Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways.

...as it turned out, growing up was just as she'd feared. One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else's thoughts in your head... or may be just your old ones, minus the hope.

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was... ...Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up. I sat between my mother and my father, watching strangers on TV carry in Shaker rockers and dusty paintings and ancient beer tankards and cranberry glass dishes; people and their hidden treasures, who had to be told by experts that they'd taken something incredibly precious for granted.

I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere.

What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.

Be kind to others before you take care of yourself; make whoever you're with feel like they matter.

Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.