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.

Today I taught second grade Sunday school for the first time. Here’s what I learned:

– A neighbor’s goose died
– A chicken tried to cross the road and was miraculously saved from an oncoming truck
– A grandma’s dog died
– A big sister ran away from home and was living in a shelter
– A mom was going away for a week
– A dad was in charge for the summer but didn’t know how to say prayers as good as the mom
– A dad was very sick

And that was just within the first 20 minutes.

Sometimes I think this whole motherhood thing would be a lot easier if I were a Vulcan. For one thing, I would pass on my logical Vulcan DNA to my progeny, so arguments would go something like this:

Me: “It is not logical for you to prefer non-nutritional Cheetos over nutritious baked chicken, Child. Therefore, you should eat the baked chicken.”

Child: “You are absolutely correct, Mother. I shall eat the baked chicken.”

And there’s the Vulcan mind meld. All I would have to do is place my forehead against that of my guilty-looking child and I would know all.

But the real reason I wish I were Vulcan is Mr. Spock’s sleeper grip. That would be far more useful to a frazzled mom than any advice from Dr. Spock. Is the kid too cranky to sleep? Here you go Honey. Just a light squeeze on the shoulder and presto, you’ve put the child out of her misery. And yours.

Sometimes when a baby is born and the men gather out back to smoke cigars in celebration, I’ll slip outside and ask for a puff. One of them will laugh and hand me his cigar. To them, seeing me smoke is as funny and odd as watching a dog play poker.

Last night, my husband fired one up in the backyard as we sat in cracked plastic lawn chairs, watching the kids splash in the baby pool. They’re way too big for it, but they’ve concocted this game where they stand on a lawn chair, swing on a trapeze bar and then land in the pool. It’s a lot tamer than it sounds.

As we watched them sporadically play and bicker, we split the cigar, passing it back and forth. The conversation flowed just as easily. We didn’t talk about property taxes or the tire that needs air. We talked about all the blogs we liked and writing in general. He told me I was writing the best draft of my novel he had ever read, and he’s read them all.

The lightening bugs came out and we shouted, “Look kids – see the farfallies?” That’s what Boy called fireflies when he was little.

Later I thought, “We should do that more often,” and then I remembered, oh yeah, smoking is bad for you. I started worrying about the effects on my lungs and if the evening cigar had taken any years off the back of my life.

Then I decided I didn’t care. It was worth it.