After much procrastination, I am finally back here to try to kick off a discussion of “Love You to Pieces.”

I cracked the spine on this about 2 minutes after it arrived in the mail. I’ve been lately struggling with trying to step out of some of my denial about my children’s needs (2 kids with very different kinds of special needs), and was eager to hear honest stories from parents in that place.

I was thrown off a bit by the mix of fiction and non-fiction – I kept looking back to the table of contents to see if the piece I was reading was real or imagined.

There were 2 pieces that moved me in very different ways, but both times because I read the words and could only think: “YES.”

In “Speaking of Love/Reading My Son,” a mom writes about introducing her son to her boyfriend. She says “the real miracle occurs as I am putting JP to bed and tell him to call goodnight to Stephen, who is in another room. JP instead lets out a bark, and, without skipping a beat… Stephen barks back… I know right then that we are understood.”

The other piece that I am far less proud to admit I identify with is in “Moonrise,” where a mother talks about her son falling in the parking lot at the grocery store – a common occurrence. She says “And why am I so angry, suddenly? Such terrible impatience rises in me now. Am I really such a witch, such a bad other, that when I’m loading groceries and my son falls, I don’t have the time or patience to cope? Why am I so angry?”

What about you? What spoke to you?