An earlier version of this was shared in the June letter

I swiped one of my kid’s drawings last winter. As soon as I saw it, I knew I needed to keep it. I wanted to frame it. I wanted to embody it. I wanted her to embody it (yet never wield its energy against me or her dad).

I hadn’t really thought beyond framing it and hanging it on the wall, but last summer I went to a friend’s huge birthday party where he had a sticker swap table. So many silly stickers. People just did things! Adults, with jobs, made funny little stickers and shared them with their friends. I had recently been cracked open, literally and figuratively, by the birth of my third baby and buying a new house kind of unexpectedly and getting bees all within six weeks, and through this crack came the really embarrassingly obvious realization that you can just do things?? You can just have an idea, it doesn’t need to make money or be “worth” your time in a material capitalistic sense, and just do it?? If it has no point other than your own enjoyment or amusement that is simply fine?? You don’t need to think about it for months or poke holes in it or convince yourself it’s dumb before acting on it??

I don’t know where this soul-deep reckoning was in my early 20s when I really, really needed it. Maybe it is something that really only comes into focus in a new and urgent way as one creeps closer to 40, or maybe it just took this long to outgrow my pathologically practical upbringing. I simply don’t care anymore. I want to see this image my kid drew plastered around town in little corners, on hand dryers and refrigerators and electric boxes. In bars and in bathrooms. On corners near crosswalks. And so I asked that friend with the sticker table at his birthday party where he gets his stickers printed. And then I ordered some. I’m going to make more. Because who cares? Someday we’ll all be dead and at least we will have had some fun stickers beforehand.

Perhaps one of my most toxic traits is talking myself out of my own ideas. I can convince myself that my whims are not worth the resources (time, effort, sometimes money) they would require. I think my sharpening sense of time’s finite nature and living with an audience of children has helped me tamp this down a bit.

Lately I’ve been wondering if taking my kid’s art and turning it into something I secretly post in public, even anonymously, is somehow exploitative. She didn’t ask for this. I was recently in a small town far from home, alone, with a stack of these stickers in my purse. It’s the kind of small town that books up in the fall, it’s not so much lack of hotel rooms as lack of parking along the tiny streets. It’s the kind of place people love to go for a long weekend for leaf peeping. A little artsy with an antique railroad. Shops with terrible hours. Weird art. And I saw a few places others had deemed appropriate for stickers, but I stopped myself. Would it be weird to tell her that I stuck her art in this small town she’s never heard of? Would she demand to come see it someday, so she can see where her art landed? This isn’t the kind of place I have any desire to bring my children. It is notoriously hilly and the shops are tiny and it would not be an enjoyable experience. Should I have an ethical framework to guide where I decide to hang this sticker? Why am I using my kid’s art as a way to feel creatively productive? Isn’t that kind of gross? Why don’t I just make my own? You can just do things, you know. My kid knows. Do I know?