I am sorry I missed your giveaway.

Working full time and caring for my three kids under five while my husband works evenings and Saturdays pretty much consumes me these days. My daughter is already so perceptive and amazing at 4, and has already had to form an opinion on war. We don’t watch the news, but my husband keeps reading these Bush administration whistle blower accounts, and his current one is Fiasco, about Iraq. She saw the book, and asked about the picture on the cover. I had to explain that they were soldiers, what soldiers did, that they were carrying a flag-draped stretcher because one of them had been killed. I also had to explain war. She paused, and said with real conviction and a little bit of distancing denial, “That’s bad.” She didn’t want to talkabout it anymore. I think kids have to do that to protect themselves sometimes.

Anyway, I’d love to read Comeback. Last summer, when I was pregnant with twins, all I could manage to read was the Harry Potter series, over and over again. It was a kind of escapist denial, and a way to cope with the fact that I couldn’t walk, grocery shop, cook, or care for my daughter very well. Now, though, my reading is beginning to branch out again. I have always been the kind of person who likes to confront the worst, to know how bad it really could get. Maybe it’s perverse. Maybe I’m simply trying to remind myself, every day, how lucky I am. And I think I’m also gathering information for the days to come of parenting, after the diapers and bottles and preschool and the really quite easy questions.

Let me know, and I’ll email my address. Did I also mention I’m on a budget? And that it’s quite difficult to get out to shop at all (thank you, all you dot coms).

Also I can understand not wanting to read that book again. It was hard to see Ordinary People and Schindler’s List and that one movie about the slave crossing and others in that genre, maybe call it real life horror? I can say these were good movies, wonderful films, and that I never, ever want to see them again.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, and please allow me to provide you with the opportunity to clear some shelf space!

Elizabeth