When my girls left for college, I saw the Facebook posts of those giddy parents who skidded out of the parking lot after helping their last child move into their college dorm. I smiled at their joyriding into this new chapter of their adult lives. My take was slightly different. In fact, some might even liken it to a one-car procession of the funereal variety. I followed my morose drive home with three days on the couch, grieving a part of my identity that was no longer appropriate or healthy to hold on to as a source of daily fulfillment.

I am starting to see my family tree like a never-ending relay race, where one generation passes the baton to the next, picking up speed as each of us takes her turn to run in the world.

When I think of my grandma growing up on a farm in Oklahoma, married at the age of sixteen and having my mom at the age of eighteen, I am stunned by the ways in which my mom’s, mine, and my daughters’ young lives have differed.

Every so often a quote will grab me by the collar. Well, that’s not entirely true since I am so into comfort these days that I’d be hard pressed to find a shirt stretchy enough that includes an actual collar, but you get the idea.

It goes against everything I have ever aspired to be to choose “less” as my word for the year ahead. Hell, even my last name of the past 31 years is Moore.

I first started claiming a word of the year when my mom was in rapid decline. I chose “acceptance” for the first two years of this practice because no other word made as much sense while watching one of the greatest loves I will ever know fade away from me and be utterly powerless over it.

I like to think I have an active imagination, but my daughters say the technical term for what I have is “anxiety.” For the record, I think my daughters are rude.

Why is it cute and book-worthy when a kid in a wolf costume has wild daydreams about adventures in the jungle and not when a middle-aged woman sees a mysterious box tied with a bow on the beach and wonders if it could be a portable meth lab?

The early songs are the ones that came to me by force in the years that my parents bought the records, eight-track tapes, and eventually cassettes that were played in our home and in their cars. Our eternally long road trips to Bakersfield, where my brother and I whined and fought and just generally suffered and caused suffering were framed, ironically, to the perky beat and lyrics of Anne Murray’s “Snowbird.” During that phase of life, all I could hope was that my brother would make like that snowbird and spread his tiny wings and fly… the hell away from me.

Knock. Knock.

I’d answer with the proverbial who’s there, but I know very well that this is the knock of a solar salesperson. This is suburbia 2022. No one knocks unless they’re selling something and, in sunny California, during what I hope is the apex of global warming, there’s a 90% chance that it’s them.

Silly me. I keep thinking I have reached acceptance with my mom’s mortality, like it is a physical place I can arrive to and decide to stay. Build it a picket fence and a a flourishing garden with a deep-rooted tree to symbolize its permanence.

1530 Ben Roe Drive is the unofficial fifth member of my family of origin. I say “unofficial” only because the therapists in my office might otherwise stop referring clients to my coaching practice, citing annoying evidence from their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But between you and me, She’s as much a part of my family as anyone connected to us by birth or vows.

My best friend and I were looking for adventure during our senior year of high school. We found it at a fraternity house party full of rugby players who introduced us to new drinking games, and rape.