We can glut ourselves with how-to-raise children information . . . strive to become more mature and aware but none of this will spare us from the . . . inevitability that some of the time we are going to fail our children. Because there is a big gap between knowing and doing. Because mature, aware people are imperfect too. Or because some current event in our life may so absorb or depress us that when our children need us we cannot come through.

There is a time to separate from our mother. But unless we are ready to separate-unless we are ready to leave her and be left-anything is better than separation.

If his mother was drowning and I was drowning and he had to choose one of us to save, He says he'd save me.

Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.

Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love- and its partner, hate. Our father-our "second other"-elaborates on them.

Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone--childhood's end. We have left asafe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be.

Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.