With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It's all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.

The bad times I can handle. It's the good times that drive me crazy. When is the other shoe going going to drop?

I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill.

Good kids are like sunsets. We take them for granted. Every evening they disappear. Most parents never imagine how hard they try to please us, and how miserable they feel when they think they have failed.

Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.

Let me put it this way. According to my girth, I should be a ninety-foot redwood.

What does it profit a 78-year-old woman to sit around the pool in a bikini if she cannot feed herself?