My daughter often prefaces an interaction with me by turning to face her audience and—with a grand, sweeping arm gesture—announcing, “Hey! Everybody! This is my Mom!”

It’s sort of charming, if you can overlook the fact that 1) the room is empty when she does this and 2) toting around an invisible audience is a wee bit creepy. She’s always marched to the beat of her own drum, and I never really gave it a second thought… until recently.

I’ve now been blogging about my kids for four and a half years. I don’t use their real names online. I don’t share pictures of them. Both kids are aware of this and both of them seem to accept it as the normal state of affairs. But now that Sleep Is for the Weak is out, my daughter thinks she’s found her real-life audience.

“Mom,” she says, picking up my copy of the book off my desk, and waving it around like a trophy. “I’m totally famous! You wrote about me! In this book!”

“Yes, dear,” I tell her, trying not to laugh.

Someday I will explain to her that mostly, she’s a legend in her own mind. When she’s older, we can have a philosophical discussion about the many reasons to publish a book even if you’re not going to make any money off of it. And if she were just a tiny bit older, I would be able to make her understand how carefully I have guarded her and her brother throughout my (relatively) short career as a writer, and why.

But right now, she’s ten-and-a-half, and as far as she’s concerned, she’s famous. And so am I; she likes to tell random people “My mom’s in a book! Writing about me!”

One of the nicest things that’s happening as a result of the book is that we’re having a publicity tour of sorts, with various contributors heading to different venues as is practical. I’ll be doing three appearances in connection with it, and the first is this Friday, at the Decatur Book Festival. My kids will be with their dad, this weekend, so that’s one appearance where I don’t have to deal with what’s about to become a difficult issue.

For the two other appearances, though, I have a little problem. My daughter wants to be there.

My son (bless his little fruit-fly-memory-span heart) loves me and thinks the book is neat and I’m swell and hey, has he told you all of the battle stats on his new Bakugan yet? No? Well, I hope you have an hour free to hear all about it.

In other words, his level of interest in all of this falls slightly above his desire to go outside and pull weeds, but significantly lower than, say, the urge to twirl around in circles in the kitchen while insisting that it helps him to think.

But my daughter, well, she knows she’s part of the book. She thinks that’s important. (It is, though maybe not for the reasons she thinks.) She thinks I’m important. She wants to know what it’s like, at a book signing, and she wants to know what sort of people are paying real honest-to-goodness money to read about her and her brother. She wants to come clap for me. She wants to tell people, “Hey, that’s me in there!” (Though the irony in that is palpable, as she’s incredibly shy around people she doesn’t know.) She wants to be able to say she was there.

And while logically I know that there’s probably no harm in letting her come to one of these events, my Mama Bear instinct recoils against that idea. Not because I think it’s unsafe. Not even because I think she’ll be bored (though I bet she would) or disappointed (very likely). But because I don’t want to share her.

I know—I share her with a lot of people through my writing, all the time. But it’s not the same. And I don’t want it to become the same.

I’m still trying to decide if I’m being a good mother, in this, or just extremely neurotic.

Maybe don’t answer that.