So in the midst of self-reflections naturally comes reflection on one’s family. Pictured here is my mother. I think the only things I inherited from her: her round face, toes, and creativity since she is blonde and blue-eyed (not the brunette / green-eyed me). The Kirtley’s (my mother’s side) seemed so much to be the “happy” ones … the opposite to my dad’s “sadder” familial counterparts. With moths taking over my apartment right now I was looking for metaphorical meaning — a clashing of the real & metaphorical world. But as Freud said: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And I am supposing that sometimes a moth-riddled building is simply that. But these oddities of life always get me thinking (overthinking actually) and all of this led to reflections of my mother.

When I was a teen all of my friends saw her as “the cool mom” since she let us watch MTV (Headbanger’s Ball and 120 Minutes being favorites of sleepovers) and she always had a sincere respect and interest in all of us — no matter how angsty and weird we got.

When I was a little girl and liked to dress up in thift store gowns and other over-the-top finery, she let me go out into public like this … and she would lug my plastic Fischer Price grocery cart to every store we went to … indulging what she jokes about now as my “endearing and endless eccentricities.”

Her constant encouragement of my creativity and bookishness, her trying but not pushing me to not be so shy and quiet with the world has been a profound and absolutely necessary aspect to every phase of my life.

And the words “mother” and “moth.” Moths seem to be these almost-there creatures … the word moth not being completed to become something more. Mothers are the there and beyond creatures. In any case, I am going to try to embrace this mothness, a colony of sorts, and to borrow your recent phrase, Ben: I’m going to make it mine.