On Thursdays I post from the vault. This post is from March 2010. Yesterday was not my best day. It started when Mark dropped Jafta off at school. He’s been complaining about one of his classmates being mean to him. He comes home talking about it quite a bit – saying that he’s getting hit and kicked and made fun of. Jafta can be dramatic and overly sensitive, and he can also be antagonistic, so we weren’t sure how much of this to believe. We talked to the teacher about it, and she basically . . .

What I Want You to Know is a series of reader submissions. It is an attempt to allow people to tell their personal stories, in the hopes of bringing greater compassion to the unique issues each of us face. If you would like to submit a story to this series, click here. Today’s guest post was submitted by an anonymous reader. "Remember that one time at band camp?" Nope, I never had that experience. I was saving myself for marriage. I had a pact with 2 other . . .

I want to point you to three incredible children's books I just discovered. They all have inspiring messages, and they all feature a little black girl as the main character. Children's books with girls as the main character (in non-princess roles) are woefully under-represented, and books with black girls as the main character are like a unicorn. So I'm thrilled about these new books. (For full disclosure, Matthew and Denene are also personal friends and two people I really like a lot). If you . . .