On New Year’s Eve, I sat cross-legged on my bed, staring at a blinking cursor and a blank screen. This is a kind of torture particular to writers, and I know it well.
Grace ambled in with a book after lunch. It was a book we’d given her for Christmas, Infomaniac: Become an Expert in an Hour! With more than 4500 facts in brightly-bordered paragraphs, Grace loves to jump from page to page and fact to fact. Ask her to finish a chapter book without illustrations though, and you may as well ask a monkey to make an omelet.
She crawled under the covers fully clothed, and opened her book.
“Grace,” I sighed, “Mommy is stuck. I’m not sure what to write about today. Do you have any ideas?”
“OF COURSE!”
Grace always has ideas.
So she began in on her brothers. If you ask Grace, her brothers get all the attention, what with their autism, OCD, ADHD, and DMDD hogging the limelight. There’s never enough time for Grace to explain the many ways in which her brothers torture her.
“Sometimes, Noah gets frustrated, but sometimes he lets me love on him and play with him. Mostly, he’s stuck in his special corner playing with his electronics, but when he’s out, he’ll sometimes play with me. Jesse doesn’t like to do a lot with me, either. Sometimes when I bribe him, he will.” (Atta girl, Grace. Start the swindling young.) “But mostly, not.”
“Well honey, what DO you think they like to do?”
“They love to play football with each other, but don’t like spending a lot of time as a family. I think that’s because they are happier by themselves. And if they hang out with anybody, it’s usually each other, because they have the same interests. Also, Jesse has a tendency to start things and not finish them.”
It was all accurate. And it sounded very mature, though this is the way Grace has always talked. She is sharp witted, and comfortable with adults, and her sarcasm is as strong as her temper.
