My youngest came home late last night from her last rehearsal before her big play opening  today with a full and overwhelmed head

This is the way it always is around here in the 11th hour of anything. We need a little cry just before anything big.

I asked her what it is like carrying around the big role in a major production in your head

and all those lines

I reminded her of when I was in a Peanuts camp play as a kid, in the role of the Beethoven- playing -Schroeder (because you look like him, everyone said. Great, thanks a lot), we started the play and 5 minutes in, voila,

I forgot my lines

I looked out at everyone and said ‘Hey, can we start again?’

Honestly. Bad actor does not begin to describe how it was not my gift.

I can’t even talk to her about all those lines because it scares the wits out of me.

Except I had to ask just this once.

She said it is like having a constant reel in your head as you are going through your days, meetings, classes, homework, tests and life but your head is so occupied with the persona, the pages of lines and the play itself, that there is very little space left in that crowded bus you call your head.

I could not help but think that this is the way it is when you experience loss, sadness, difficulty or sit in a state of depression. The mind is a crowded bus and you are fuzzy around everything else.

Like so many things all our kids do, it so far surpasses what I can do that I am so excited, so nervous, so butterfly thrilled about the performance tonight, I am walking inches off the ground. My pew is stuffed with so many who are coming to see her with me. Thank goodness she does not take after me in the acting category.

Sammy as Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice

And my oldest is facilitating at the Jack Project this weekend. Sharing her gift of compassion and turning her own recent struggle into something useful.

This stuff soothes the crowded bus that is my head.

If I gave them an allowance, this week there would be a raise. A big one.