Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.
My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.
People ask me all the time if I'm from a family of writers. The literal short answer is no, but my father and his brothers and sisters and his mother are all people who would sit around with a Tom Collins and tell stories that seemed to get better and better each time they told them.
My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.
My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room, and I realized that out of a sea of infinite possibilities it had come down to this: a specific person, born on the hottest day of the year, conceived on a Christmas Eve, made by his father and me miraculously from scratch.
As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.
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