Lately, I've been drawn to observing my children when they aren't aware that I'm watching them. Particularly when they're naked. They have a naked chasing game they like to play before bed, and my husband and I will often just sit and watch them running after each other, laughing and shrieking with the anticipation of catching or being caught. It is then I realize I am playing this same game, but that I am always caught - have been from the beginning of the game. I am caught in a web so sticky that it fairly glistens with tenacity. The web is made up of my life and the choices I've made and the results of those choices. Marriage, child-rearing, writing: all of them connect to form the various strands of the web, but it is the child-rearing that has caught me up the most. Parenting has turned out to be the stickiest of the strands. It has wrapped itself so securely around me that I will never be free and it forces me to ask profound questions about my life. Will I ever sleep in blocks of eight hours again? Will I ever be able to use a spoon and not a shovel when eating? Will my attention span return to that of a human being rather than a gnat? Will the sight of two naked bums running through my house remain etched forever in my memory or will it fade like so many of life's precious nuggets? These are the pivotal questions of my life right now.

Of course, I'm not thinking about the future. The sleepless nights of raising adolescents. The debates over body piercing, body art or clothing choices. I'm not considering the poignancy of watching my babies, whose naked bums run through my house, become young women, then grown women. I'm not concerned with "What Will I Do When They Leave Home?" These questions are for other parents. Perhaps they are for you.

And, too, there are other aspects of parenting that I often don't care to look at, emotions generated that are painful to deal with and sometimes seemingly impossible to solve. Anger, grief, loneliness, anguish: those pieces of the web that I avoid like a dark alley and that, even here, even now, I don't want to talk about. But I do. I am. I will talk about them. And read about them and share the hope that I feel when I read the collection of writing we have gathered here for you. It is the connection we forge with each other and our world that ennobles our situation and makes it bearable when it seems it should not be so. Read and enjoy. Feel connected and empowered. Relish the strength of the strands that have caught you and that hold you so tightly.

In this issue of the Journal For Living, we are offering you some very fine writing. As you read about the different aspects of parenting and the emotions they generate, remember that the journey we are undertaking is the most important one of our lives.

Heidi Sullivan-Liscomb