Watching the sunrise over Aransas Bay and thinking about a sunrise 40 years ago over the Gulf. I stood between my parents’ folding chairs on the deck of a weathered beach house as a V of pelicans flew by like remnants of pterodactyls. I unrolled a cinnamon roll straight from the oven. Standing near them with the pink sky overhead and a warm roll on my tongue I felt a peace that comes only rarely.

I don’t spend as much time with my kids as my mom spent with me. Yesterday, the first day of our short vacation, I yelled a lot. I’m hoping for better today. Hoping to recreate for them some of the memories I have, some of that serenity and peace.

As a general rule I try not to cry in front of my kids. Once they saw me cry because I couldn’t find my wedding ring. I burst into tears so fast it surprised even me. Usually I hide in the bathroom or wait until they’re fast asleep before I have myself a good cry.

But with my aunt’s passing, we’ve all lost someone dear to us and they’ve seen me cry plenty in the last few days. Their reaction to my tears has been telling for me.

Girl comforts me the way I comfort her when bad thoughts grip her at bedtime, when her mind seizes on some incident of the day and won’t let go.

“Don’t think about sad things,” Girl tells me, patting my shoulder. “Think about something happy. Like when we were in the swimming pool. That was happy, right Mom?”

Boy comforts me the way I comfort him when he cries about Guatemala. He hugs my waist hard and wipes my tears with his finger. “It’ll be okay, Mom,” he says.

So I see that nurturing can be a two-way street between mother and child. Sometimes it’s reassuring to take comfort from a small, firm hand.

I’m looking through my old spiral notebook. Here’s what’s in it:

– Pink crayon drawing of Spongebob
– Guest list for Girl’s birthday party
– Guest list for Boy’s birthday party
– Hangman game spelling I LOVE YOU
– Detailed medication schedule for Boy, Girl and me when we all had the flu
– More Spongebob drawings — this time mine — drawn in an airplane to entertain someone
– Prayer list from my old church
– Detailed checklist of all the things I want to do to my house, room by room
– List written by Boy in red marker of Star Wars toys he wants, including prices
– Menu for last year’s Father’s Day gathering at our house
– Ideas for science fiction novel about a mom who gets a computer chip implanted in her head to help her keep up with all her shit.

Sometimes people ask me how I can post personal stories on the Internet. It’s really not that difficult for me because I’ve realized one thing: I lost my privacy a while ago, and it had nothing to do with the World Wide Web.

No, I lost my privacy the day my daughter uttered her first complete sentence. Since then she has been broadcasting the details of my life to anyone who will look her in the eye — her babysitters, her teachers, my parents, my siblings, our friends, occassional strangers.

For those of you without small children, here’s what it’s like: You are throwing a massive party and have invited lots of guests. You have cleaned your house for a solid week, shoving all the shit you don’t want anyone to see into a messy upstairs closet. When your guests arrive, your child takes each one of them by the hand, leads them upstairs, throws open the closet door and says, “See what Mommy did?”

Thankfully the people who know every last detail about me are kind enough not to tell me that they do. So how do I know that they know what they know? I had an epiphany two days ago when I was teaching Sunday school. Just sitting at eye level with these seven and eight year olds opened up some sort of floodgate and they spilled and spilled and spilled.

I talked about this phenomenon with my sister, an elementary school teacher. “We teachers know everything,” she confirmed. “And a lot of times, we don’t know what to do with the information. It’s TMI.”

So those of you with little children, don’t be surprised when you get a strange look from your child’s teacher during your next parent/teacher conference. They’ve seen inside your closet. And it ain’t pretty.