It's just like nurses in a hospital tend to know more than the doctors most of the time; if you really want to get the answers to a question about court, you should spend more time buttering up the clerks than the judges.

If there's something as good as [him] in my life, I'm going to pay for it.

At 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

I think there are crossroads in our lives when we make grand, sweeping decisions without even realizing it.

You'd think someone who'd been to medical school would be able to hear through a stethoscope that somebody was empty inside.

But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?

parenting isn't a noun but a verb--an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat.