One night when I was seventeen, my mother came up the stairs to my room after she had watched I Remember Marna (the movie) on TV. She cried and put her arms around me and said, "I hope you remember me, Kim."

Of course, I'll remember you. I love you. You're my mom," I said, as I returned her embrace. I was a little shocked, but now, from the vantage point of being over forty, I understand her. She was in her early fifties at the time, and I think she was looking into the precipice of her own mortality. She looked so sad as she said, "Your father and I only have about fifteen years left." I think it was the first time she ever made herself totally vulnerable in front of me. She died of cancer about ten years after that, at the age of 61. There are no words to describe how much I miss her.

One of the places where the rubber hits the road, so to speak, when one's parents are deceased, is not being able to share one's children with them. There are so many anecdotes I want to tell my mom and dad that would make them laugh or cry. Other times I would love to know what their thoughts and experiences were in different situations.

When we grow up, we can finally appreciate what difficulties our parents suffered in raising us. Life turns full circle. Ideally by then, parents and children should be able to relate on the same level. When I think about my parents now, it seems that most of the painful memories tend to settle on the bottom like silt in a pond. The happy memories outshine everything else.

I am fortunate to have been raised in a home with a lot of affection and laughter. We were very expressive in both a positive and negative sense. My dad was a Navy veteran with a sailor's vocabulary. He salted the atmosphere of our home whenever the short fuse of his temper was lit, which happened almost every day. When I think of him now, I try to remember that his mother died when he was about five years old, and he was raised by grandparents who weren't very thrilled to have him. His primary childhood memory was of being served the turkey neck on Thanksgiving.

He was rather inarticulate, like many men, and found it difficult to discuss his feelings with anyone but my mother. But he was always there, punctual, dependable, and funny. We were very close when I was little. He read to me and held me on his lap and took me places with him. When I became a teenager we didn't relate well anymore. I needed to communicate about the details of life more, and he was limited in his ability to respond.

My mom was a woman without enemies. She had a sunny, sympathetic nature and took a compassionate view of things. She was always saying, "You love your friends in spite of their faults;" and "Maybe the reason that person is crabby is because they had a rotten life and it colors their viewpoint about everything;" and "It's not worth it to fight. Kill 'em with kindness." My mom was the kind of mother that other kids liked. I have numerous memories of sitting at the kitchen table with my friends and my mom, talking about life. She made friends everywhere she went and corresponded with all of them whenever we moved. She choked the post office at Christmas time with the amount of cards she sent (complete with personal notes!). She also had a beautiful smile.

We lived in the country in upstate New York when I was a child. My parents were big nature lovers-they subscribed to all the conservation magazines and watched nature shows on TV They knew the names of all the birds that fed at our numerous feeders and birdbaths. "Look Fen, it's a downy woodpecker!" "Look Iris, it's an evening grosbeak!" We took many hikes in the woods and I was emphatically taught to "Shut up when you're walking in the woods and you might see something!"

Going on vacation to Cape Cod was probably the best fun with my parents. Something about the texture of vacation was good for them and imbued them with good humor. Real blueberry pancakes on a picnic table under the pinecones, sand under our bare toes, the slap of water against the boats and docks, all seemed to eradicate their stress.

We met with the same family every summer. Ed was my dad's childhood buddy from "Hungry Hill;" the Irish section of Springfield, Massachusetts. His wife, Ruth, was a freelance writer, and they had a son, Ned, who was four years older than I was.

Everybody was a comedian in their own right, so there was a lot of chuckling, needling, and friendly teasing. My dad and Ed both worked for insurance companies. They would go fishing and talk about the fish or about insurance, and were generally boring to listen to. My mother caught up on all the latest news with Ruth, and they invited me to listen in. At home Ruth did yoga in her spare time, or went to her friend Olive's antique shop where they pushed around a Ouija board. Ruth told kooky anecdotes, reminisced with my mom, and shared a hilarious running commentary on her relatives. We played cards, or listened to the bullfrogs in the evening, or drove to the ocean which was a short trip from the small lake resort. The time was cozy and sweet with no sense of worry or agitation.

Everyone has memories of their childhood-some are beautiful and some are sad. My family was very emotional, and my parents yelled at me a lot when I was growing up. When I transformed into an archetypal, smart-aleck-brand teenager, I mocked my parents when they yelled at me and then they slapped me silly. Those memories are painful. Despite their mistakes I know they tried to love me and tried to do the right thing. I am certain of that, because all I feel when I think of them now, is how much I miss them.

My older brother called me one New Year's Eve a couple of years ago. I could tell that his tonsils were well-oiled, as my father used to say, because his speech was slurry and he was very sentimental. "You remember that birthday party when I was ten years old, and you were all singing 'Happy Birthday' to me? I remember feeling so happy and all that love washing over me-you remember that? You remember that?" (I was three at the time, so I didn't really remember) He got choked up and the conversation moved on, but I thought about it later.

My brother and my father didn't get along. He left home and joined the army when he was eighteen (I was eleven then), and he saw our parents only twice after that before they died. There was a lot of unresolved pain on both sides. After that conversation, I realized that my brother's good memories were rising to the surface of his heart. The misunderstanding and the James Dean "Rebel Without a Cause" debris were subsiding. He wanted to remember the love. The rest of it didn't matter anymore.

I love the fact that God gave humanity this quality. Once we forgive the past and let go of the pain, the "real stuff' distills and rises to the top. Sometimes I've heard old people speak about their childhood. They remember the way their mother looked making dinner, and what the whole family was like as they sat down for a meal. They might be the last remaining member of their family, but the essence of those moments remain, suspended in time. A soldier dying on a battlefield calls out for his mother, his inmost self gravitating to the one who loved him the most.

Peter and I spend hours talking about how to raise our children. The thing we tell them more than anything, that applies to almost every situation, is what Peter calls the "rule of heart." "Never make anyone sad, and always make other people happy. Treat people better than you want to be treated." It's so basic, but it says it all. I want my children to grow up with warm hearts toward others, and the ability to laugh in the face of gloom.

Family closeness requires family fun. Belly laughs together, smiling into the eyes of our children-and our children smiling back at us, all build a sense of closeness. We can love our children, but how great it is if we like them too! Beyond loving them, do we respect them and the gifts they bring to the mix? I just read an interview with Goldie Hawn in a women's magazine. One of her children said they laughed more and had more fun at home than anywhere else. Creating a home filled with laughter and joy is a wonderful legacy to pass on to our children. Creating that legacy requires more than a dose of humor-naturally!

If the world were an ideal place, then the mommies and the daddies would love and understand the kids, and the kids would love and respond to the mommies and the daddies. The mommies and the daddies would always be patient, loving, and kind, and the kids would never make noise during "Star Trek;' and never leave messy jelly knives on the counter to attract ants.

In the hubbub of working for a living and cleaning the house so we can stand living in it, we need to set aside time for PLAY Children were created for play. They know exactly how to release all of the stress (what stress?) from their little beings, pounding their little chests with their little fists, kicking up their little heels, braying and hallooing with their little Tarzan-brand vocal cords. And that's just the girls. Parents, encumbered with the numerous burdens of adulthood, can hardly remember what having fun is all about. It's hard for them to cut loose in utter informality. Imagine the difference in Dicken"s England if they'd had the Hokey Pokey instead of corporeal punishment.

A case in point was the night we finally got curtains on our front windows, months after moving into this house (my delay factor). Two of our friends actually came over with blinds and a drill and put them up for us or we still wouldn't have them! (I'm terrible at domestic details) (Give me a rake and I'll show you a clean carpet!) Anyway, on that glorious day, Peter came home and said, "Children, do you know why we have curtains?" "Why Daddy?" "So we can do this!" he said merrily, and danced on the coffee table like Farmer Hoggett from "Babe." The children totally cracked up.

Adult burdens are incomprehensible to children. Many times my husband and I are hard at work for a client and my son Ranin comes into the office and wants us to come and turn somersaults on the carpet with him.

"Why not Mommy, come on!"

"I can't, we're trying to make money."

"Why do we need money?"

"So the IRS can take it away from us."

"Huh?"

But often at a moment like that we'll decide to stop and play. We chase the kids wildly around the house until we catch them and fling them on the bed, and tickle them unmercifully. (Invasion of the Body Squeezers! Run for your lives!!!)

Sometimes we try excursions off the beaten path. One night we turned off all of the lights during dinner and lit candles. The kids immediately started to play "Shadow Theater;' making finger ducks on the wall. Then they ran and got plastic dinosaurs which made very impressive and threatening shadows. Dinner evolved into bath time. What the heck, let's keep the candles on and the lights off. I happened to flip on the radio as they were getting out of the tub. The ominous sounding "Capulets and Montagues;' from Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" just happened to be on, which lent itself well to shrieking and maniacal laughter.

One night we were singing a little ditty in the kitchen while washing dishes. Tadin, who is two, started to do a funny little dance with shoulder wiggles and legs kicking out in all directions. That was a cue and everyone started dancing like King Louie and Ballou from Disney's "Jungle Book." None of us knew the real jitterbug, but we faked it howling, "I wanna be like you, Scoobie Doo Doo..:" The jitterbug became the tango which ended abruptly when the kids slipped in spilled water and whacked their heads on the floor. Bedtime!

Inspired by the trips I took with my parents, I spoke to Peter about taking little trips with our family too. We wanted to experience traditional family fun. Disneyland. Six Flags. Even the fifty-cent merry-go-round at K-mart. Living in Virginia there are a lot of places to go on day trips. We went to the beach, to old plantations along the James River, and to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

One trip to the mountains was particularly memorable. As we drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway, we saw a cluster of picnic tables under a canopy of trees, with a little sign that read something like: "Humpback Rock-Scenic Overlook-20 Minute Hike-This Way." We stopped the car thinking, oh a twenty-minute hike. We can do that. Our littlest boy was one and a half at the time and had to be carried. We began walking up the slight incline, dum de dum, hmm, this isn't so bad, laughing, (sweat, sweat) marching, marching (feel those thigh muscles pulling), steeper steeper, hmmm, hasn't it been twenty minutes yet?

People passing us on their way down looked at us and said, "You're brave." We shrugged, thinking, gee, it's just a twenty-minute walk, isn't it? We took Indian names to make the climb more authentic. Peter was Sitting Bull and I was Princess Tiger Lily. The boys were Squanto, Geronimo and Crazy Horse, and Gracie was Pocahontas-of course.

The sign should have said that it was a twenty-minute hike for graduates of Mt. Everest expeditions. The path steepened into vertical steps that some diligent and thoughtful park work crew had pounded into the rock face for the climbing-impaired. Our thigh muscles strained and our knees trembled. Our tongues panted and our eyes rolled back. Our pulses quickened, our chests pounded. (Gee, are our bodies trying to tell us something?) Steeper and steeper, along a zig-zag muddy path, we passed the baby back and forth-you take him-okcan you take him now? OK., can you take him back? OK. This seemed to go on for an hour and a half until we emerged onto a huge granite rock. Before us was a stunning view, going for miles in all directions. There was also a sheer drop-off which seized me in the solar plexus as I imagined my children running off the edge like Wylie E. Coyote -- standing on the air one moment, and plunging to the rocks below, the next.

Peter and I crawled on all fours to the center of the boulder. We made the children sit down and hang on with everything but their teeth. Then we looked at the world God made. Hawks circled around us. A hush fell upon us as we took in the grandeur. The hush lasted a split second as the children began cawing at the hawk.

The hike down was faster than the hike up. Our kneecaps felt like they were going to pop like champagne corks. At the bottom we recovered with salami sandwiches and soda from our cooler, on a picnic table under the trees.

I got out of the habit of reading bedtime stories during the last couple of years. I was really faithful about it with the older two when they were little, then somehow I became lazy. (Shame, shame!) Reading Barbara Bush's biography recently re-inspired me about the importance and fun of reading to children. Now we're doing it at least a couple of times a week. We're learning a song before bed too. I taught my children, "Home on the Range" recently. Teaching a song gives you a chance to hear it as if for the first time. That particular one is actually very sentimental. It conjures up images of some lone cowpoke away yonder on the range, alone with his beans and his dawgies. If we sing it sincerely we almost cry. The kids throw their heads back and Peter howls like a coyote in the background.

Experiences like these make terrific memories. So many things can help strengthen our relationship of love with our children. I don't think it matters if we go to Disneyland or if we jump up and down on the bed with them. I think what truly solidifies the family is when we share our real selves with each other. No secrets, no pretense. Even the mundane can be fun if there's laughter and warmth.

The challenge parents face is that there are a multitude of mistakes we can make while parenting, and they are hard to foresee until you're in the saddle. I feel like I'm winging it a lot of the time, but I believe that prayer and the determination to never stop trying are vital components for success.

The difficulties we all face at one time or another can be more easily weathered when our memories have a little tenderness or a little comic relief. One way I hope to accomplish this, in the far distant future, when my bereaved family drives my body to the cemetery after I die, will be to leave instructions for the undertaker to play a recording of my voice asking, 'Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"

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