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and paint rocks and build fires that lasted past midnight. There were still terrible arguments and painful conversations, confessions, makeup sex and speechless moments, and there were still sobbing children to be held and righted and sent back out into the world. All that wicked, wrenching aching could not nullify the fact that there was still a role for her—work to be done and happiness to be had.
    She was sad, not bitter. “There’s a difference,” she said.
     
    I remember having an awful conversation once, long before I became a mother, about whether it would be worse to lose a baby or a ten-year-old or a twenty-year-old, and so on. Why people thinkabout these things, I don’t know, but we do. We hover around the edges of catastrophe—trading headlines, reading memoirs about addiction and disease and abuse, watching seventeen seasons of ER . I said it would hurt the most to lose a twenty-year-old, because you’d have loved them so much longer and your attachment would be so much more specific. Babies love everyone and everyone loves them. But twenty-year-olds? They won’t lean into just anyone. You have to earn any sliver of intimacy you share with them. Some pale memory of trust and connection has to hold against the callous disregard that is adolescence. And at twenty, they are just on their way back to you.
    Now, though, for me, the most unthinkable loss would be never to have had a child in the first place. That’s what I ended up saying to Meg (your “Aunt” Meg, who became family when we asked her to be Claire’s godmother).
    I don’t know why Meg’s single. She’s crazy-accomplished—marathons, fund-raising projects with Tom Brokaw, conference calls with Bono. She almost went to ballet school instead of college and still has Dancer Ass. She has a master’s from the Kennedy School and worked for the World Bank. She reads The Economist and People .
    But that’s not why I love her. I love her because she gave her friend most of her savings when the financial markets imploded—in fact, she insisted on it. I love her because she pinches mold off her bread instead of tossing the loaf, she bakes casseroles, and always sends thank-you notes, like the well-raised girl from Topeka that she is. I love her because she has photographs all over her apartment of African villagers from her Peace Corps years, but none of the frames match and they’re hung willy-nilly and all the nails and wires show. I love the way she is with her sister and brothers,how they tease each other and roll their eyes and say Duh but keep coming back together—helping with cable modems, flat tires, moves. I love that they are going to puke when they read this nice stuff about Meg and start calling her something totally juvenile like Mold Pincher.
    I meet people at cocktail parties all the time, women who are moody or mean-spirited, and then their charming husband comes up with a nice, fresh drink for them and I always think, what does she have that Meg doesn’t? Why does this woman get someone to sleep next to, someone to call when the dryer breaks, someone to bitch about to her friends? Meg is so much better. I’d marry her in a second.
    Sometimes, when I’m with you girls, I kind of shake my head and say Meg’s name out loud, almost like a prayer, which means that I’m thinking about how unfazed she’d be by the Play-Dohin your teeth or how much she would like the fairy hut you built or the way you made yourself a math worksheet and then filled in all the answers and gave yourself a big A+. I want her to have this thing I have that’s so ordinary and tedious and aggravating, and then, so divine.
    It’s no small thing to encourage someone to become a single parent, to take on the bottomless work and cost and heartache that comes with children. Dad thought I might not want to push it. He thought Meg would do fine with the logistics and frustrations, the “blocking and tackling,” as he put it. He was more worried about the