I’m gonna go out on a dumb limb here and say that snooping in your kid’s diary, though somewhat risky and of ambivalent morality at best, is not always such a bad thing. It can give you really valuable information—insight into where they are developmentally if nothing else. Tell you where your blind spots have been, w/r/t “innocence” and all that fun, safe stuff you didn’t realize you had come to think would last forever. That can be downright lifesaving information. It can really keep things in perspective, and keep you from flipping your shit when the oldest one—always the unwitting unwilling pioneer—forces her way out of the next layer of the chrysalis you somehow always manage to not fully realize is even there. Here’s a question for ya: why does the feeling of waiting for the kids to come back from the skate park have so much, just viscerally, in common with the feeling of jealously waiting for a lover to come back from being out, from being with someone else? (2016)