In Morocco, there is an insistence on authority. Children are not encouraged to speak up in front of their parents. My parents were not like this. I was the kind of girl who could tell her father, 'No, what you are saying is totally untrue, and I don't agree with you.'

My father had been opposed to my flying from the first and had never flown himself. However, he had agreed to go up with me at the first opportunity, and one afternoon he climbed into the cockpit and we flew over the Redwood Falls together. From that day on I never heard a word against my flying and he never missed a chance to ride in the plane.

Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.

The ties of blood," said Spider, "are stronger than water." Water's not strong," objected Fat Charlie.

My mother's love has always been a sustaining force for our family, and one of my greatest joys is seeing her integrity, her compassion, her intelligence reflected in my daughters.

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.