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The other morning, I was digging around for something in the back of my closet when I found a framed photograph I’d stashed there in one of my fits of manic tidying.

When I was 32, three years into my blessedly peaceful second marriage, 16 months into the motherhood gig, five months pregnant with our second child, I sat on the floor of our New York apartment in stunned silence.

Is there something the matter with me? As a wife? Because here’s the thing: I don’t always like to do my “wifely duty.”

My brother Sean and I were sitting at our round kitchen table eating lunch one sticky summer afternoon in the middle of my childhood, when my father opened the freezer to survey its contents and figure out what he’d make for supper that night. This freezer was always unreasonably disorganized and packed to the gills...It was like an unexploded mine, waiting to combust and assault you with frozen shrapnel the moment you opened its door.

“I’m a grown woman who is not, I repeat, NOT going to be seen by the outside world as simply another mommy, a vanilla suburban parent, even when my kids aren’t with me in a minivan. I’m still cool! Damn it.”

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for all the lessons my parents taught me. I am grateful because those lessons are now all I have. I don’t get any new advice.

Emi is ambivalent. She is five years old, losing her baby-fat and gaining the responsibilities of a kindergartener. At school she loves the thrill of being in "K," though she is anxious over the newness of it all. At home, she revels in her status as an older sibling even as she is bitterly jealous about having to share me with her brother.