We sat and reminisced, and I explained to one of her daughters that I grew up by her grandma and grandpa. A random young father bringing a kid out of the play place, said, “Wait, your father-in-law is Art B. who teaches French? I teach Spanish three doors down from him.” As we crossed the parking lot it was almost eery as we made our ways to matching minivans. I said to Lucy (perenially my straggler), “Stay right by me.” A couple feet over came the echo, “Stay right be me.”

I feel like it should bother me that we’re so alike, that our lives are so alike. Yes, we played clarinet together twenty years ago (I am freaking old, dude), and we go to the same church and my sister was friends with one of her sisters and my friend Tracey had a crush on her older brother and there’s even a less-salubrious connection that we’ve never discussed (though I could be indignant on behalf of my side), and basically this girl could be me, or I could be her, or something, and shouldn’t that be a bother?

Instead it warms the cockles, tickles the funnies. I don’t want to be special, but I do want be different, I think. Most important, I want to believe I have the life I have, the kids, the husband with the respectable job, the being-a-mom-ness, the consumed-by-childhood-things, out of choice, purposefully, not that my demographics dictated it for me. I am probably wrong about that. And tonight it’s okay.

A few weeks ago a family from church adopted their second daughter from China. They went ahead with this adoption even after finding out they were miraculously pregnant with a son. Their daughter is nine, and until her new father arrived in the country, she had no idea she was being adopted, she spoke no English, and she had lived her entire life in an orphanage.

We learned twenty words of Mandarin, with the help of a local high school teacher, so that we could sing to her in her own language and let her know how welcome she is here. Here in her new home, here in America, here at church with us. We’ve wondered how she will fit in, and how this warm, loving family will stretch and swell to fit everyone who belongs in it now. We’ve prayed and pronounced words utterly foreign to us.

Every time we passed out the sheet music with the transliterated lyrics, I cried. Some Sundays I kept it to a discreet tear or two. Today, when we preached all our practicing, when she stood at the front of the room as fifty pretty-homogeneous Americans, all secure and well-loved, stable and confident kids and their teachers sang “Nihao, nihao” I saw her parents who had come in to check that she was doing okay, and her visiting grandmother who was holding her new little brother, I left the room.

I looked in through the glass, at the slender, shiny-haired girl, in her new pink dress, next to the other visitors in the special visitor spot, and I saw her eyes light up, her smile break then widen. It didn’t really sound much like the Chinese you hear on NPR or in movies. But some of the words must’ve been recognizable, and the simple sincerity of the children singing was as evident as their enjoyment of the loud echo parts and the untranslated ending hurrah.

I sobbed. Part of it is just me, crying at the very idea of Chick-fil-A’s sublime nugget-breading spices, and part of it is — What if every child in the world was this wanted, this welcome?

This taught me a lot about the good man who is my father, and that saying you’re sorry is important and best of all: that proving you truly are sorry by becoming something different, — that that is not only important, it is possible.

All that to say that I believe in saying “I’m sorry.” The words are important, because words are important. Whether it’s saying seven positive things to counteract one criticism or being grown-up enough to say I’m sorry when I am, I want the people who eat in my kitchen and model their behavior after mine to know that their feelings, and the words they hear — the words that circle in their heads like my parents’ voices circle in mine — that they matter to me.

I want them to know I value them enough to say “I’m sorry,” even though I’m the mom and they’re the kids, and even if they’re probably still young enough to not remember if I yell irrationally about the crumbs in the car.

There are lots of opportunities to practice “I’m sorry” online. Lots.

Last week I was a little bit appalled by a self-flagellating “I’m sorry” essay on the Motherlode blog. A blogger on momlogic had written about her three-year old son asking (upon being introduced to her coworker): “Mommy, why is her face brown?” Readers attacked her for not answering the question herself. Instead, she had turned to her colleague to see how she would like that kind of question addressed.

Maybe this particular firestorm was more an indication of how fraught race relations are rather than how we teach our kids and respond to their questions. Because allowing kids to interact with other adults without parental intervention is actually a good thing, an invaluable part of learning to converse. If a parent always jumps in to interpret, kids miss out.

So the first question is whether racial inquiries are in a category apart. Is it unconscionable to not immediately set little kids straight on the appropriate modes of racial discourse? How do you answer a question like that? Do you talk about skin pigmentation and the sun? DNA, genetics, the slave trade, family group migrations from continent to continent? Do you say that God created several different shades of skin because a rainbow wouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting or beautiful if there was only one color instead of seven? Do you say skin color doesn’t matter, what’s inside matters?

(Perhaps a parent should always answer this type of question, because she knows her child and which type of answer (scientific, moral, metaphoric) would best satisfy her child.)

This mother, put on the spot by a fearless, unprejudiced three-year old, didn’t have a pat answer ready. Instead she turned to her colleague, who responded playfully and memorably.

So far, so good, right? Of course then the mother (made the mistake of blogging about it and) got attacked for doing it (parenting) all wrong.

Which is not surprising. The internet, especially strangers on big sites, can be cruel. I have seen too many good people torn apart by unthinking, uncaring strangers for the crime of being reflective and uncertain and honest to think that writers should accept such attacks as the whisperings of their own conscience.

But that was exactly what this mother did. There was too much sorry in her response to her critics. Too much mea culpa and cringing and “feeling ashamed at the cowardly way I handled my own son wanting his mommy to help him work through something in his head.” She said she “dropped the ball entirely” and worries that it wasn’t her son who hurt her colleague’s feelings, it was her. Of course by all accounts the colleague, who humorously and child-friend-ily compared her skin’s color to peanut butter, didn’t seem all that hurt. But the mother continued on about how she “blew her chance” and missed a teaching moment — a moment when it was she who needed to be taught. She concluded that she is flawed.

I don’t want to criticize this woman because she already seems too self-recriminatory (and also it sounds like she is a great, conscientious mother), but it made me think of other instances in which I have heard people — especially women — apologizing too profoundly for things that either a) aren’t that big a deal or b) aren’t really sins or crimes or character flaws, but rather mistakes or things that happen in the course of everyday life.

I see my sister over-functioning in her relationships, eager to overlook infelicities and mold herself into someone agreeable (loveable). I hear friends apologizing profusely for missing a husband’s phone call or a mother at the park apologizing to her child for the kid’s falling down when the mother wasn’t being hyper-vigilant every second of the day.

Women apologize for being sad about secondary infertility when they know that some women have borne no children or for not being ecstatic about a surprise pregnancy because some would be overjoyed. I apologize for  finding being a stay-at-home mom occasionally frustrating because I know some women would love to stay home.

My oldest daughter has learned to apologize when she spills the milk, and last night she tried to gulp back her tears when she banged her arm badly on the wooden leg of a chair, after a particularly spectacular gymnastic feat. I was reading a book, and she is aware and old enough to know how much I dislike interruptions. But her arm was pretty bruised up and I was happy to get her an ice pack and coo soothingly over her pain.

I felt bad that she thought she had to restrain her expression of hurt because it might inconvenience me, that she feared my impatience. I am here to comfort her and make things right in her world (even if my book was getting good right then). She doesn’t have to say “I’m sorry” for needing me; she doesn’t have to apologize in order to get my attention and affection.

And neither does my dad.

Dick didn’t like my Rory post, the post that gave me FITS. He said I didn’t make the epiphany part clear enough or engaging enough, and he hated the first paragraph and I should’ve included examples from the Reviving Ophelia book of what truly bad bullying looks like because to him the stuff I said Rory did sounded plenty bad.

So here was my point:

For years Rory was THE Bad Guy in my mind. Whenever I thought about boys teasing girls, or church youth activities, or riding the bus, or walking the halls of my high school in my bathrobe after swim class, or Survival, or juvenile espionage, or Sally entering junior high school, or about driving past the K. home on my way to see my parents, I always thought about Rory and what a terrible, awful, no good, very bad kid he was.

He was THE PITS.

Then Sally got punched in the face, and I stupidly provoked my middle school mean girls on Facebook, and my mom and my good friend from that same middle school recommended the book that gave me an incredible epiphany.

Which epiphany was this: Rory was actually not quite as terrible as I thought. In fact, compared to the book’s description of sexual harassment, the grabbing of breasts and pressure for meaningless sexual encounters and physical objectification and demeaning of mental aptitude and basically treating of young women as stupid, shopping-consumed, fluffy, inane, valueless sexual kleenex –

COMPARED TO THAT?

Rory was . . . someone I almost wish I had gotten to know when we were young.

Oh, fine, I’ll say it:

COMPARED TO THAT?

Rory was a nice boy.

And you might think, well, things have changed: that book is probably describing what goes on in schools today, so of course Rory’s hyper-juvenile pranks would look endearing and Wally-from-Leave-it-to-Beaver nostalgic.

But that book was published in 1995, the year we graduated from high school. Now, I know that not everyone experiences the sexual harassment-type bullying. I didn’t, not really. And trying to avoid it is one of the reasons we moved to a small town in Utah for our daughters to grow up in. I expect that if there are problems at school or church, I will know the parents of the kids causing problems, and I will have some say in how things are handled. (Oh, will I HAVE SOME SAY.)

Mostly, though, the point is that I would love for the neighbor boys to toilet-paper our house when my daughter is thirteen, and for the sex talk she hears when she is seventeen to be about NOT HAVING SEX ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT BUT JUST HOLDING EACH OTHER INSTEAD.

What mother wouldn’t want that for her daughter?

I think little girls liking horses has become less common only as little girls have been deluged with Disney Princess paraphernalia. And make no mistake, the Disney Princess love is strong in the hearts of Jane’s daughters.

Last Saturday I got Dick to help me with our church kids activity. Chrysanthemum helped us pitch a big tent in the primary room, and Dick dressed up as King Benjamin (a Book of Mormon prophet-king like Solomon in the Old Testament). We joked that I was “Queen Benjamin” in my Egyptian gallabeya, and Susan wanted to be a Nephite Princess. In her squeaky, excited voice she confided: “I’m going to be Sleeping Beauty Nephite Princess.”

And Spot helicopter-parents her Jasmine and Snow White dolls (apparently she suspects that Rachel down the street harbors Disney-figurine kleptomania).

But Sally has fallen in love with horses. She draws horses whenever she’s not reading about them, and begs to ride the ponies at Farm Country. She has decorated every inch of her room with equine art, printed off the internet and colored or traced from her special “How to Draw Horses” book.

I almost hope she’ll move on to unrequited boy crushes before Dick has to sell a kidney and build a corral in the backyard.

Jane

So it’s a bit disconcerting that Susan, my middle child, seems to be three going on thirteen. Why would anyone want to be thirteen? Or to mother a thirteen-year old? Perhaps I am over-dramatizing. (Would I do that?) You tell me. Is she three-and-a-half or thirteen-and-I’m-going-crazy?

Susan Knows

That Mommy Is Not the Smartest Person Alive
(I thought this illusion lasted MUCH longer)

Dick: Mommy’s a genius. [Because I know where the juice lives.]
Susan: Mommy’s not a genius, she’s a mommy.
Dick: Mommy can be both a mommy and a genius.
Susan: Mommy, you’re a mommy, right?

That Mommy is still Pretty Darn Smart

Never go to sleep with gum in your mouth.

That Writing is a Powerful Thing

Susan: What starts with the letter Barbie?
Mom: “b”
Susan: What starts with the letter graham cracker?
Mom: “g”
Susan: No, that starts with the letter “bah.”
What starts with the letter trash can?
Mom: What do you want me to say?
Susan: I want you to say “d.”
Mom: Okay, trash can starts with a “d.”

Her Place in the World

Middle child syndrome? And in Sally’s Dollar Store Beer Stein? Apple juice. Of course. You knew that.

Mommy Sometimes Reacts Irrationally

Susan got the blue plastic mug today, my favorite Dollar Store mug, perfect for Swiss Miss Dark Chocolate Sensation with whipped cream on top. Susan didn’t appreciate the mug; she wanted a different cup. And Mommy lost it: Dang it, I have better things to do with my life, MY LIFE, than negotiate with you over which cup you drink your milk out of today. Don’t I? DON’T I?

But Susan Doesn’t Know

That Acting Irrationally is a Sign of Maturity

Mom: Susan, quit bugging your sister.
Susan: But I’m only bugging her a little bit.

Mom: Why did you DO that? or What’s wrong honey?
Susan: I don’t KNOOOOOOOOOOW.

Words to Describe Female Anatomy

[Mom takes off her sports bra]
Susan: I can see your elbows, Mommy!

That She doesn’t Love Everybody

[Mom and Susan looking at pictures online]
Mom: This is Mommy’s friend’s baby.
Susan: Oh. This is my favorite baby.

Jane Has Learned

Old-Fashioned Stitches are Best

They’re less likely to become infected. Also, shaving is not recommended, as it irritates the skin. Taking stitches out of a hairy person takes a long time. Mommy would rather see blood gushing out of her own [insert vital organ] than out of her baby’s head.

Mood Swings and Temper Tantrums and Sweet Beseeching Looks

Are probably just age-appropriate. Whether you’re three or thirteen or thirty.