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I was much closer to my father than to my mother when I was growing up. My father and I had an intellectual connection; we both loved to read and to talk about books -- "philosophize" as my mother used to say, shaking her head. My father introduced me to good poetry and encouraged me to write.

My mother is a passionate but practical woman. She is a neat freak -- I'm sorry to say that I remember too many Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings spent dusting and vacuuming and mopping hardwood floors under my mother's hawk eye -- and loves to shop. She likes a good party and will sacrifice her time and energy recklessly to help people in need. I don't connect with her easily; I have to work at my relationship with her. She's made me and my sister the center of her life and I have to fight with her all the time, now that I'm an adult, for my personal space, for the right to make my own decisions.

And yet what I remember as the safest and happiest times of my childhood have almost always to do with my mother. (I begin to see now that my relationship with her is one of extremes: the worst and the best melded together.) She was always exuberantly happy for my successes, militantly on my side in any conflict I had with the outside world. Often her enthusiasm and love embarrassed me. But when I had nightmares and sneaked into her and my father's bed in the middle of the night, I always chose her side. I put my hand on her hip and touched her hot calf with my icy toes and was flooded with a profound, almost religious, sense of peace and calm and safety. Her body felt then, truly, like the thing that gave me life.

Many afternoons when my sister and I returned from school we found the kitchen table set for lunch, two white plates with spoon and fork over a white napkin, and between the plates a basket of bread covered with a rough hemp towel. A pot of soup, still warm, sat on the stove. My mother rushed home during her lunch hour to prepare all this for us. I didn't appreciate it at the time. I gobbled down my lunch and rushed off to do my homework. I didn't appreciate the harsh, homey smell of clean, starched bedsheets to which I fell asleep at night. I didn't know that home is a place of safety and comfort not only for the soul but also for the body. Emotional and spiritual comfort wasn't my mother's to give to me, in part because our personalities are so different. But she made home a place to return to, if only because it smelled of clean linen and good food.

That's not much in the grand scheme of things. But it was my mother's best. The ability to see this and be grateful for it is the biggest and hardest step I have to take in order to make peace with my parents.