Dear Wigleaf,

My four-year-old daughter keeps asking me to write something about her and I can never find a convincing way of explaining that I'm always doing that, even when I'm not. I think she would prefer a story about animals, or a story about friends getting lost in the woods, though actually she doesn't enjoy conflict in stories very much. I once sat with her for an hour trying to puzzle out her new opposition to Secret Pizza Party, which is a book about a raccoon who loves pizza, but has difficulty acquiring it. Why had she suddenly blacklisted this book she used to love, along with every other book she owned that didn't feature single words on pages, corresponding to photos of single objects?

She ignored the question for a while, distracting herself with Peppa Pigs and everything else within reaching distance, before finally whispering: I don't like when they tell the raccoon to wait a minute. And I realized, shit, that's what I'm always doing: telling her to wait a minute. But then, sometimes I really need a minute to text myself a sentence I wrote in my head that's probably about her/not about her, you know?

Guilty as charged,
Julia




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