I can’t run his race with him. But I understand. For all of our differences, we do have this. This, we will always share.

The allure of mommy solitude is not enough for me to ignore the sound. I reach for the iPhone.

My pre-teen daughter has just begun to experiment with make-up. I watch with slight dismay.

I need you Preteen Ballerina, to keep dancing. I need you to show my daughters that a ballerina can be curvy, strong and imperfect. I need you to help me change things.

And that’s when everything clicked for me up there on that snow-covered beast of a mountain and I realized – Hey, you know what? I can do hard things.

The first day of his last year in high school. The first of many lasts is my immediate future. He jumped up ready to tackle it, even if I wasn’t.

Someone let out a giggle, and that started it—we all began to laugh. All of us except Steve, who was still searching the wall in vain for this mysterious “other painting.”

We do have to accept that while we cannot control most of this world, we can choose our response to it.

There are so many things I want to tell her about what it means to be a decent, kind human.