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"On Friday afternoon, I fed JD his lunch: a grilled cheese and a half dozen cherry tomatoes cut in halves. I tried endlessly during lunch to get him to say tomato. &amp;quot;Toe-May-Toe,&amp;quot; I sounded it out while holding the little red ball pinched between my fingers. &amp;quot;Ball!&amp;quot; he said, then stuffed his mouth with two pieces of the cut-up sandwich. And I felt like a failure. My son thinks a tomato is a ball. My son can&amp;#x27;t say tomato. This is the hard part of single parenting. Teaching your kid how to say tomato is on you. JD finished his milk, letting some dribble appropriately down his chin. I cleaned him up and put him down for his afternoon nap. Then, like a robot, I returned to the kitchen and cleaned up the goopy tomato seeds that found themselves between every nook of his high chair, and I swept up the crumbs that were sprinkled all over the floor (another hard part of single parenting--no one is there to take turns with when it comes to scraping crap out of your kid&amp;#x27;s high chair), and I felt that heavy feeling where you don&amp;#x27;t know if you should cry or have an anxiety attack or go to bed in the middle of the day. I called into Babble Radio Live. I was committed to...While I waited for Brett Singer, the host, to pick up and the cheesy music to stop, I gave myself the pep talk I&amp;#x27;ve been giving myself all week long. &amp;quot;Everything is fine. You&amp;#x27;re healthy. You have a beautiful, healthy son. You have a new condo (you can&amp;#x27;t really afford), still, Chrissy, Baby, everything is fine. Just peachy.&amp;quot; Blech. Brett came on, greeting me in a punchy tone, and I responded like perky Storked! blogger Chrissy should, as if everything were perfection in my world, how my readers expect me to sound. Then the questions started, and for those of you who were listening, I was honest. I blurted out that &amp;quot;I had a really weird week, and with Father&amp;#x27;s Day approaching it makes sense why I was so anxious this week, sort of a little sad and down in the dumps, just really not 100 percent there. It&amp;#x27;s another Father&amp;#x27;s Day, and he&amp;#x27;s not around for Jack and it makes me sad and I hate to say that because my blog readers are so great and they love me and they&amp;#x27;re constantly cheering me on and I really think at the end of the day they do think I&amp;#x27;m like this superhero single mom who can get through anything and I&amp;#x27;m resilient and optimistic, and I like to think that I am but I&amp;#x27;m also a real person and I&amp;#x27;m not lost on the fact that my son doesn&amp;#x27;t have a father and it makes me sad.&amp;quot; [Note] And, no, I&amp;#x27;m not whining or complaining. This is real life. Real life isn&amp;#x27;t always fluffy and pink and how it might sound in some chick-lit novel about a knocked-up blogger heroine who works for Glamour and makes everything work, with time for a cocktail at the end of the day and money in the bank for a new pair of shoes that start with M and match her baby&amp;#x27;s booties. And trust me, I could write that story and you&amp;#x27;d call me a wannabe Carrie Bradshaw and immediately stop reading this blog, so instead, lovely readers, I give you the guts and sometimes the guts are messy and they make me cry and feel anxious and worthless and ridiculous and lonely. And Brett said, &amp;quot;Well, he doesn&amp;#x27;t have a father in his life, but he does have a father and I guess that&amp;#x27;s your point...Jack&amp;#x27;s father decided I&amp;#x27;m not ready to be a father--well, ya kinda are.&amp;quot; Snark, snark. Uh, exactly, Brett, exactly. Which brings me to President Obama&amp;#x27;s 2009 (tearjerker) Father&amp;#x27;s Day address. President Obama says: &amp;quot;In many ways, I came to understand the importance of fatherhood through its absence-both in my life and in the lives of others. I came to understand that the hole a man leaves when he abandons his responsibility to his children is one that no government can fill. We can do everything possible to provide good jobs and good schools and safe streets for our kids, but it will never be enough to fully make up the difference.&amp;quot; I mentioned this exact sentiment in several interviews surrounding Rattled!--that no matter what I do, now and always, I will never be able to mend the fact that JD&amp;#x27;s father left and I will in fact be the one to explain it all in broken sentences to big, unassuming, perfect eyes. So, let&amp;#x27;s not argue about a man&amp;#x27;s right to choose today (we&amp;#x27;ve done that before, here), because when a woman chooses to have an abortion, there is no living, breathing child left affected by that choice, and I am pro-choice and I do not mean to offend anyone because I respect that people on this blog may think, hell yeah, a child is affected--it was murdered, but for argument&amp;#x27;s sake, there are real live children on this earth and they are remarkable and sweet and smell like shampoo and chocolate pudding and a tinge of sandbox sand and their fathers are completely absent, continuously oblivious--ever so disappointing. (And yes, there are absent moms just the same!) Discuss, my lovely Storked! readers. Wait! In other news, Rattled! was reviewed in The New York Times yesterday (!!!), that&amp;#x27;s right on Father&amp;#x27;s Day--how poetic, right? (I seriously had no idea. My agent emailed me with the subject line: &amp;quot;Books Of Style!!!!!!!!&amp;quot;) And the review? It was good. It was make-me-cry-in-my-coffee, dance-in-the-living-room-with-my-son-in-our-jammies, this is why I write, good. You can read it here. Order your copy of Rattled! here. Take a peek at my Rattled! reading tour here."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/blogs/storked/2009/06/happy-fathers-day-to-all-the-s>