Time with my Daughter

Lila is home from school today not feeling well and working on her missing assignments from her creative writing class that I’m helping her with. We keep going off track. She needed me to help her with an assignment where she has to write a fictional story about a crime. How it started, dialog, a conclusion, etc. Lila hates writing but when I was growing up this was my jam. I LOVED writing, still do always have.

So I was helping her come up with an idea and we decided on a story about shoplifting. Then I told her the story about how my cousin, sister, best friend and I all got caught shoplifting from Rite Aid when I was her age. For anyone that doesn’t know my 12 year old daughter, she’s a really good kid. Rowan, my 15 year old son calls her “The Square”. Anyway I felt like she was old enough to hear that story to draw inspiration from.

Then she got to asking me what other “bad” stuff I used to do as a middle school kid and I told her all sorts of rebellious mid to late 90s types of hijinks that people my age used to get into before technology was all over the place. I didn’t tell her anything awful, just typical innocent stuff. I told her about how we used to spend hours making prank calls, I told her how we would sneak into rated R movies, I told her how we’d tell our parents we were taking the bus to the mall but really we’d go hang out in downtown Seattle. She thought all of this was so hilarious. Then it got into me telling her how different yet similar things were. My best friend and I didn’t have TikTok when we were in middle school but I do have a bunch of VHS tapes in my basement because we had our parents’ camcorders. Same thing basically, just recording ourselves being ridiculous. I also have a lot of cassette tapes where my best friend and I would “interview” one another and pretend we were famous. Also, cassettes of us singing with her karaoke machine. I really need to find myself a VCR and a cassette player so I can share these things with her. I want her to know what her mom was like at her age. I’m so glad I kept these things.

This post doesn’t have much to do with cancer besides the fact that when you get a really scary health diagnosis and you’re a mother it really makes you slow down and make sure that you’re bonding with your kids as much as possible. I love that Lila loves hearing my middle school stories. I love it so much and I love her so much and the amazing young woman she is becoming.