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.