Forgiveness redux

This is how I began yesterday's post entitled Forgiveness:

Three more peace pins have fallen from my fingers, the a-sides all hand-dyed cochineal linen (which is not as pink as it looks here, but the color was saturated enough to give my camera fits) ...

with the b-sides also reflecting each person's named peaceful colors ...

Clockwise from the upper left, indigo blue and rose for Stephanie in California, any and all colors for Vicky in Washington, and wild rose colors for Suzanna in California.

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There was more, but I did the blog-equivalent of hitting "Reply to all" instead of "Reply to sender" ... I inadvertently hit "Publish" instead of "Save to draft."

So it was that some of you saw the unedited, first draft version of what appears below (with a tip of the hat to Ann Lamott's classic Bird by bird, which introduced me to the notion of "sh---y first drafts"). I didn't realize my error until later in the day when comments started to arrive in my inbox. I quickly rectified my error by reverting the post to draft mode and sent explanatory emails to the commenters. Then looked at the stats and realized the post had been seen rather more widely than I might have hoped.

Ah well.

Here's the more circumspect version of my less-than-perfect first draft:

Back in my teaching days I attended an amazing training program called the Eastern Virginia Writing Project (one of 200-some sites in the federally-funded National Writing Project). The two month Summer Institute was designed to give us the tools to become better teachers of writing by taking us through the recursive writing process of plan, draft, revise, edit ... repeat as needed, then publish (cue irony here).

Anyway, one of many prompts was to write about forgiveness. I liked the resulting piece well enough to revisit it in one of my earliest blog posts entitled Food is Love (http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/2009/08/food-is-love.html). 

Long story short, I re-revisited that piece yesterday. Without going into the details this time around, I will simply say: life is recursive and being a parent never ends, even when your kids are in their thirties. The corollary to that being: the need to seek forgiveness never ends either.

And who knows, perhaps yesterday's slip was more Freudian than not. Because it turns out my daughter was among those who read the inadvertent post. Now a parent herself, she brought a new perspective to my gaffe and sent me a text message that read, "Please don't feel guilty." To which I responded, "But I do guilt so well."

So I guess I've already been forgiven ... but I'm still bringing her some cookie dough tomorrow.

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N.B. To those kindly commented yesterday, I am keeping your comments along with the original post, which will remain a draft in perpetuity (or however long Blogger exists). Thank you all, as always, for your presence here.