Michele Vanort Cozzens

The Things I Wish I'd Said Michele Vanort Cozzens

From The Things I Wish I'd Said...the other day when my kindergartner announced that she wanted to be in cheerleading, I nearly fell off my chair. First of all, I didn't know they made cheerleaders out of five-year-olds. Secondly, I thought of one of my lifelong regrets in having wasted my best high school athletic years on the sidelines in a short skirt. I almost launched into a history of Title IX and how when I was a young girl we didn't have the opportunity to be much besides cheerleaders; however, I chose a hopeful tone and asked my darling Camille if she wouldn't rather be the one playing the sport instead of the one yelling about it on the sidelines.

She looked at me like I was cracked.

"Mom," she said, "I like the uniform."

Once again my five-year-old proved to me that more often than not, it's all about how you look.

Michele VanOrt Cozzens explores light topics from newspaper columns she wrote a decade ago (and offers new colums with what she wishes she'd said) from baby showers and kids' birthday parties, to disc golf, home improvement, gardening and bad haircuts, she also digs deep and shares intimate feelings about sexual harassment, the "disastrous first marriage" and the deaths of her mother and young niece, a victim of the herb ephedra.