I doubt my own mother watched me as intently at each stage of life as I did my own daughter.

I prayed for her survival in a world she had yet to confront.

By age 40, daughters have lived enough that the dynamic naturally levels out. A shared mortality awareness?

She was never easy. The words I would use are: Colorful. Challenging. Fascinating. Never boring. Capable of reducing me to tears as she gained a sense of herself. But those tears are not what I want to talk about. Because my daughter, now in her 40s, has turned fully human. Hang on. I’ll qualify that.

As the boomer mother of an only child who happened to be a girl, I often felt more the observer. I doubt my own mother watched me as intently at each stage of life as I watched my own daughter. Women of that era had no time for such things. They just worked hard, loved hard, prayed hard, and hoped for the best for their girls—that some wonderful man would someday come along and “take care” of them.

My baby girl was a force of nature. Impatient. Persistent. Limit-testing. Ask any of her teachers. Her mind behaved more like a whirling dervish than a candidate for future domesticity. By her mid-teens, she was so bored with high school that I couldn’t get........

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