This is a Mothers Day post.

A week or two ago I did a workshop with Lynda Barry and the gist of the writing exercise is that you take a random prompt, say "cars," and you write a list of 10 cars that you remember. Then you pick one on a new piece of paper write little notes of concrete details about that car, then you get a new piece of paper and start with "I am ... " and write a little story about the car. This is the simplified version but it's a great exercise. You should try it.

For our main class exercise the prompt was: other people's moms when you were a kid.

We did several versions of this exercise and at the end a few people read. Two of the people that read wrote stories about how they wished the mom they were writing about was their mom and how their moms were somehow, not ideal. (In their kid voice, not like now.)

I thought about that later. I never wished someone else's mom was my Mom. I thought my Mom was better than the other kids Moms. (I'm going to give up on proper punctuation of the possessive. My head hurts {see yesterday's post} and I don't like apostrophes anyway. Live with it.)

I remember I didn't like to eat at other kids houses when their mom cooked because other moms weren't good cooks. And we always had good birthday parties. And we had pet rats. And we read lots of books.

You did good Mom. Happy Mothers Day.