I'm grateful for my children, who are slowly emerging to become their own wonderful, interesting, compassionate young adults - which makes me believe that along the way I must have done something right.

Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don't buy that. It's a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't. Every day I sit down and write.

I am not keeping my distance because it is uncomfortable for me, but because it is uncomfortable for them.

The nurses, I have already learned, are the ones who give us the answers we’re desperate for. Unlike the doctors, who fidget like they need to be somewhere else, the nurses patiently answer us as if we are the first set of parents to ever have this kind of meeting with them, instead of the thousandth.

Hopefully, more and more people will come to understand that a child who's "different from" is not one who is "lesser than."

We all have things that come back to haunt us. Some of us just see them more clearly than others.

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.