Okay, Ms. Fate, I admit that was pretty funny --

Sort of.

Funny and
a little painful,
like the funniest things
usually are.




If you've read the previous post, you'll understand.

I was having Chinese food for lunch with two of my daughters yesterday. When the meal was over one daughter opened her fortune cookie and then got a funny look on her face.

"Oh!" she said. "I'm sorry Mom, I'm pretty sure this was
supposed to be yours."


We all had a little laugh about it.

Then the other daughter opened her cookie and pulled out the slip and the laughing started for real. The fall off the chair snorting kind. In fact, it's a good thing we were done eating or there might have been an unfortunate laughter-induced rice incident of some kind.



Well.

Of course we immediately decided that if my cookie contained the same message, it was an obvious fortune-cookie-malfunction and the whole episode would have to be declared null and void.

So I opened it . . .

and . . .



Seriously?
Who cares about beauty and virtue?

"Bummer," one daughter said.

"That sucks," said the other. "You could make money off the 'beauty', but the 'virtue' would probably somehow get in the way of that."

My first thought was that I should of course take the message about possessing great beauty to be an indication that fortune cookies are inherently flawed as a predictor of actual lifetime achievements.

Or perhaps I should apologize to Ms. Fate for screwing things up by still missing the boat when she gave me two out of three odds for picking the right cookie.

"It's okay," I said. "I'm afraid that ship has sailed."

"Really?" observed my daughter. "Because I don't think it has. It seems like you're still looking for your ticket."

My girls are pretty smart cookies.

The funny thing is, I'd be just as delighted for either of them to become an accomplished writer as I would to become one myself.

That says something about being a mother, I guess.

And on that note (drumroll . . . )

here's the still-in-progress "Stay at Home Mom No. 3"




The central motif is finished, but I've been a little slow completing the piece because the words I planned on initially no longer fit once the characters actually landed.

It happens.

And when it does, I just sit on it for awhile. And I pay close attention.

Because the piece always tells me what it's trying to say eventually.

Henry J. Kaiser said:

When your work
speaks for itself,
don't interrupt.

I've found in my work that if I get out of the way and let things develop at their own pace, they usually grow up to be what they were meant to be.



I imagine Ms. Fate would probably say the same thing.