My daughter loves to picture life on the page. I get drawings on scraps of paper, backs of envelopes, colored paper, and anything that’s blank and white. She’s ordering her world in these drawings: her family and who belongs in it; animals and their families; stars, planets, and stuff in the sky; her friends….and just about anything else she comes in contact with.

I don’t pass by these quickly. So much is expressed in them, over time, they string together a story in themselves. Once and awhile I date one and throw it in the "Coco Art File." She’ll be able to look at a part of who she was back then: stick figures with block hair; animals with elongated necks and funky ears; houses with chimneys, always with chimneys.

It’s a habit I encourage and bear with when I am busy cooking and she again presents me with another rendition of the lion family or the new puppy/kitty family she’s invented. It’s a habit that could, as I’ve grown to find, save her. For in those stories are the bits and pieces of her SELF, her truth. And as far as I can tell, the truth shall set her free.