Do your kids say words in some adorable way? McKenna used to call the washing mashing the washa-washa machine. Then one day—she just stopped. I don’t know when it happened but it just stopped and we had a regular washing machine. Same with bidiculous (ridiculous) and falaxin’ (relaxing). Those just disappeared as she grew.

Am I an asshole parent? If you ask my kids, they would say yes. Want to know why? Let me list some of the most common ways.

We typically go to see Great Grandpa on Sundays. We pick him up and head to his favorite family restaurant. It’s one of those restaurants with a huge menu serving literally everything from burgers to fajitas to spaghetti to breakfast all day. You know the kind. They always have the very best cream of chicken rice soup every Sunday.

There were a few nice days in a row a couple weeks ago. McKenna decided to partake in her favorite pastime. I like to encourage any activity which gives her fresh air and moves her body in a way she enjoys so I didn’t protest too much. But what is this favorite pastime she enjoys with such a passion?

We should have done it long ago. It was one of those things we just kept putting off and putting off. Then it was just embarrassing. Who has time to actually go see someone to do estate planning? There is SO much involved with this. After much hemming and hawing and pushing it off yet again, I finally just made an appointment. It has been on our to do list for literally almost nine years.

I don’t dream about her often. It’s actually pretty rare. It was years before she came to me in dream. Like the kind of dream I could both see and hear her…those kinds never happened. She was always a glimmer just off set. More of a feeling of her presence than actually being in the room with me. It left me thinking that it hadn’t really happened when I awoke.

Yesterday we had my son’s Scout Blue and Gold Dinner. We packed up the whole family to go together. Even Great Grandpa and Regular Grandpa joined us. George was so excited to win a trophy for the Pinewood Derby Backwards Race. McKenna and George both ran around with friends while Theo spent most of the time snuggled up on my lap. I assumed it was the damn DST messing with my usually feral toddler.

TRIGGER WARNING: talk of depression, anxiety, ADHD, and systematic failures in ND diagnosis for women—this is also pretty lengthy

I had long suspected it. More in that…oooh…squirrel kind of way than the windup toy kinda way. Can you visualize the difference? It wasn’t that I couldn’t attend. It’s just that I would attend to all the wrong things. Like…put me in front of a spreadsheet and I could work that data while the building burned down around me. But I just couldn’t attend to things like following up on doctor appointments or keeping up with laundry.