When I was 32, three years into my blessedly peaceful second marriage, 16 months into the motherhood gig, five months pregnant with our second child, I sat on the floor of our New York apartment in stunned silence.

My brother Sean and I were sitting at our round kitchen table eating lunch one sticky summer afternoon in the middle of my childhood, when my father opened the freezer to survey its contents and figure out what he’d make for supper that night. This freezer was always unreasonably disorganized and packed to the gills...It was like an unexploded mine, waiting to combust and assault you with frozen shrapnel the moment you opened its door.

Emi is ambivalent. She is five years old, losing her baby-fat and gaining the responsibilities of a kindergartener. At school she loves the thrill of being in "K," though she is anxious over the newness of it all. At home, she revels in her status as an older sibling even as she is bitterly jealous about having to share me with her brother.

KT Tunstall sings through my earbuds as I watch the desert roll by from the back seat of our station wagon....Suddenly I see, this is what I want to be...Her ‘20-something’ lyrics are most likely about discovering her own emerging identity, but they hit home for me right now as I realize this is where I want to be right now.

The other morning, I was digging around for something in the back of my closet when I found a framed photograph I’d stashed there in one of my fits of manic tidying.

Empathy is a hard thing for a preschooler to understand.

Remember that little slice of Americana called the drive-in? Well it’s not dead yet.