engaged in the act of creating good adults, we are still dealing with children, and applying too much pressure to the mold will cause them to squish messily out of the cracks, and that would be a shame.

thanks, Arthur Browne.