Of course, Molly threw her own 21st birthday party. She'd been waiting to celebrate this day for years. "I just want to be able to go where my family and friends go," she said, having grown up the youngest in both her family and her grade. Saturday night in Minneapolis her friends and family went [...]
My daughter Molly has been setting her own pace since she took her first steps (to her Great-Grandpa Fey in the visiting room of his nursing home). A Thoreau-ly confident English major, she occasionally keeps pace with her companions, sometimes trails them and, every now and then, she zooms ahead. She likes to step to [...]
As I make hasty plans to celebrate the final college graduation of my maternal career, I am pondering the beauty of parental transitions. I should be confirming reservations, packing, even figuring out what I’m going to wear. But I accidentally pulled out an old shoebox that sent me down a familiar detour and now I’m [...]
As soon as I was old enough to understand what a family was, I knew that I was grateful for mine. I recognized pretty early on that not every father would sneak his kid out of summer camp for a pep talk and an ice cream cone, and not every mother would drive over to [...]
One of the best things about your children growing up and leaving home is that every moment you get to spend with them thereafter feels like a gift. Another best thing is seeing them stretch themselves in ways you could not even have imagined. I enjoyed both when my daughter Molly came home this past [...]
