Sit down, we need to talk.  I've got something to tell you that I've been keeping to myself like a shameful secret for a while now. It's grown so heavy and thick, I need to get it off my conscience so I can sleep better.  Deep breaths. It's not about the children; they're fine. This is about me.  Over the last year or so, I've developed an addiction.  Every single day I crave this thing so deep within my bones that I have to have it, or I can't function. Without it, my body starts to break down and my brain begins to melt to uselessness. I can survive from dawn until lunchtime, but then I start plotting and planning and counting the hours. What errand can I skip, what chore can I put off so I can get my fix? What is drop-dead necessary, and what can wait until I fulfill that indecent need burrowing inside my head?  My friend, I'm profoundly addicted. To naps.  It started innocently enough, just a recreational resting-my-eyes. I could get up anytime I wan...

Do you remember what I was like back then, a food stamps kid so out of place among the shiny glass towers and $150 designer jeans and yet you hired me despite the uncertainty in my eyes and my lack of marketing experience but I guess I write a good cover letter and I can still remember how expensive the stores smelled and the Alamo-shaped facade of the building where I cut my teeth and I wanted so much to be as cool as you, so devil-may-care with your tinted glasses lenses and longish hair and gravelly voice and not a one of my business classes ever mentioned how much swearing there'd be in a creative office but not me I never said the right thing, never fit in, never rocked to the easy rhythm of belonging even that summer when most of the building went to happy hour every Thursday and I learned how to drink with all the young up-and-comings in Midtown and Deep Ellum and Lower Greenville and you used to rib me joking asking if you could buy my first and last drink because I'd h...

Me: *clicks new message icon" "Hello again, Karen. I hope things are going well for you. Our giveaway contest is going extremely well. Thanks again for helping get that set up. I'm reaching out for two reasons" 3yo, in the living room: Momma! Me, from the office: What? 3yo: The dog won't stop licking me Me, yelling: Chappy, STOP LICKING HER "After this current lickaway"  backspace  " giveaway is over, we're going to run a second one for Q4" 3yo, suddenly in office: Momma! Me, startled: ACK. What? 3yo *hands me a lavender ball of tulle and fake velvet*: Will you put on my princess dress Me: Okay, but then you have to go have quiet time so Momma can work *struggles to find dress's neck hole, which won't fit over child's head because she's trying to put her head and arms through the neck hole at the same time while also holding her dolly* 3yo, muffled: Ma dis dresh doeshnt fet Me: *forces head t...