When my oldest son started his first day of Kindergarten I, like many mothers, cried the minute he sat down in his classroom. He was a big boy now. He was entering a new phase in his life, yet I still remember the first day I held him in my arms as a newborn.

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.

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.

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.

Others may have begun their parenting journey with a positive pregnancy test and parenting book, but I started mine in front of the television.

I'm going to confess something that might sound shocking coming from a writer who often takes as her subject the complex and sometimes dark experience of mothering young children . . .