When Mom Is You

This book was put together from those very notorious notes in a notebook that readers always ask about. I make notes rarely because anyway I forget where I wrote things down. I saved even this notebook only because a two-year-old girl—my friend’s daughter—used to draw in it, and her first-grader sister invented her own font. In this same notebook, I wrote funny rhymes for her and explained the difference between the hard and soft signs, which to a first-grader seemed the same. “Well who invented all these letters? Did they think about children at all?” my student complained… And here, too—notes for a line, two, a paragraph. Real situations that shook me in some way, surprised me, made me laugh. This book is a collection of little stories about big feelings. Masha Traub