Four. Or five. Or six, if we're starting with the first time I really thought about you.

I've been thinking a lot about friends and lovers and family and what it all means, what it means to be friends and lovers and family.

I've talked a lot lately about trying, making a concentrated effort to be a good person.

I just think that it's so hard to be sincere and honest AND think about the effect you're having on other people. Not impossible, but hard. It takes a lot of thought and time and attention span to think that way, to think about the future and other people's brains and your own brain and your desires and feelings and other people's desires and feelings. It's easy to say what you want to say, to put your two cents in, to make your opinion heard. It's harder to live the life that you want to live and hold onto everything that you love.

I've had a lot of concerns lately about Kane, his being eleven, his being in sixth grade, his inching towards teenagerhood. We've all either been through it or are heading towards it, so I know it's not an impossible mountain to climb. But I feel very much like I wish it could be easier, or I wish he could just already know the self-aware, stand-up, impossibly smart person that he's going to be in ten years. I wish we could skip this part where people are mean and it hurts him. He told us recently that he can't wear this particular jacket he has, this corduroy jacket with a fleece collar, a jacket that Jason and I both have exact versions of, because "I already get called a nerd enough". It's heartbreaking in a very personal way having been a person who had to start finding ways to endure acne jokes at the age of eight, a person who was "weird", a person who wore clothes from Bargain Town and went to school not knowing that there was anything about her that deserved ridicule. And I know that a lot of us withstood ridicule, that I'm not special in that experience. But that doesn't make it any easier when your eleven-year-old tears up when you ask him how his day was.

Jude is pretty solid right now. He tears up when we make him do his homework, or when sundown is too close to let him wander the neighborhood, or when we won't let him have that thirteenth piece of candy. He is impossibly cool. I wish I was as unapologetic about my coolness.

I feel constant pity for their mother, a woman who tries to find ways to spend less time with them. She is missing out on her children, on actual human beings that her body made, and when I look at Reed and every time my body aches because I have to leave him with people who are not his family I wonder how Mary can seek this out, can actively seek out how to spend less time with them. Every time I hear them talk in their sleep I think how it's a special gift, an inside joke that she's giving away to a crazy person who obsesses about socks.

Reed is a powerhouse, a tiny little person who has his own agenda and his own rules and tells us all about his life at every chance he gets. He tells us that there are boogers in his ears, that the kitty hit him, that he wants wadah and fizzy-fizzy and be-bies (water and coke and french fries, the basis of any healthy diet), and I ache to my core when I look at him because I know that I have an open invitation to totally fuck him up if I make him anything like myself. PLEASE, GOD, LET HIM BE NORMAL, let him be sure of himself and unafraid and steadfast and hardworking, let him be a good man who takes care of his family and loves his wife/husband/significant other/children/whathaveyou, let him be a person who can stay calm and remember himself and let water slide off the duck's back, PLEASE just let him be a rock, a stable person who loves life and sucks it through his teeth at every turn.

And God, while you're at it, please let me be a woman who is constantly thankful for the man in my life, a man who is a rock and is constantly reminding me how to be positive and excited and happy for my life.

Happy anniversary, Jason. I love you.