Mothering: 10 Tips and Parenting Lessons for the Parent and Child in Us All

No matter who you are or what your life circumstances are or have been, somebody (or many people) mothered you and you mother somebody (or many people). Or fathered. Or parented in some way. It's not the biology, the DNA, the color of the eyes or the color of the skin. It's about being the person or people who do the loving, frustrating, inspiring, reliable, relentless work of parenting and being parented.

We all find ourselves in the role of parent and child. That's the focus of my series of posts collected here. These are stories – from my family and others – of those primal connections that shape us and define us and that we spend so much time trying to understand, escape and/or recapture.

Fostering Love

In the ongoing series of posts called "Fostering Love" I share the story of a remarkable family in Maryland.

1. Fostering Love Part I describes Tom and Maryjane Famulari, who took in a severely disabled newborn doctors were convinced would die. The family would have none of that nonsense. Bridgette, whom they adopted in 1990, is now 26 years old.

Read: Part I: Fostering Love: Beloved child expected to die in months lives for decades. Now what? Now in their 60s, her ailing parents need care, too

2. Fostering Love Part II tells more about the family and their amazing story and explores why they chose not only to take in Bridgette, but 30 other children that "nobody else would take in."

Read: Part II: What kind of people take in dying children? Meet the family that keeps Bridgette alive

3. Fostering Love Part III moves into the present, where a recent series of family-wide medical crises shook the Famularis and made more urgent their fight to get Bridgette into a high-quality residential facility for severely disabled adults. 

Read: Part III: Fostering Love: Parents fight for a home for their severely disabled – and deeply loved – daughter

Unplanned Parenting: When Mom's too broken to schlepp

4. Unplanned Parenting: Bring back the unscheduled summer explores what happens when the parent who normally serves as the family cruise director is benched by grief. The death of my brother at the start of the summer left me unable to arrange, transport, plan, create or structure my daughter's summer.  Turns out, without a childhood cruise director, your kid has to fend for herself. When Mom's too broken to schedule and schlepp, kids revert back to an actual childhood. Oddly enough, it's the childhood many of us remember: School's out. Mom throws open the screen door to the backyard and says 'Be back for DINNER!'

Read: Unplanned Parenting: Grief brings back the unscheduled summer

College Confidential: Parenting and Listening to College Students

College Confidential: These are a regular series of posts from my perch reporting live from the trenches of college life. In 'College Confidential' I offer true, unvarnished accounts of college students' experiences in their own voices, from their perspective. My goal with these is to open communication between parents and their college-aged kids. For whatever reason, their kids are talking to me. I want to share what I've learned.

5. Read: College Confidential Part I: Dear Mom: 'Sex is casual, and I have lots of it.' 

6. Read: College Confidential Part II: Advice on how to parent college students FROM college students  

7. Read: College Confidential Part III: What college students want their parents to know: 'Yeah, I drink. Don't freak. Duh, I'm eating. Don't judge. I'm lonely. Can't talk now! Don't give up on me.'

Mothering Daughters

8. Daughter's beauty is mother's guilty pleasure

I'm a sucker for the apple-didn't-fall-far-from-tree thing. This old oak's got cankles.

I know. I know. It's a terrible thing to admit in public. It's a shameful confession. My daughter is stunning and it's my guilty pleasure. Not in a Toddlers & Tiaras creepy-freaky-horrifyingly pathological kind of way. Just in a tiny little private, prideful maternal way.

Read: Daughter's beauty is mother's guilty pleasure

Parenting through grief and after loss

9.  Living with The Great Ache: No Dad on Super Bowl Sunday 

We had an all-girl Super Bowl party Sunday, except for my delicious nephew who, at 2 and a half, already knows why peoples' eyes well up when they see him. "My daddy died," he says.

We tried, my sister-in-law, daughter and me. We tackled and tickled. We grunted when they punted. We yelled out words like 'interception' (my daughter wondered if that was like an 'interjection') and field goal. 'KICK IT KICK IT' we screamed. But it was all wrong.

Read:  Living with The Great Ache: No Dad on Super Bowl Sunday 

Motherly Advice

10. Katie Couric shares 'The Best Advice I Ever Got'

Who gave you the best advice? For me, it's always been Mom ('Men should fit like comfy shoes.') Katie Couric, the CBS News anchor (maybe not for long), just released a new book: "The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons From Extraordinary Lives." No Academy-Award winners have offered me any advice. Just my Mom. But Mom's pearls of wisdom haven't failed me yet. 

In the spirit of motherly advice, I asked my daughter what's the best advice I've ever given her.

"Breathe," she said. "But I never do it." 

Read: Katie Couric shares 'Thes Best Advice I Ever Got'